Countdown to Apocalypse

Why nuclear war, not the climate crisis, is humanity’s biggest threat, according to one author.

Mark Lynas has spent decades pushing for action on climate emissions but now says nuclear war is even greater threat

Climate breakdown is usually held up as the biggest, most urgent threat humans pose to the future of the planet today.

But what if there was another, greater, human-made threat that could snuff out not only human civilisation, but practically the entire biosphere, in the blink of an eye?

As you read this, about 4,000 nuclear weapons are poised for a first strike across the northern hemisphere, enough atomic firepower to kill as many as 700 million people from blasts and burning alone.

And that is just the start. The explosions and fires – like nothing seen on Earth since the comet strike that led to the Cretaceous mass extinction – would loft enough soot into the stratosphere to cast an impenetrable shadow over the globe. No light means no photosynthesis, the basis of planetary foodwebs. No heat means that the surface of the Earth would plunge into an icy, years-long winter.

That is the message of Mark Lynas, a British writer who for two decades has worked to help people understand the science of climate breakdown while pushing for action on carbon emissions. But after three years of research for a new book, published last month, he now sees nuclear war as an even greater threat.

“There’s no adaptation options for nuclear war,” Lynas said. “Nuclear winter will kill virtually the entire human population. And there’s nothing you can do to prepare, and there’s nothing you can do to adapt when it happens, because it happens over the space of hours.

“It is a vastly more catastrophic, existential risk than climate change.”

- Author: Damien Gayle, The Guardian

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