Counting down to a man-made midnight
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So here we are, at the turning of another year. A time to look back on all that’s been and gone over the past 12 months.
And I don’t know about you, but for me 2017 was dominated by one very troubling topic.
For the first time in as long as I can remember, nuclear annihilation has again been making headlines.
I was born a little over two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the eve of my fifth full year on this planet, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War came to an end.
Nuclear tension, then, was not a staple of my childhood. It seemed to belong to a bygone era — even if the nukes themselves never really went away.
Last year changed all that, however. Real weapons of mass destruction have again been thrust into the limelight, and with them all the catastrophe and ruination that their use would entail.
Early last month, a newspaper in Northeast China’s Jilin province made waves after it published a full-page report detailing what to do in the event of a nuclear incident, including information on preventing radiation hazards and protecting oneself when a nuclear explosion or leak occurs.
It’s also telling that the winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons — a noble cause, to be sure, though it’s questionable how successful such movements have been in achieving their aims.
To this day, South Africa remains the only nation on Earth to have voluntarily given up on the nuclear arms it developed for itself.
Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine — three former Soviet republics who inherited stockpiles from the USSR’s breakup — likewise relinquished their weapons upon becoming independent.
And globally, the total number of nukes has diminished over recent decades.
But the threat they pose is still very real.
According to a report published by UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph in October, there are an estimated 15,000 warheads in the world right now — 10,000 of which are in active military service.
That’s about 25 percent of the total during the “heyday” of Cold War stockpiles, but it’s still more than enough to wipe out almost all life on Earth and render the planet near uninhabitable.
It’s actually one of the most convincing arguments I’ve heard in favor of the absence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe: that once a civilization has accrued the tools of its own destruction, inevitably it will use them.
And though that may be unthinkable, it certainly deserves a second thought.
Later this month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will reset its Doomsday Clock, which as of last January stands at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight — signifying the second closest point humanity has come to exterminating itself since we first formulated the capacity to do so amid the fires of World War II.
It’s too early to say where the minute hand might move to, though given the events of the past 12 months, I’m not overly optimistic.
But let’s hope for a better year ahead, and for a step back from the precipice.
Because I don’t know about you, but I want to believe that humanity can be better than the bonfire it has built for itself.