By Dan Worthen
Timmon Wallis’ Warheads to Windmills: Preventing Climate Catastrophe and Nuclear War greets us as we slip further into the climate abyss and sleepwalk toward nuclear cataclysm. It fills a heretofore empty niche among books tackling climate change or nuclear war. Namely, it weds the two. In so doing, it presents a convincing argument that we can solve neither of these human-generated emergencies unless we address them both together. That the book succeeds in this ambitious task is testament to the urgent tenacity of its author.
Wallis, a lifelong peacemaker and anti-war activist, has directed peacebuilding projects in a dozen high-risk countries. He also served as part of the team that helped craft the first international, legally binding agreement to comprehensively ban nuclear weapons (the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons). He is the founder and executive director of nuclearban.us (a WANW partner), and he brings intimate, encyclopedic knowledge to the nuclear-abolition side of his topic.
He possesses a similarly strong, if less personal, grasp of the climate challenge. When I started reading the book, aware of his expertise with things nuclear, I thought I might find evidence of diminished knowledge or passion on the climate side. That evidence never materialized. In fact, one gets the sense that Wallis stands hand in hand in the vanguard of climate activists and scientists grappling with this unique moment in history.
In superbly researched detail, Warheads to Windmills describes the realities of the twin terrors we face, and it spells out the specific steps required to ensure the continuation of life as we know it. Three examples are, first, to see the international community adopt a fossil fuel treaty similar to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons; second, to get the leaders of the nine nuclear-armed nations, starting with the president of the United States, to sign the TPNW; and third, to free up the trillions of dollars being spent on nuclear weapons to instead fight the climate crisis.
The challenges are monumental, and Wallis makes no bones about humanity’s failure so far to meet them. In order to have a sustainable future, he says, gradual, baby-step measures will no longer suffice. These global problems require full-throttle global initiatives. Those initiatives must be led by the United States in concert, not competition, with the international community. Wallis singles out the U.S. because it is the richest nation in human history and therefore has the resources for such leadership. It also bears a unique responsibility as the most profligate of nations, having largely instigated the climate crisis and wholly created the nuclear peril in the first place.
The book contains a great many data points. In this regard it borders on excess, especially for a layperson like me. A related quibble has to do with the book’s abundant graphs and charts. Many are helpful, but they are all printed in grayscale, no doubt to save money. This makes them hard – sometimes nearly impossible – to read. I skipped over a lot of them. After finishing the book, I had the opportunity to sign up for a more in-depth reading led by Wallis, and I was able to view the images in color. No contest. Colorizing the images added tremendously to their impact. For future printings, the publisher would do well to find the funds to correct this.
I emphasize that these are just quibbles. Overall, Warheads to Windmills comes to us as a most welcome guide. At a time when many of us feel helpless against the onrush of these twin juggernauts that would end us, we now have an actual book of instructions to enable us to stand against them. Perhaps it’s what we’ve needed all along. Of course, we also need the will. If humankind can find that (a tall order), this book inspires me to believe that we may still be able to turn the tide.
~ Dan Worthen is the facilitator of WPSR’s Nuclear Weapons Abolition Reading Room