Nuclear Options At The End Of The World

What kind of people spend their lives making bombs that could end all life on Earth then call it defence, call it safety?

It’s really hard to sit with the reality of ‘conventional’ weapons, let alone nuclear weapons, and think that anything about this civilisation is legitimate or deserves to endure.

There are approximately 12,100 nuclear weapons in existence. The detonation of just a fraction of these could mean the end of everything. And it’s a frightening fact that we never know the true mindsets of those with the power to launch these weapons. We never know how stable they are, or how stable the chain of command is, institutionally or psychologically. We never know how close we are to nuclear war, and therefore to the ensuing nuclear winter.

Yesterday in a speech Benjamin Netanyahu said something along the lines of, “if Israel falls, many parts of the world will fall with us.” The speech was in Hebrew and there have been a couple of different translations of his exact words. Some, however, have interpreted what he said as a threat to invoke Israel’s so-called ‘Samson Option.’

This military doctrine was revealed by whistle-blowers in the 1990s but has never been confirmed by Israel. It states that if Israeli leaders ever believe the existence of the state is threatened, they will authorise an unrestrained launch of their nuclear stockpile without worrying about the consequences. It is at least one of the ‘options’, a choice on the menu to wipe out existence.

No one knows what the parameters of this doctrine are or how they might have changed as fanatical Jewish extremists have come to dominate the Israeli government. Would UN-backed military intervention to stop the Gaza genocide be grounds for the Samson Option? Would crippling sanctions against the Israeli economy be grounds for it? Would an Iranian counter-strike against Tel Aviv - in the event, which is growing increasingly likely, that Israel bombs Iran - be grounds for it? Does the Israeli leadership consider their own political survival as synonymous with the survival of the state? Nobody knows. But the threat is real. And, as I mentioned in my last piece, how can we really rule anything out from a state committing genocide.

They could of course be bluffing. And this may not have been what Netanyahu meant in his speech. But Israel clearly values life narrowly and in very specific ways. This has led them to commit the most heinous crimes imaginable. It’s not a huge step to imagine them committing the cardinal crime. We know Nazi Germany wanted a nuke, and we know they’d have used it. Because we know what evil is, and what evil does. Israel is that today.

If you’ve been following me for a while you’ll know my writing has been focused a fair amount on existential threats - from climate, to covid, to viruses, to disease, to plastics, to pollutants - and the myriad ways everything is being fucked up under late colonial capitalism. Well the launching of nuclear weapons is right there in the mix of things that could fuck us up forever. Israel, given its shallow history but deep roots in religious supremacy, ultraviolence and end-times theology, is perhaps the world’s most likely candidate for a first-strike nuclear attack. Russia and the US are said to have similar doctrines, but only in response to a nuclear strike from the other. India and Pakistan likewise. But Israel’s nuclear launch doctrine is said not to be determined by whether they’re being attacked with nuclear weapons, it’s more about vibes and whether the leaders at the time ‘feel’ the existence of the state is threatened. This could be via conventional weapons, or it may not even be in response to military action at all. Whatever the specific parameters, it makes Israel incredibly dangerous to the entire world. It is a doctrine of supremacy and an explicit threat that the country hangs over the world: if we can’t survive, neither will you.

It’s untested so it’s unknown how many nuclear weapons it would take to cause a nuclear winter. Some experts have said as few as five, others that it would need a couple of hundred or more. Israel is said to have somewhere between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads. A decade ago former US president Jimmy Carter said they had around 300. In other words, more than enough to initiate a nuclear winter. A recent paper estimated a nuclear winter would starve more than half of the world’s population as black carbon from the firestorms drifts into the upper atmosphere, blocking the sun and initiating a decade of global crop failures. Before the starvations, tens to hundreds of thousands to millions, depending on the locations, would be killed in the immediate blast radius as a fireball as hot as the core of the sun rolled across the landscape. Later, hundreds of millions would develop cancers from the radioactive fallout which would be dispersed around the world by atmospheric winds. Many would freeze to death in winter as the surface temperature of the land plummeted by between 10 and 30 degrees Celsius. Nuclear strikes followed by a nuclear winter would be a global health crisis like no other, an unmanageable, unrecoverable crisis that would end this civilisation forever.

Then, beyond the effects on human civilisation, there is the effect on the world’s ecology. The lack of sunlight reaching the surface would make it difficult, probably impossible, for phytoplankton, the basis of the marine food chain, to photosynthesize. The mass death of phytoplankton would trigger a complete collapse of the marine food chain and the extinction of vast swathes of ocean life. Everything at sea, like much on land, would starve to death. The fall in global temperatures would also initiate the rapid expansion of glaciers and the ice at the poles, storing up flooding and catastrophic sea level rise when the Earth rapidly heats again after the soot dissipates. Forests in the immediate blast zones would be swallowed by fires.

That some humans hate other humans enough to make thousands of these weapons is a bleak indictment of humanity. More specifically, it is an indictment of hierarchies, ideologies of supremacy and modern nation states. After all, you and I didn’t make these weapons, and we don’t want them in this world. Yet right now, a nuclear-armed nation with the capacity to effectively end the world, and which might just have threatened this, is committing genocide.

We are at an inflection point. The stakes are incredibly high. Which its why it was so disappointing to see climate scientists, NGOs and others with big followings who were hardcore Team Greta stay silent about her attempt to break the siege of Gaza. From Michael Mann to Katherine Hayhoe to Greenpeace, not one post, not one retweet. Cowardly silence. There were many other offenders. We can't do it like this. Genocide and ecocide come from the same root. They aren't different things. If you can’t stand up against genocide, if you can’t understand the moral imperative of the moment, how can anyone trust you to stand up for the planet? People are ecology. We are a part of, not apart from, the ecosystem. Israel’s genocide has also caused more carbon pollution than entire countries, while also devastating the environment of an entire land, destroying ground water, farms, olive groves, green spaces.

Genocide is ecocide, and vice versa. They are logically inseparable.

And if we’re going to end both of them, if we’re going to end the system that enables them, we need people who understand this clearly and aren’t afraid to say so.

If we’re going to save the world, there’s no place for nukes, and there’s no place for genocide.