The Emerging Voices Network (EVN) at BASIC is organising Expert Masterclasses. The EVN’s Masterclasses are our opportunity to tap into the fantastic network of experts that BASIC is lucky to have, to ask them to deliver their expertise to the EVN. The masterclasses are both skills and content-based. This is a primarily digital resource to make access to expertise more equitable for our global, diverse membership.
On 12th April, Jamie Kwong, Policy Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, discussed ‘The Climate-Nuclear Nexus: The Threat Climate Change Poses to U.S. Nuclear Weapons’.
In this masterclass, Jamie Kwong presents the findings of her project that examined the threats climate change pose to US nuclear weapons. The project aimed to evaluate the sustainability of fundamental US nuclear practices in a rapidly changing physical environment and considered how the failure to adapt those practices to the realities of climate change could exacerbate nuclear risks and fundamentally challenge US deterrence efforts. Her project aimed to raise awareness of the issue in an effort to better prepare for the dangerous convergence of nuclear weapons and climate change. Her recent paper aims to present some initial answers on how climate change will affect the capacity of US nuclear systems to support the nation’s deterrence missions. Read it here.