File:Marshall Islands ev.png

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Marshall_nuclear_memories.png

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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 [former adviser to GreenPolicy] 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.

Winslow Myers:

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.

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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)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fate_of_the_Earth

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

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https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/schell-fate.html

THE FATE OF THE EARTH By Jonathan Schell

244 pp. / New York: Alfred A. Knopf

THIS is a work of enormous force. There are moments when it seems to hurtle, almost out of control, across an extraordinary range of fact and thought. But in the end, it accomplishes what no other work has managed to do in the 37 years of the nuclear age. It compels us - and compel is the right word - to confront head on the nuclear peril in which we all find ourselves.

In some regards, it is tempting to treat Jonathan Schell's achievement as an event of profound historical moment rather than as a book on some publisher's spring list.

Text:

For one thing, the volume consists (though not quite word for word) of three long articles, which appeared serially in The New Yorker a few months ago. They are the reflections of a person of commanding gifts who has been thinking hard about nuclear realities for many years. The articles have an obvious integrity when gathered together into a single volume, but they are so different in temper and in reach that they should probably be read as separate essays - with pauses for thought in between - rather than as continuing chapters in a book.

Moreover, Schell's language sometimes stretches well beyond the immediate requirements of the argument. He shares a problem with everyone who undertakes to write about the nuclear peril. How do you use ordinary vocabularies to describe something so immense and so absurd as the deaths of, say, 100 million persons?

How do you talk sensibly about a horror beyond comprehension? Readers, being human, do not generally like to contemplate such things. Writers who use words to try to punch their way through those protective layers of lethargy often find themselves speaking louder and louder, in the hope that the tone of their voices will convey an urgency that the words alone do not. The metaphors multiply, the adjectives become warmer, the tension rises. The Fate of the Earth, then, is not only a statement. It is a summons, an alarm, a commotion.

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From his NY Times Obituary - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/27/us/jonathan-schell-author-who-explored-war-dies-at-70.html

“For decades, they’ve said I was too idealistic, too unreal,” Mr. Schell said in a lecture at Northeastern University... “But since the Wall Street Journal crowd has spoken up, I’m less in the wilderness.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB116787515251566636

... unless urgent new actions are taken, the U.S. soon will be compelled to enter a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting, and economically even more costly than was Cold War deterrence.

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http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Nuclear_Weapons

http://strategicdemands.com/one-day-in-the-life-of-a-nuclear-arms-race/