Existential silos: The compartmentalization of the futures of environmental change and the nuclear threat

Abstract

Nuclear weapons and environmental change are two existential threats to humanity. This article shows that current policy and academic discourse neglects their possible future interactions and proposes a research agenda to undo this compartmentalization. Based on a comprehensive review of policy documents and scholarship on nuclear and environmental security futures between 1990 and 2024, this article documents the compartmentalization of these threats. It shows that prevalent security imaginaries do not account for interactions and instead treat environmental change and nuclear weapons as different types of security threat. This creates a number of epistemic and material vulnerabilities which must be addressed by scholarship. The article lays out avenues to map out material and political interactions between the two threats. It urges policymakers and scholars to integrate imaginations of the implications of these and other existential threats for the future of humanity.