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One Sunday morning, as I was reading Mark Lynas’s outstanding new book on the risk of nuclear war, Six Minutes to Winter, my five-year-old daughter joined me on the sofa, sat on my lap, and asked me to read her a few lines. I chose a paragraph about US–Soviet Union disarmament policy in the good years of Reagan and Gorbachev, and before long she had lost interest and said: “Dad, can we play the unicorn game instead?”
The exchange struck me as poignant in at least two respects. The first was that Lara’s understandable desire to focus on unicorns rather than the (for her) much more oblique notion of nuclear conflict was, in its own, innocent way, a wider illustration of one of the central arguments of Lynas’s book: that most human societies in recent decades have focused much more squarely on other concerns, including the climate crisis, than the risk of a nuclear conflagration. The second was that – according to Lynas’s characteristic distillation of a huge amount of scientific and academic research – Lara and her contemporaries born in 2020 face an at least two-thirds likelihood of witnessing a major nuclear incident in their lifetimes, with that probability increasing each year unless urgent action is taken. Our little exchange that morning – followed a week later by the Israel–Iran confrontation – concentrated my mind and has strengthened my resolve to act on Lynas’s remarkable book.
Six Minutes to Winter bears all the hallmarks of Lynas’s previous works: meticulous research, fluent, engaging writing and storytelling, a clear, cogent argument, and, towards the end, a moving and humane closing argument restating the case for nuclear disarmament as a pressing global priority, recounted in this instance from Hiroshima. I found the book compelling and terrifying, as well as ultimately inspiring and galvanising, and believe it should be required reading for decision makers in the nine nuclear states. I also hope it achieves a more widespread global readership, and plays its part in mobilising a renewed global effort to pursue disarmament and major concerted steps to avoid the folly and tragedy of a nuclear conflagration.
With so much of value in the book, three particular dimensions stood out for me. The first was a deeper understanding of the sheer scale of the destruction that would follow from a nuclear incident: human suffering on a vast scale, with billions of lives lost, and in the most horrific manner possible; major devastation of the natural world; and – even for those who survive – a much-diminished world, of conflict, famine and insecurity. Lynas’s depiction of the fallout from past events, coupled with his understanding of the latest science, conveys a vivid and dystopian future that it is our collective duty to contemplate and prevent.
The second insight comes from a couple of chapters describing just how close we have already come to major nuclear accidents, including through inevitable human error in key nuclear sites and operations. Human interactions at a time of escalation are also of central importance: Lynas describes how a misunderstanding of one nuclear error in one geography could easily and quickly lead to a rush to nuclear action elsewhere, with an array of missiles aimed at cities in the US, Russia and China launched by military apparatuses in the three countries acting on imperfect information. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov who, in 1983, took the decision not to escalate a perceived nuclear attack within his military bureaucracy, correctly judging that a purported US attack was in fact an error in a computer system. How brave and cool-headed one must need to be in those circumstances! Petrov rightly (and posthumously) received the Future of Life award for his actions, while the anti-nuclear campaigner Beatrice Fihn received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for her efforts to pursue nuclear disarmament. Lynas also describes how cool-headed John F. Kennedy was in 1963 when all around him his military generals wanted to escalate at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Let us hope for similar wisdom in Iran, Israel and the US in 2025.
The third conclusion I took from the book is one that Lynas feels particularly well qualified to give, after over two decades of work writing and campaigning on the climate crisis: that there are lessons to be learned from the climate effort that are directly relevant to what will hopefully be a new wave of nuclear disarmament action. On climate, we drew attention to the science, mobilised the global public, marched, cajoled, protested, articulated solutions, brokered a global climate agreement in Paris, made the economic and political case for climate action, and got to work. Now – while far from where we need to be – the situation is profoundly better than it would have been had we not acted. The Paris Agreement has meant the world is on a trajectory to nearer 2.4 degrees of warming (still calamitous) than, say, four. And most countries – notwithstanding the US at present – are still committed to the climate effort. In other words, the climate work of the past two decades has been transformative.
Could the world not now, again, therefore, do the same for nuclear disarmament? It would be a tragedy if we managed to prevent the worst of the climate crisis but were then (largely or totally) obliterated by nuclear conflict instead. Let’s find it in ourselves to call on the best of humanity – so little in evidence at present at a time of terrible conflict – to bring about a world of peace, in which nuclear weapons capable of killing billions at a stroke are a thing of the past (by 2045, as Lynas suggests: 100 years on from Hiroshima).
In summary, Lynas has done us all a great service by writing this urgent and compelling book on one of – if not the – most existential issues of our time. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Lynas included, I concluded as I finished the book that Sunday morning and returned to Lara and her unicorns, and the swifts of the restored river nearby.
Six Minutes to Winter: Nuclear War and How to Avoid It by Mark Lynas. Bloomsbury Sigma, 2025. ISBN: 9781399410519
