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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a magazine dedicated towards ending nuclear weapons. It’s most famous for the “Doomsday Clock.” The magazine describes the Doomsday Clock as so:
The Doomsday Clock conveys how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction–the figurative midnight–and monitors the means humankind could use to obliterate itself. First and foremost, these include nuclear weapons…
In some ways the magazine is a lingering remnant of another time. The Doomsday Clock used to be much more well-known than it is now. Today most young people have never heard of it.
Currently the clock stands at 5 Minutes to Midnight. That is, the world is figuratively five minutes away from nuclear warfare and the end of the comfortable, mostly peaceful world we live in.
There’s just one problem: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is wrong. It’s not five minutes to midnight.
Of course five minutes to midnight is a figurative term; the world will not literally end in five minutes as of this writing. It’s impossible to say just what “five minutes to midnight” actually means in real terms. How can I argue, then, that the scientists are wrong?
Because the world today is much safer than it ever was during the Cold War.
The Cold War was shaped by the threat that one misunderstanding, or the actions of one crazy general, would cause the world’s two superpowers to unleash their weapons. There was a constant threat that the Cold War would turn into a Hot War – a world war far worse than the last one.
There is no such threat today. People rarely use the term nuclear winter anymore, or at least they use it much less today. The nuclear threats today are merely local ones. Even if Iran or North Korea (or both) launch nuclear weapons, the devastation will merely be local rather than global. A Pakistani-Indian nuclear war would likewise be a local war, not a global one.
In 1963 and in 1972 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists stated that the world was 12 Minutes to Midnight. The world is much farther away from nuclear catastrophe today than it was in 1963 or 1972.
So, at the very least, the world is 13 minutes away from midnight.
– inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/
4 Comments
How about five years from midnight? If we do not substantially change our way of doing business in the next five years most scientists say it may be too late to prevent misery for future generations. Does anybody care?
Live life fully while you can.
Obama’s executive order on Friday signals WW3. Israel is going to hit Iran. That will pull Turkey, Russia, and China into it. US will not be able to stay out. Everybody that has them will be using nukes.
Spend, eat, and make love, everybody. The end is coming soon.
We are 30 seconds to midnight.
Not so sure that signals anything more than getting ready to fuck with us here at home. Dissent in the US is the biggest hindrance to fucking with the world. And they know it. We must occupy more than ever.
I appreciate your premise. I’m not confident that Russia has no Nukes aimed at us, especially on submarines. We don’t know what Nuclear resources were sold off to other countries, wealthy individuals, or corporations as the Soviet Union failed.
I think a Nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan could escalate into a larger exchange as well. And its fallout would threaten all of Earth.
The more Nuclear explosions and Nuclear leaks there are, the closer we all are to dying.
I am glad if we have dialed it back 8 minutes, as you assess. Let’s keep on turning it back.