Standing on the Edge of Catastrophe

To face systemic risks, defence investments must build stability, not just strength

In early October, I attended the Montreal Climate Security Summit, co-hosted by NATO’s Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence and the Conference of Defence Associations Institute. Panel after panel, military and civilian experts mapped a widening spectrum of dangers, from climate disruption and Arctic instability to disinformation and the fragility of space-based systems. What struck me most was not the list of risks but the shared assumption that they can be managed; that instability itself can be contained through foresight, capability, and control. Across every domain, the reflex is the same: prepare, harden, arm, deter. Yet the systems we depend on—from the climate to orbit to nuclear deterrence—are complex, interconnected, and fragile.

As Canada undertakes “generational investments” in defence, equal investment is needed in the conditions of stability, including climate resilience, orbital safety, and crisis prevention, that make lasting security possible.

The Illusion of Control

Climate change has forced governments and alliances to confront the limits of security as we know it. NATO’s own assessments describe accelerating impacts as “complex, non-linear, and co-evolving,” touching every domain from land and sea to cyber and space. Yet its strategy still frames climate change as a “threat multiplier:” something to adapt to rather than a crisis to prevent. The focus remains on protecting military capability instead of addressing the causes of instability.

This logic extends far beyond climate. Across emerging technologies and security domains, uncertainty has become something to engineer away. Governments and industries alike are betting on automation, data, and predictive analytics to outpace instability. Much of this innovation is dual-use: technologies first developed for civilian efficiency or commercial profit being repurposed for military control. The promise is seductive: that with enough sensors and algorithms, disorder can be mastered.

Deterrence’s old paradox that stability comes through the promise of annihilation is collapsing, exposing a deeper, more frightening vulnerability.

Tech and defence firms have built empires around that belief. Palantir markets “decision dominance” as a service, fusing military, intelligence, and disaster-response data into predictive dashboards. Anduril Industries sells autonomous towers and drones designed to “see, decide, and act” faster, replacing human interpretation with algorithmic reflex. But complexity does not yield to control: it multiplies under it. Each new layer of automation tightens the feedback loop between perception and response, raising the risk of error and escalation. A misread signal in orbit or a misclassified threat in cyberspace can cascade across systems too tightly coupled to pause.

Across domains, the governing idea is the same: that survival lies in anticipation, speed, and precision. Yet the more tightly we try to manage uncertainty, the more brittle our systems become. Even Canada’s renewed investments in Arctic surveillance and infrastructure show the same tension: necessary for safety yet combatting symptoms rather than transforming the sources of insecurity.

Control from Orbit

Nowhere is the ambition of control more literal than in outer space, the proverbial high ground, long imagined as the vantage point from which Earth could be observed, defended, or commanded. That ambition is being rebuilt in real time.

The United States’ proposed Golden Dome system, mandated in 2025, envisions a vast network of satellites, sensors, and interceptors designed to detect and destroy missiles in flight from the vantage point of space. China’s announced “planet-wide defence system” follows a similar logic, aiming by 2030 to link orbital sensors, ground radar, and AI-driven command networks into a seamless layer of predictive awareness; control through orbit rather than merely from it. Europe’s planned Space Shield, part of its Re-Arm Europe roadmap, would extend deterrence above the atmosphere space-based early-warning data with ground-based missile-defence systems.

But orbit itself resists command. Collisions, malfunctions, and natural forces routinely undo even the most sophisticated designs. The 2009 crash between a defunct Russian satellite and a commercial Iridium spacecraft created more than 1,700 fragments still circling the planet. A 2022 geomagnetic storm destroyed 40 newly launched Starlink satellites. Every destructive anti-satellite test, from the United States in 1985 to Russia’s in 2021, has scattered long-lived debris that endangers all nations. Each new attempt to impose order multiplies complexity and risk. The pursuit of mastery in space, like on Earth, breeds its own instability.

The more we try to use orbit as a platform of control, the more it exposes our lack of it. What was once imagined as the ultimate high ground has become a shared field of mutual vulnerability.

Nuclear Shadows

If space reveals the limits of control, nuclear weapons expose its oldest illusion. Deterrence was built on the belief that existential danger could be managed through balance and calculation; that fear itself could be engineered into stability. For decades that equilibrium held, but it was never true control. It depended on judgment, restraint, and trust. These are human qualities that cannot be automated.

Those guardrails are now eroding. In October 2025, Russia conducted new flight tests of its Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile and renewed trials of the Poseidon underwater drone, both designed to evade interception and outlast defence. Moscow had already withdrawn its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, signalling that even symbolic restraint no longer applies. In the United States, calls by the President to resume nuclear testing follow the same logic, rooted in displays of strength through the rejection of limits. Strategic surprise, once the danger to avoid, is now cultivated as a strategy of deterrence.

The technologies driving this new instability, which include AI, quantum sensing, rapid launch, real-time data fusion, are fuelling an arms race between systems, not just states. Missile-defence architectures such as Golden Dome and Europe’s Space Shield draw on the same sensor and data networks that underpin nuclear early warning. Each promises invulnerability through speed: to detect faster, decide faster, act faster than an adversary. But this quest to eliminate uncertainty only accelerates it as the space for human judgment shrinks. Crisis management becomes a contest of speed; one that machines will always win, and humans will ultimately lose.

What began as a pursuit of control has become a contest of chaos. Weapons once meant to enforce restraint now defy it. Deterrence’s old paradox that stability comes through the promise of annihilation is collapsing, exposing a deeper, more frightening vulnerability.

Beyond Control

Today’s most urgent security challenges including climate disruption, orbital instability, and nuclear risk, do not fit the traditional logic of defence. They are systemic, interconnected, and non-linear. Weapons and deterrence may still be necessary to guard against aggression, but systemic threats cannot be contained by strength alone. Security now depends as much on the stability of shared systems as on the capabilities of armed forces.

That means broadening what “defence investment” entails. Stability is built through early-warning networks that fuse climate, cyber, and space data; through accessible verification tools that make restraint credible; and through crisis-prevention and mediation mechanisms that stop escalation before it begins. It depends on international coordination to monitor orbital debris and greenhouse emissions with the same urgency we track military launches, and on resilient infrastructure that can withstand cascading disruption.

Technology can serve that purpose. The same satellites that track missile launches can map permafrost collapse and sea-ice drift. Algorithms that fuse early-warning data can also predict food shortages and disease outbreaks. The ingenuity that builds weapons can build resilience, but it requires re-balancing what “dual-use” means. Today, innovation investments are channeling civilian creativity to military application. It is time to turn that current back, using defence investment to strengthen the public goods that make all forms of security possible.

We are all standing on the edge of catastrophe together. The challenge now is not to command uncertainty, but to build cooperation strong enough to live with it.

Published in The Ploughshares Monitor Winter 2025