risk

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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Insecurity, the Anthropocene & nature’s tipping points

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

Each February, leaders, policy-makers, thinkers and practitioners in the field of security, broadly defined, get together at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich for a three day international conference. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2019, Germany’s then Chancellor, Angela Merkel, opened her speech by reflecting on the world’s entry into a new geochronological age – the Anthropocene Epoch. 

She explained, “This means that we are living in an age in which humankind’s traces penetrate so deeply into the Earth that future generations will regard it as an entire age created by humans.” She briefly touched on different human impacts on the environment and then said, “All of this has implications for global security and for the issues that are being discussed right here, right now.”

Right here, right now, too right.

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