military spending share GDP

Sustainable Defence in a Challenging Environment

/ Dan Smith / Leave a comment

For Europe, responding to insecurity and responding to ecological disruption are both era-defining challenges. In June last year, NATO decided to respond to the insecurity that member states and many, many citizens feel by increasing military spending to 5% of annual economic output, with a minimum of 3.5% devoted to what they called ‘core’ security, and up to 1.5% for cyber security, infrastructure and suchlike. No comparable pledge has been made for responding to the ecological crisis. Far from it, European (and other) governments currently seeming to be turning their backs on the green agenda.

There is an obvious risk that national security will divert and drain energy and resources away from other policies and priorities, such as welfare, health and education as well as the environment. And a further risk that the emphasis on national security and building up the military will have negative effects on the natural environment and accelerate ecological disruption.

Those are the risks. Does it have to be that way?

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The nuclear challenge today and tomorrow

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

On 6 and 9 August this year, we will mark the 80th anniversaries of the two occasions on which nuclear weapons have ever been used in war – the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.* Humanity has perpetrated and experienced a great deal of harm in the past eight decades but nuclear weapons have not been used again. Despite today’s widespread and intensifying perception of nuclear risk, the nuclear taboo survives.

That does not mean the nuclear problem has been solved, of course. It is “an encouraging fact”, as the Nobel Peace Prize Committee put it when giving the 2024 award to the movement of Japanese nuclear survivors (the hibakusha), Nihon Hidankyo. But not more than that. And honouring the hibakusha in this way was also intended as a wake-up call to those many people who until recently regarded nucleapons as yesterday’s problem.

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