HOMO sapiens forget that contempt or compassion, like dropping a nuclear bomb or seeding a plant, the Earth never forgets in any case. The exactitude of her memory is so amazing that pollen layers on every single millimetre of the rock drilled from the bottom of Maar Lake in the crater of an extinct volcano near Germany’s Eifel region narrate the parable of Neanderthals’ extinction. Neanderthals lived there. A group of climatologists associated with the University of Mainz analyzed the sampled rock and reconstructed that a climate chaos occurred around 60000 BC due to the erratic Gulf Stream dramatically changed the bio-ecological landscape and perished Neanderthals from the face of Earth. Homo sapiens replaced Neanderthals due to their competitive edge and took the charge of this planet. However, unlike Neanderthals, enigmatically, the new “wise” species had a tendency for existential narcissism–and therefore—they have become participants in the chronicle of their own extinction.
In addition to disturbing the cyclic sea and wind currents by emitting loads and loads of carbon, since 1945, at least eight nations have tested more than 2000 atomic bombs in oceans, atmosphere, and underground. According to the Arms Control Association, some of these tests were more lethal than the 1945 bombing on Japan. International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has recently published that in 2023 only, the USA, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel, together spent the staggering total of USD 91.4 billion on both modernizing the existing nuclear arsenals and expanding their delivery mechanisms like bombers, missiles, and submarines. The US takes the lead due to the Russia-Ukraine War, the Middle East situation, and China’s massive economic and strategic ambitions. In response, China and Russia also increased their nuclear budgets to secure their design for a greater Eurasian shift in global politics and economy.
All of these countries consider spending money on nuclear weapons essential for their national security. On 7 July 2017, 122 UN member states showed their collective wisdom and adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at the United Nations. However, all nine of the nuclear-armed states and their allied nations, including Japan, did not sign the Treaty. The USA alone has accounted for 80% of this massive increase by spending $51.5 billion, followed by China $11.8 billion and Russia $8.3 billion. Most of this taxpayers’ money went into the pockets of private contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The report profiled 20 companies having worth more than 335 billion in outstanding nuclear weapons contracts, some of which will last for a decade. These powerful companies have invested in security think tanks, policy boardrooms, and governments. They paid $118 million to lobbyists in the USA and France, placed their employees as advisors to the top think tanks working on nuclear weapons, and funded their research with more than $6 million assistance, the report says.
This US-led nuclear club spent $91.4 billion on nuclearizing a planet that is desperately looking for investments in decarbonization plans. Seasonality spikes, heat waves, glacier melting, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, and even slower-onset climate impacts, like rising sea levels, are outstripping the ability of many vulnerable communities to sustain their biological and economic resilience against nature. Many models show that anthropogenic climate change induces variations in Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The glacial melt in Antarctica, Norwegian, Arctic, and Greenland Seas are imposing variations in the patterns of Jet Stream–the ribbon of prevailing westerly winds circling the Arctic, and Gulf Stream–ocean currents that carry heat from the tropics to higher latitudes and play a key role in regulating the thermal balance in the USA and Western Europe. Variations in Gulf Stream play their part in rising sea level off the north-eastern and Mid-Atlantic States.
A study by Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Columbia University found that heat waves in Europe had increased in frequency and intensity over the past four decades. In addition to changes in the Jet Stream, the heat waves take off from a starting point of 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than they were in the late 19th century, before the multi-fold increase in the emission of heat-trapping gases like Carbon dioxide. Furthermore, the already melting Arctic has become a new strategic theatre between NATO and Russia. Russia views the Arctic as a contingency battlefield in the greater war with NATO to secure its second-strike nuclear capabilities based around the Kola Peninsula. The arctic is undergoing rapid militarization and ice-breaking for the Russian infrastructure projects installed for exploiting natural resources and securing the northern trade route.
Meanwhile, changes in Earth’s climatology are evident in other sections of the planet as well. The warming effect on the vast swath of glaciated lakes and mountain springs of the Tibetan Plateau is adversely impacting the lives of the billions living in the riparian ecosystems of Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Sutlej, Indus, Tarim, and Amu rivers. Likewise, the analysis of multiple satellite missions and global land surface models over the Tigris-Euphrates Basin showed 11 years of prolonged and intense drought with no parallels in the past 100 years followed by a 1-in-100-year extensive precipitation event. The hydro climatic variations like temporal shifts in annual surface run-off and an increase in surface temperatures are posing serious water challenges for the populations living downstream in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Amid such a large-scale climate emergency, one can imagine the extent of human disarray by comparing the amount spent on nuclear weapons with the amount (totalling only USD 661 million to date) globally committed under the UNFCCC Loss and Damage Fund for Climate Justice.
Moreover, the contemptuous indifference of this US-led nuclear club to the plight of their own race is established by the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report 2023, a joint publication by five United Nations specialized agencies. The report finds around 735 million; nearly one in ten people around the world go to bed with a growled stomach each night, a crisis driven largely by conflict, climate change, and chronic inequality. This represents an increase of 122 million people compared to 2019. Action Against Hunger says nearly 14 million children suffer from Severe Acute Malnutrition and 45% of child deaths are due to hunger and related causes. Back in July of 2021, U.N. World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley said that by 2030 it would take an estimated $40 billion each year to end world hunger. It is less than half of what this nuclear club spent last year on the weapons of mass destruction.
After going through millennia of civilizational and scientific evolution, Homo sapiens proved that more than sustainability, their pursuits for progress are governed by combined insanity. They challenged the ecological, economic, and biological balances of this globe. Not only have they created a mess that is extremely disproportionate to their spatial and temporal significance on a planet with gigantic patterns and a memory of 4.5 billion years—but also engaged in an outright contempt by allocating times more resources for destruction than continuity. Such existential narcissism is enough to demonstrate human immaturity that can switch nuclear weapons from being used as political leverage to an actual attack. The Cold War’s doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction can lose its vitality anytime during the escalation dynamics in a highly polarized world. With rising conflicts and waves of populism, the world appears to be increasingly unstable, upping the risk of tactical, or so-called, battlefield use of nuclear weapons.
—The author is a regular columnist and member of the UNFCCC and ICAN. He taught public policy at the National Defense University of Pakistan.
