Race against the Clock
Jane Corbin looks at the rise of nuclear weapons
NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON: HOW CLOSE ARE WE?
BBC2, 9pm
WITH the Doomsday Clock ticking ever louder, journalist Jane Corbin investigates the rapid increase of nuclear weapons across the globe.
“Nuclear weapons are one of the greatest threats to humanity,” she says.
“Every year there’s a meeting to assess the risk of global catastrophe and to set the Doomsday Clock.”
With unique access, Jane wants to find out what has brought us to this point.
Audiences worldwide flocked to see the film Oppenheimer, the story of the American scientist J Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb.
Less well known is that a couple of years after he saw his weapon’s devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock – to warn the public how close mankind is to a global catastrophe in the nuclear age.
On Tuesday, the world will find out where the hands of the Doomsday Clock will be set – a marker for the peril the world could face now.
Last year, the hands were moved forward to just 90 seconds before midnight – the closest they have ever been to nuclear Armageddon (midnight).
Jane visits Los Alamos, home to the United States’ nuclear weapons development facility, and of Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project.
She travels to Scotland to reveal the strategy behind Britain’s nuclear deterrent – missiles on submarines constantly on the move deep beneath the ocean.
Jane also speaks to campaigners in Suffolk fighting against a new generation of US weapons they fear will come to be based on UK soil.