Cherishing nature was a spin-off from the desire to turn it to military ends (Image: Kenneth Garrett/NGS/Getty)
I HAVE often wondered why NATO holds environment conferences. Now I know the answer. Back in the 1960s, the Western military alliance coined the term 鈥渆nvironmental warfare鈥� and for years actively considered how to wage such wars. More than that, argues Jacob Darwin Hamblin in this startling account, much of modern environmental thinking originated with the scientists and military strategists during the dark days of the cold war.
And you thought the first environmentalists were muesli-eating, sandal-wearing hippies? Far from it, Hamblin says. Before them was a generation of scary Dr Strangelove types, 鈥渟cientists, military leaders and politicians who believed they would have to manipulate and exploit nature鈥� in a war against the Soviet Union. The original doom-mongers were not sounding the alarm; they were riding into battle.
Advertisement
鈥淭he original doom-mongers were not sounding the alarm they were riding into battle鈥�
During the Korean war, US advisers considered spraying waste from plutonium reprocessing across Korea to create a 鈥渄ehumanised death belt鈥�. In their view, a third world war could involve using H-bombs to trigger earthquakes; millions of tonnes of soot to melt the Arctic ice cap; and spraying yellow fever across Soviet cities.
Hamblin鈥檚 case is that the links between such military fantasies and environmental thinking are far closer than we might imagine: without the cold war, we might not now be gripped by fear of environmental catastrophe.
Seminal environmental texts are often stuffed with military metaphors and Pentagon-funded research, notes Hamblin. Paul Ehrlich chose the title The Population Bomb for his 1968 bestseller, airing concerns about overpopulation that were fodder for national security scenarios years before. Research into chemical and biological warfare underpinned many claims in Rachel Carson鈥檚 1962 Silent Spring.
Earlier Charles Elton, the British ecologist who alerted the world to the perils of alien species, began his 1958 book, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, with the observation that 鈥渋t is not just nuclear bombs and wars that threaten us鈥� this book is about ecological explosions鈥�.
Hamblin鈥檚 stories of individuals on the front line are equally telling. MIT鈥檚 Jay Forrester modelled defence systems for the US military before constructing the model behind the doomsday analysis in the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth. The Congressman who proposed the radioactive 鈥渄eath belt鈥� in Korea was Albert Gore, father of former vice-president and climate-change campaigner Al Gore.
On the other side was Herman Kahn, who developed post-holocaust doomsday scenarios for the Pentagon-backed and was possibly the from the 鈥淏land Corporation鈥� in Stanley Kubrick鈥檚 1967 film. Kahn was an environmental optimist, and fiercely critiqued The Limits to Growth.
Military scientists were good at their jobs. They theorised about a 鈥渘uclear winter鈥� before Carl Sagan popularised the idea in the 1980s. They considered how NASA rockets damaged the ozone layer, and let others pick up the Nobel prize for research published years later. And early post-war research into climate change was largely funded by the US military.
As news editor at New Scientist in the 1980s, the first reports I saw on climate change came not from environmentalists but from the US Department of Energy.
Scepticism about environmental fears is more popular today in much of the US. Hamblin argues this followed the fall of the Soviet empire, when the US military lost its interest in controlling the environment. The Faustian pact dissolved. And that, to say the least, is another surprising message from this thought-provoking book.
Oxford University Press
