Different Takes: Should SRM Be Seen as a Serious Security Issue?

Historically, ‘security’ has been a field of concern that has focused on things like troops, borders, strategic resources, and other issues related to hard-power. More recently, this has evolved to include migration, terrorism, cyber warfare, and especially in this case, climate change. Some traditionalists maintain that these new issues are veering too closely to questions of ‘soft-power’ and shouldn’t be included, but the fact that NATO chose to launch a Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence seems to suggest that even the most hard-power-minded thinkers understand the broadening implications of climate change.

Climate change presents a security issue through many avenues, including changes to migration, shipping routes, and battlefield conditions. If climate change presents a security issue, then surely technologies which have the potential to change global climatic conditions – SRM to be specific – also present a security issue. Even the theoretical ability for a great power to influence the global climate – such as tweaking rainfall patterns, thereby altering crop yields in other regions – means that any nation with security concerns must pay attention to SRM.

However, this doesn’t mean that SRM should be treated primarily as a security issue; in fact, this might be the worst possible outcome. Military control of SRM technologies – especially in the current moment of elevated geopolitical tensions – is more likely to lead to secrecy and competition, potentially leading to an arms race. Therefore, while security agencies should closely monitor SRM, they should not be allowed to be involved in development or deployment – else we risk sliding into a new geopolitical arms race.

Instead, any SRM research should be conducted openly and transparently – with government and civilian oversight. While militaries should be kept informed, to ensure they understand the realities of SRM (such as that it cannot be directly weaponized), they should not be allowed to dictate its development, nor be placed in control of any potential future deployment. This is a difficult tightrope to walk – but likely a necessary one.

Security means different things to different people. At one narrow end of a spectrum, security can be thought of as being about protecting against threats of violence, especially organized violence – wars (including civil wars), terrorism, transnational crime, etc. At the other broader end of that spectrum, security can be thought of as being about protecting against threats to people’s wellbeing – personal security but also economic security, health security, environmental security, etc.

For me, the latter, broader conceptualization of security is too expansive: labeling all threats to people’s wellbeing as potential security threats risks stretching the idea of security beyond recognition and drains the concept of its utility. On this basis, I think about security as protection against organized violence.

One way to consider whether SRM is a serious security issue (i.e., related to threats of organized violence) is to ask whether it poses direct or indirect threats to people. SRM is too imprecise to be weaponized and thus is not a dual-use technology. Since it has no military applications, SRM would not seem to pose any direct threats.

Instead, because of its potential to scramble geopolitics in numerous and unpredictable ways, SRM could pose a range of indirect security threats. An attempt to deploy SRM in the Arctic, for example, could exacerbate an increasingly complex set of cross-cutting regional tensions, encouraging countries to expand their military presence or alter their force posture. Or disagreements about SRM between the United States and China could aggravate commercial, security, or status disputes in ways that increase the likelihood of armed conflict between the superpowers. One can imagine many other similar scenarios.

Such indirect threats are not unserious – they could result in violent conflict – yet SRM would not pose immediate dangers in the way that other frontier technologies like AI could. For these reasons, I would characterize SRM as an issue with important security implications, but not as a serious security issue per se.

It would be comforting if SRM were determined only by concerned climate scientists out to minimise global average risk. Sadly, SRM faces a world quite different from the ‘model land’ of the more idealised SRM modelling. If it happens, SRM will emerge from immensely powerful states and financial actors who unfortunately care deeply about ‘security’.

SRM ought not be thought of as a security tool. ‘Securitizing’ things is usually a bad idea, including when it comes to climate change. Putting problems in the ‘security’ category may add urgency but tends to hand the biggest stick to the strongest actor, restrained by the most elastic of political leashes. Particularly since 9/11, ‘security’ has been invoked by powerful states and others as a justificatory battle cry for a sprawling array of racialised, coercive and exceptional measures at home and abroad.

While current SRM designs look unpromising as kinetic weapons, it would be folly to ignore the risks of SRM becoming enrolled in competition, coercion and subterfuge. If, as its proponents say, SRM really is ‘the only known way’ to rapidly affect the planetary energy budget, how could it escape being considered a potent geopolitical resource? Would SRM-ownership be geopolitically akin to a reserve currency – or used to prop up the actual petrol-dollar system? Or be justified as a necessary security measure to protect order or current privileges against climate disruption?

High leverage technologies like AI (or nuclear) have been coopted by security before. Who can rule out SRM going the same way? Recently, an SRM startup emerged backed by venture capitalists boasting symbiotic ties to Israeli and other Western militaries and intelligence outfits, led by a former deputy chief scientist of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. A warning that with SRM, geopolitical, financial and ‘environmental security’ will be devilishly hard to keep separate.

The security implications of SRM are grossly overstated.

International conflicts generally arise from one of two channels: divergent interests; or divergent ideas of identity, religion, or historical grievance.

Over the next few decades – the far future given the rapid pace of change in international relations – it’s hard to imagine plausible scenarios in which SRM produces changes in national interests that are large relative to the changes in welfare caused by technological and demographic shifts. And because SRM is not yet strongly linked to the kinds of identity-based narratives that most often drive conflict, it seems unlikely that SRM will drive conflict through that channel.

SRM is unlikely to have big impacts on national interests because stratospheric aerosols are the only form of SRM with a clear developmental (no new research required) pathway to deployment, and so the only approach likely to be deployed at scale over the next few decades. Stratospheric aerosols are inherently slow-moving and diffuse. They cannot be locally targeted and are impossible to hide. They are not plausibly weaponizable. Even under the largest plausible stratospheric aerosol deployment over the next few decades, the difference in economic impacts across major nations is unlikely to exceed a few percent of their economic output. These differences are small compared to plausible impacts of trade policies, AI, and decline in fossil fuel production.

Other potential methods of SRM could be rapidly modulated and targeted, such as low-Earth orbiting sunshades. These might allow real-time weather control with significant security implications, but all such methods are so far from technical feasibility that they exist firmly in the realm of science fiction rather than reality.

Of course, conflict can arise from the complicated nonlinear interactions of politics and egos, and it’s possible that threats of SRM could play a role. But the same could be said about almost any issue in the modern world. Nearly anything could serve as a secondary trigger under the right geopolitical conditions.