Apocalyptic anxiety. Overwhelming? Yes. Over-dramatic? Maybe not. Collective fear of destruction is not new, nor is it unwarranted or unnatural. Throughout the mid- and late-20th century, amidst the Cold War, “apocalypse” looked like death by a Russian nuclear weapon (at least to a Western audience). In the present-day, apocalypse looks like climate change-induced natural hazard and environmental destruction. Climate anxiety is becoming increasingly common and paralysing, especially among Gen Z and children who are having to process that the world they know today may not exist in its current form for their children, or even in their adulthood. This is eerily reminiscent of the anxiety felt by Cold War children who spent schooldays performing emergency “hide-under-your-desk” drills in the case of a nuclear bombing. 

Both the anti-nuclear and the climate justice movements have a common goal: keep the Earth and its people alive. Sustainability has become a 21st-century buzzword, largely associated with the climate crisis and environmentalism. However, “sustainability,” if it is to be a guiding principle in social justice activism, must be interdisciplinary. This includes building a world that limits its consumption and environmental waste, but that also recognizes and opposes the existential threats of nuclear weapons and hawkish militaries. So, what more do these movements have in common, and how can they be bridged? 

First, we must remember that in the cases of both nuclear warfare, military conflict, and climate change, there are widespread top-down exercises of narrative-building. In other words, the story of climate change and the story of nuclear tensions are being told to us by power centres (through media outlets, government
press releases, partisan stances, etc.). This means that the values and interests held by those in power can and do dictate public understandings of these conflicts. In the case of nuclear warfare, the “nuclear nine” (the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea) have for decades propagated
the idea that nuclear weapons – and nuclear expansion - are necessary to deter foreign aggression. In the case of climate change, Western governments and corporations continue to push an individualistic narrative that puts the primary burden of sustainability on the individual, ignoring corporate emissions and global extractives as the primary driver of the climate crisis.

The first step in re-interpreting – or rather, credibly interpreting – these threats is to reverse this narrative-building process to the “bottom-up,” centering the perspectives
of those most vulnerable to the conflicts at hand.

In January of 2018, as tensions between North Korea and the United States were rising, 1.4 million residents of Hawaii received an alert on their phones reading: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” The alert was a mistake. For thirty-eight minutes, though, residents of Hawaii – 300,000 of whom are Indigenous to the island, many of whom have been involved in anti-occupation and anti-militarist movements on their native land – believed their lives were about to end. Mass panic ensued, goodbye messages were sent to loved ones, recipients ran to make-shift bomb shelters. What was a state-to-state conflict was now arriving on the shores of Hawaii, and civilians – not those in military or state leadership, but everyday people – were about to be the collateral damage. The trauma from this 38-minute period has lived on, with social media being filled with 5-year anniversary posts of Hawaiian residents remembering the heart-stopping moment.

In Japan, “Hibakusha” (“person affected by the bomb”) is used to describe surviving victims of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hibakusha have dealt with physical, psychological, and community trauma, in addition to lifelong physical ailments and deaths of loved ones. Moreover, the Hibakusha have faced widespread discrimination for misconceptions of their radiation poisoning being contagious, literally being deemed as radioactive. There were 650,000 recognized Hibakusha – in addition to the roughly 200,000 people that died in the bombings themselves. Again, the majority of these victims are not military leaders or decision-makers – they were civilians, targeted for the sake of ensuring a “profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.” Moreover, roughly 22,000 Hibakusha were Korean Prisoners of Wars – supposed allies of the United States. The asymmetry in the victims of the bomb versus the perpetrators is not to be ignored - the “path of least resistance” for those who profit off of destruction is to disregard (or actively target) the livelihoods of those least able to protect themselves. Those who are able to build their shelters or bunkers, access early-warning technologies, and stockpile resources are more likely and able to be perpetrators, enablers, and survivors of destruction. The lives of Hibakusha and their children have been forever shaped by the actions of the United States military, who dropped the bomb both as a retaliation for Pearl Harbour in August of 1945 and in response to the so-called impossibility of a Japanese surrender, despite the Truman administration openly acknowledging Japan’s losing position, a delay in diplomatic attempts at resolution, and several Manhattan project scientists arguing against the use of the bomb.

Both Hawaiians and Japanese survivors have been pivotal in reporting their lived experiences and fuelling the anti-nuclear movement for a peaceful and long-lasting world.

In the case of climate change, research has shown over and over again that those most vulnerable to climate change-related disasters on a global scale are in the Global South, often being preyed upon by emissions-crazed Global North corporations who use outsourced and underpaid labour, replicating centuries-long colonial dynamics. In the United Kingdom, working class folks have less ability to build or occupy homes that are adaptable to climate changes, and disabled people are far more vulnerable to natural hazards. Environmental crimes and emission creation are expertly dominated by the upper echelons of the Western corporate world and face the minority of the immediate impact of the climate crisis. 

How can these threats be addressed? Just as the testimonies of vulnerability must be amplified, adaptability measures taken and created by non-Western and marginalised communities in the West can contribute to a blueprint for a joint anti-apocalypse movement, rebranding sustainability as a joint anti-war and anti-climate change endeavour. Stewardship to the land and connections between the human and non-human are not new: the ideas are central to numerous non-Western, pagan, and Indigenous philosophies. However, capitalist and neo-colonial understandings of extractivism, endless expansion and consumption, and disposability of the earth and its people, have overridden much of these values. Indigenous movements across the world, including in Turtle Island and the Pacific Islands, have joined forces with Native Hawaiians in the movement against nuclear weapons, in alignment with traditional understandings of human and non-human connection and the sanctity of land. The binary between preservation of the land against weapons and against the climate crisis is thus traditionally blurred, with preservation being an all-encompassing value.

Keeping this in mind, the underlying principle within an intersectional anti-apocalypse movement must never be depoliticized. Nuclear warfare and anti-climate policies will never be sympathetic to civilians and can never foresee the full consequences. When the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made, warmongers were willfully blinded by bloodthirst, promoting ignorance to the fact that hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians – including many of whom were or are American citizens – would be living with lifelong disabilities and that the 20th century would devolve into a decades-long nuclear conflict between the East and West. Expending hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Korean lives to assert American dominance was the priority. Similarly, when corporations and Western governments ignore the climate crisis, despite privileged access to climate realities and early-warning technologies, they choose to create a future wherein the lives of those outside their elitist paradigm are not worth protecting, and are a means to a profitable end. The victims of these conflicts, however, have not lost foresight. The bridging of the climate justice and anti-nuclear movement on a Global scale, following suit of the activism of Indigenous communities across the Pacific, could be the key to a mass mobilisation against apocalypse, adding volume to the sustainability movement and throwing the neo-colonial elite off kilter. Nuclear weapons and climate damage rely on hegemonic power dynamics that disfavour civilian rights, particularly those most vulnerable, and put humanity’s very existence in danger. Sustainability and the movement behind it must thus bridge the anti-nuclear and the climate justice movement together into a widespread, bottom-up anti-apocalypse movement if it is to succeed.