File:Marshall Islands ev.png: Difference between revisions

https://zcomm.org/zmagazine/global-climate-change-and-nuclear-abolition-are-one-issue/

The Marshall Islands are filing lawsuits against the nine nuclear powers to get them to step up to their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to negotiate total nuclear disarmament. Meanwhile, Bill McKibben is gathering citizens for a rally in support of urgent action on climate change in New York on September 21 and 22, 2014, when the next climate summit will be held.

No two transnational issues are more closely related than the abolition of nuclear weapons and global climate instability, for three reasons:

• nuclear war is the biggest potential accelerant of life-threatening climate change

• the resources desperately needed to address climate issues continue to be poured into nuclear weapons and their delivery systems

• the solution to both challenges depends on the same new way of thinking based in the reality that national and international self-interests have merged.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

In 2007, the late Jonathan Schell spoke presciently about the relationship between nuclear weapons and climate change:

“When I wrote The Fate of the Earth in 1982, I said that, first and foremost, nuclear weapons were an ecological danger. It wasn’t that our species could be directly wiped out by nuclear war down to the last person. That would only happen through the destruction to the underpinnings of life, through nuclear winter, radiation, ozone loss. There has been an oddity of timing because when the nuclear weapon was invented, people didn’t even use the word ‘environment’ or ‘ecosphere.’ The environmental movement was born later. So in a certain sense the most urgent ecological threat of them all was born before the context in which you could understand it. The present larger ecological crisis in that context. In other words, global warming and nuclear war are two different ways that humanity threatens to undo the natural underpinnings of human, and of all other, life... we may be in a better position today because of global warming, to grasp the real import of nuclear danger.”

The Fate of the Earth (1982)

http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/issues/schell.pdf