US Secretary of State John Kerry addressing the Non-Proliferation Review Conference image courtesy of the US State Department

Angela Kane, the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, warned that the nuclear powers’ lack of meaningful progress toward disarmament could undermine the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). US Secretary of State John Kerry said at the NPT Review Conference that as of September, 2014 the US had 4,717 nuclear warheads—87 fewer than the year before. Kerry said that the US planned to accelerate dismantling its approximately 2,500 retired warheads by 20%. Mikhail Ulyanov, who heads the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department for Non-Proliferation and Arms Control, said that US policy was the main obstacle to nuclear disarmament. Ulyanov criticized the US for implementing a global missile defense system, for developing Prompt Global Strike weapons—high-speed, precision conventional weapons—and for failing to negotiate limits on space weapons and on nuclear tests. Ira Helfand, co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, wrote in The Hill that the US needs to disarm more completely if it wants to preserve the NPT. “The US needs to change course,” Helfand said. “It needs to recognize that the world will not indefinitely tolerate a system of nuclear apartheid where some countries get to have nuclear weapons and others don’t.”

James E. Cartwright, former vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and commander of the US Strategic Command, and Vladimir Dvorkin, a retired Russian major general, argued in The New York Times that the US and Russia should remove from their military doctrines the option to launch nuclear missiles on a warning of a possible enemy attack. The launch-on-warning option is dangerous because provocations or mistakes could trigger a catastrophic conflict. Early-warning systems could also be vulnerable to cyberattacks. Russia’s early warning system may already be compromised by the failure of its launch-detecting satellites. “In periods of heightened tensions and reduced decision times, the likelihood of human and technical error in control systems increases,” Cartwright and Dvorkin said. “Launch-on-warning is a relic of Cold War strategy whose risk today far exceeds its value.”

Robert J. Peters wrote in 38 North that if the North Korean regime collapses, the US will have to be ready to secure and disable the country’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. That will be difficult because we do not know the extent or location of North Korean weapons programs. Peters called for the creation a joint US-South Korea task force to prepare to secure dangerous weapons if the North Korean regime loses control. Al-Monitor reported that Syria is willing to give up its highly-enriched uranium and convert a nuclear reactor near Damascus to run on less-enriched uranium. Miles Pomper, a research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said that the news does not completely allay concerns about Syria’s nuclear program, but that it is still “something we can celebrate”.

A study in Nature Climate Change found that global warming caused by human emissions has already quadrupled the frequency of high temperature extremes since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Global warming has also increased the frequency of heavy rainstorms by 22% since the 19th century. The study found that the frequency of both temperature and precipitation increases is likely to increase at a faster-than-linear rate as global temperatures rise.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said the danger of Ebola spreading beyond West Africa is falling. The WHO’s latest Ebola strategic response plan focuses on limiting the spread of the virus to coastal areas before the rainy season reaches its peak in May. The number of new cases of Ebola is down in both Guinea and Sierra Leone. Liberia has gone for 5 straight weeks without a new case by the end of April. Countries have to go for 7 weeks without a case to be declared free of the Ebola.

Bernice Dahn, Vera Mussah, and Cameron Nutt wrote in The New York Times that we should have been better prepared for the possibility of an Ebola outbreak in West Africa. A 1982 paper in Annals of Virology found antibodies to the Ebola virus in 6% of blood samples taken from Liberians. Three 1986 studies also found Ebola antibodies in samples of blood from Northwestern Liberia, near its borders with Sierra Leone and Guinea. The studies suggested that Ebola may be endemic to the region, but because few Liberians were trained in epidemiology or had easy access to European medical journals, Liberian health officials were unaware of the danger of an outbreak.

In a report to the UN, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Harvard’s International Rights Clinic (IHRC) called for a ban on autonomous weapons under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). The report argues that it is practically impossible to hold anyone accountable for the actions of weapons systems that “select and engage targets without meaningful human control”. “Fully autonomous weapons themselves cannot substitute for responsible humans as defendants in any legal proceeding that seeks to achieve deterrence and retribution,” the report said. “Furthermore, a variety of legal obstacles make it likely that humans associated with the use or production of these weapons—notably operators and commanders, programmers and manufacturers—would escape liability for the suffering caused by fully autonomous weapons.”

Bill McGuire, University College London professor emeritus in geophysical and climate hazards, noted in New Scientist that April marked the 200th anniversary of the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. The eruption put enough sulphate particles in the atmosphere to partially block the sun and to temporarily lower temperatures around the world, causing 1816 to be known as the “year without a summer”. Crops failed in North America and Europe, resulting in famine and political violence. McGuire said that we need to do a better job of systematically categorizing the greatest geophysical dangers from things like volcanoes. “Forewarned is forearmed,” McGuire wrote. “If we want to be geared up and ready when the next Tambora blows, we need to put in place the sort of framework that will facilitate a step-change in the level of awareness and understanding of our planet’s top-end geophysical threats.”

Lewis Dartnell argued in Aeon that it might be hard for human civilization to recover from a global catastrophe because we have already consumed the most of the readily available deposits of fossil fuels. Manufacturing sophisticated alternative energy technologies like solar panels might be beyond the capabilities of a society starting from scratch. It would be hard to develop civilization on its current scale using just renewable power sources like wind, water, and charcoal. In addition, renewable power generation on a large scale would probably require resources needed for agriculture. “A slow-burn progression through the stages of mechanisation, supported by a combination of renewable electricity and sustainably grown biomass, might be possible,” Dartnell wrote. But, he added, “we’d better hope we can secure the future of our own civilisation, because we might have scuppered the chances of any society to follow in our wake.”

This news summary was put together in collaboration with Anthropocene. Thanks to Tony Barrett, Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.

For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary March 2015.

You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).