Nuclear Winter vs. Carbon Summer: How Temporalities of Threats Shape the Taboo Advocacy in Anti-Nuclear and Anti-Fossil Fuel Movements

The atomic bomb has been one of the most dominant areas of public fear since 1945 – If not after the test in New Mexico, then certainly after Japan. The first world conference against atomic and hydrogen bombs was held in Hiroshima ten years later, shortly followed by the establishment of Europe's largest single-issue peace campaign to date, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), known not only for its agency but also for its face – today's almost universal symbol of peace. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963 and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968. The aims of CND's campaigns, as well as the importance of the anti-nuclear movement as a whole, were only strengthened in the 1980s with the hypothesis of nuclear winter. This established a tangible link between the use of nuclear weapons and climate vulnerability, highlighting the impact that the soot following a nuclear explosion would have on solar radiation and life as we know it. Today's climate movement, understood here as not just environmental but anti-fossil fuel NGOs (such as 350.org), is based on the same principles as the anti-nuclear movement: avoiding human suffering and the end of life-sustaining conditions, and proposing alternative energy (for the latter, not nuclear), with the difference that it fears carbon summer rather than nuclear winter, and is fighting something slow but already in place rather than something very imminent but only potential. Given that nuclear norms have been the most successful deterrent (to the point of becoming taboo), the question arises as to why climate change has not succeeded in turning the tables and stigmatising carbon in a similar way by advocating nuclear winter 2.0 (carbon summer). This assumption does not ignore the successes that the climate movement has achieved but finds that climate change advocacy is slow, lacks a groundswell of popular support, and does not translate into commonly shared norms (as the nuclear taboo did). This matter is discussed through comparative historical analysis informed by the framing theory, comparing how these two movements constructed their narratives. It compares not only the timeframe and development of their advocacy but also political opportunity (PO theory) enabling or constraining tangible outcomes (e.g., LTBT, CTBT, NPT, Kyoto, Paris…). More importantly, it attempts to analyse the links the anti-climate change movement has had with the anti-nuclear one (through external network analysis) and whether these were sufficiently or insufficiently acted upon. The article postulates the idea of tabooing the carbon economy and placing climate change research at the centre of security studies scholarship. At the same time, it applies the theorisation of nuclear taboos to a modern crisis and examines the temporality of the urgency of threats, which influences the effectiveness and social acceptance of advocacy efforts.