Why trident is the biggest cause of climate change

Competition between sectors will be inevitable. Some people will argue that this is healthy, but it will not be so welcome if staff shortages delay the replacement project and lead to spiralling costs. Moreover, such competition could lead to skills shortages that slow our technological response to climate change. Global warming is such a major, scientifically well-established threat and the switch to a low-carbon economy so urgent that it would be foolish indeed to compromise this for the sake of a new nuclear-weapons system that even former defence ministers are not convinced would contribute to UK and global security.

But given the figures involved, it really is a tall order to expect that such efforts will be enough for all these major technological programmes to happen together.

There is also a further potential problem with this approach: some young people could be deterred from studying the physical sciences because of the continued close association between these subjects and unsavoury military projects such as the development of nuclear warheads, which are in essence weapons of mass destruction.

Many have argued that a decision to replace Trident — at a time when the UK is safer from large-scale military attack than at any period in its history — would be misguided. Worse, that it would seriously undermine global efforts to convince other nations not to go down the road to nuclear weapons.

Add to that the shortage of physical scientists and engineers, at a time when they are so urgently needed in many other areas such as tackling climate change, and the case for replacing Trident becomes completely untenable. Stuart Parkinson is a former physicist and is executive director of Scientists for Global Responsibility.

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Registration complete. Nuclear physics Opinion and reviews The costs of replacing Trident 01 Mar It said Trident met the "criteria of credibility, scale, survivability, reach and readiness" and alternative delivery options touted "simply on the basis of possible but speculative cost savings" should not be contemplated.

Their report stated that a nuclear capability should not be justified on the grounds of it being an "insurance policy" against an uncertain future or to maintain Britain's diplomatic standing in the world. The rationale for keeping Trident, it added, lay in its ability to counter "credible" threats to the UK's security. It identified three scenarios in which such threats could arise; from a long-standing nuclear state with an "aggressive posture"; from an existing or emerging nuclear state which "enters into direct strategic competition with the UK"; a "massive overwhelming" threat involving weapons of mass destruction.

The commission was divided over the question of whether the current practice of always having one submarine at sea at any other time should be maintained. Some members argued that continuous-at-sea patrolling should continue until there was an "improvement in the security environment" while others argued that without a direct threat to the UK's interests, this could happen immediately while retaining the capacity for increased patrols at times of crisis.

But the commission was united in its call for the UK to consider what it could do to further the cause of nuclear disarmament and to discourage proliferation. While acknowledging the steps that had been taken since the end of the Cold War, it said the UK could consider a further reduction in missile and warhead numbers, enhanced verification procedures and commitments to control or decrease stocks of fissile materials.

Can Trident be re-located? Trident cuts 'won't hit deterrent'. Trident review 'shows alternatives'. Nuclear weapons and climate change are the two existential threats facing us today — find out more about how these two issues are linked. Nuclear annihilation and climate catastrophe are the two biggest threats to human existence. This has been confirmed by the atomic scientists that maintain the Doomsday Clock: this year its hands were set at seconds to midnight, the closest it has been since its foundation in They cite the potency of the dual threats of nuclear weapons and climate change as the reasons.

The threat of climate change, which has received an increased level of attention in recent years, is usually understood as a separate issue to that of nuclear disarmament. But rather than only tackling these issues in isolation, the threat of nuclear war and the threat of climate change share a symbiotic relationship as each threat exacerbates the other in a variety of ways. CND campaigns for robust action on climate change to be coupled with nuclear disarmament and believe that anti-nuclear activists and climate change activists are natural allies.

Among scientists there is a consensus that human activity has increased carbon dioxide emissions, resulting in increased global temperatures and a change in our climate.

This has resulted in an increase in extreme weather events such as floods, hurricanes, and storms and has led to significant changes such as the melting of the polar ice caps. It is an ongoing and increasing problem.

In the past year we have witnessed previously unthinkable weather events such as wildfires in the Arctic, in addition to those in Australia, estimated to have killed up to one billion animals, as well as flooding in rural parts of England and Wales. Despite the grave nature of this threat we are woefully underprepared for what is to come.

It declared that further inaction would result in poverty, water shortages and soaring levels of migration. By , the costs of dealing with the problems created by climate change will reach a trillion dollars a year. The scale of the threat we face is not unknown.

In , the UN warned that we had only 12 years to stop the human and planetary misery that would be unleashed by a rise in global temperatures beyond 1.

Despite this, we consistently see governments across the globe failing to take meaningful action. Across the world, the devastating effects of climate change are making the onset of a nuclear conflict more likely. Climate change is affecting access to resources such as land, food and clean water across the globe.

This is particularly significant in places such as Kashmir, which has long been a site of tension between two nuclear-armed states, India and Pakistan, and where a new source of disagreement has occurred over the water from the Himalayas, which passes through Kashmir on its way to Pakistan.