Charged Affairs

By Alvina Ahmed | Rising Expert on Defense | July 4, 2024 | Photo Credit: Flickr

In recent years, states and multilateral institutions have characterized climate change as a threat multiplier. In the defense space, experts and officials perceive climate change as a catalyst that exacerbates existing security challenges. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance—and several of its member states—has released assessments analyzing climate change’s impact on military infrastructure, training, and operations, as well as its political and economic implications for human security. Nevertheless, a large portion of the current literature views climate change as an issue NATO can take time to tackle in the longer term. Many analyses do not make an explicit connection on how climate change has already directly impacted NATO’s deterrence. At the upcoming NATO Summit in Washington, NATO officials should discuss climate change through the prism of an immediate threat to NATO’s nuclear deterrence and the steps the alliance can take to address this challenge in the near term.

NATO’s Conceptualization of Climate Change Threats

To its credit, NATO has conducted thorough assessments of the multi-faceted impacts of climate change and proposed measures the alliance should undertake to alleviate its effects. At the 2021 NATO Summit in Brussels, heads of states of NATO member states and officials concluded that climate change is a threat to the alliance and subsequently agreed on a Climate and Security Action Plan. The Action Plan is significant as it, for the first time in the alliance’s history, explicitly spells out the need for NATO to mitigate the impact of climate change. Furthermore, the 2022 NATO Strategic Concept–NATO’s strategic document that describes the security and geopolitical environment NATO faces and makes clear the alliance’s priorities to deter and defend against adversaries–states that climate change is a “defining challenge of our time.” It explains that rising sea levels and more frequent extreme weather conditions can make NATO forces and military infrastructure more vulnerable.

The 2023 NATO Climate Change and Security Impact Assessment, a follow-on document of the 2021 Climate and Security Action Plan, provides a detailed analysis of climate change’s impact on NATO’s strategic environment and the implications of its effect on human security. It discerns that extreme weather conditions can lead to loss of land and livelihood among marginalized communities, prompting displacement, and regional instability—and in some cases—can create environments in which non-state armed groups can recruit more successfully, undermining NATO’s collective defense and security. The 2023 report also states that extreme conditions can impede NATO forces’ training and exercises in certain locations.

Climate Change as an Immediate Threat to NATO’s Nuclear Deterrence

While the analyses and action plans NATO has put forth are noteworthy, what is missing from these reports is how climate change is a direct threat to NATO’s deterrence, particularly its nuclear deterrence. A Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Carnegie) report found that extreme weather conditions can erode NATO’s nuclear deterrence as they affect NATO’s dual-capable aircraft (DCA) mission. The DCA mission is NATO’s nuclear sharing initiative in which certified aircrafts provided by different NATO member states that can deliver both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons (specifically, US forward-deployed gravity bombs) are employed to enhance NATO’s nuclear deterrence. The Carnegie study explains that warmer temperatures make the DCAs’ hardware more vulnerable to overheating and damage. Such operational issues have the potential to eventually weaken NATO’s nuclear deterrence.

Climate change can also undercut the credibility of US extended deterrence as it affects each leg of the US nuclear triad. For context, the nuclear triad consists of an air leg (consisting of nuclear-capable bombers managed by the Air Force), a sea leg (which includes US ballistic missile submarines, or SSBNs, managed by the Navy), and a land leg (comprising of intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, also overseen by the Air Force). In a 2023 Carnegie study, Jamie Kwong states that climate change-induced extreme weather impacts naval and air force bases that house US strategic assets. For instance, flooding at naval bases which service SSBNs can impair the sea leg of the triad; likewise, flooding at air force bases that host ICBMs could impact personnel’s accessibility to the silos to provide routine maintenance. Kwong also explains that warmer-than-usual temperatures can hinder bombers from taking off freely at certain bases. All of these challenges caused by climate change can compromise US strategic deterrence, thus diminishing the credibility of US extended deterrence to its NATO allies.

The Washington NATO Summit’s Agenda

At the upcoming NATO Summit in Washington, topics that are high on the agenda of NATO officials include the question of Ukraine’s future membership into the alliance, continued NATO unity towards aiding Ukraine, China’s increasing aggression in the Indo-Pacific and globally, as well as potential spillover threats to the alliance emanating from the war in the Middle East. While these topics are crucial to be addressed, NATO officials should also consider the impact of climate change on the alliance as an urgent issue. Particularly, given that climate-change-induced effects on nuclear forces are not widely discussed, officials at the Washington summit should pay close attention to how climate change can undermine nuclear deterrence and propose concrete steps NATO, as an alliance, can take to mitigate the effects of climate change. In short, along with other immediate geopolitical threats, climate change should also be treated as a direct threat to deterrence that requires immediate and concrete actions to be mitigated.

Alvina Ahmed (she/her) is the 2024 Rising Expert on Defense. She also serves as a Nuclear Risk Reduction Fellow with the Nolan Center on Strategic Weapons at the Council on Strategic Risks and as a program analyst in the US Department of the Navy.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy, or the US Government.