In Arming Mother Nature , Jacob Darwin Hamblin argues that environmentalism is rooted in cold war plans to abuse nature for military ends

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 “environmental warfare” 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, “scientists, military leaders and politicians who believed they would have to manipulate and exploit nature” in a war against the Soviet Union. The original doom-mongers were not sounding the alarm; they were riding into battle.

The original doom-mongers were not sounding the alarm they were riding into battle


During the Korean war, US advisers considered spraying waste from plutonium reprocessing across Korea to create a “dehumanised death belt”. 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’s 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’s 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 “it is not just nuclear bombs and wars that threaten us… this book is about ecological explosions”.

Hamblin’s stories of individuals on the front line are equally telling. MIT’s Jay Forrester modelled defence systems for the US military before constructing the model behind the doomsday analysis in the Club of Rome’s 1972 book, The Limits to Growth. The Congressman who proposed the radioactive “death belt” 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 RAND Corporation and was possibly the model for Dr Strangelove from the “Bland Corporation” in Stanley Kubrick’s 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 “nuclear winter” 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.

Arming Mother Nature: The birth of catastrophic environmentalism Jacob Darwin Hamblin Oxford University Press