Two minutes to midnight
Any weekly columnist faces several challenges: doing your homework; having something to say; saying it clearly. But the first challenge is the toughest: deciding what to write about.
Usually, the goal’s to tackle the most important issue of the day. But the most important issue’s not always the sexiest. Take this week. Donald Trump’s “Executive Time,” political chaos among Virginia Democrats, Cory Booker’s new girlfriend, a MAGA rally disguised as a State of the Union address: all have received a lot of media attention, and are fodder for a good column.
Too bad. Dare I suggest that even Trump’s latest tweet is less significant than the fact that we are as close to nuclear annihilation as we ever have been before? Repeat: We could blow up and destroy this planet at any minute. Surely, that’s worth at least one column.
Ominous signs of the critical nuclear threat came recently in two events largely ignored by mainstream media: First, an update by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, announced during a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington on Jan. 24, 2019. To illustrate the urgency of the nuclear threat, former California Governor Jerry Brown and former Defense Secretary Bill Perry unveiled the latest setting of the Bulletin’s “Doomsday Clock.” If midnight represents nuclear destruction, they warn, we are now at “Two Minutes to Midnight” — the closest mankind has ever been to the nuclear brink, and as close as we were at the height of the Cold War, in 1953.
Bulletin scientists base their two-minute warning on lack of action on the dual threats of climate change and nuclear proliferation. Among troubling developments on the nuclear front, they cited Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal; continued nuclear buildups by Pakistan, India, China and North Korea; decisions by Russia and the United States to upgrade their nuclear arsenals; and signs that the Trump administration intended to withdraw from existing nuclear arms treaties with Russia. Governor Brown said that, given the evidence of what’s close to a new nuclear arms race, the “blindness and stupidity of politicians” not even to debate the nuclear issue is “shocking.”
Just one week after the Doomsday Clock was unveiled, a second event made the worst fears of nuclear disarmament advocates come true. On Friday, February 1, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the Trump administration was withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a landmark agreement signed by President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, which resulted in the destruction of 2,700 intermediate and shortrange missiles. And suddenly the nuclear arms race was back underway, with disastrous consequences.
Granted, there were problems with the INF treaty. In 2014, President Obama accused Russia of violating the accord by testing a new groundlaunched cruise missile. In turn, Russia accused the United States of deploying a shortrange missile defense system in Eastern Europe that could easily be converted into offensive weapons. But, instead of sitting down with Russia to try to resolve the differences, Trump, as with the Iran nuclear pact, just decided to pull out — thereby giving Russia a green light to build as many intermediate missiles as it wants.
It won’t stop there. When it expires in 2021, Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton have already declared their intent to withdraw from the new START Treaty, signed by President Obama and President Medvedev in 2010, which limits the number of deployed strategic warheads to 1,500 on either side. Today, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), Russia and the United States together have a nuclear arsenal of over 13,000 warheads, each of which is many times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and each of which could kill millions of people. Yet Donald Trump says he wants to increase our nuclear arsenal tenfold.
Now here’s the scary part: On his own, only one American could decide to launch a nuclear warhead. And, for now, that man is Donald Trump. As Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, “a public grant-making foundation focused on nuclear weapons policy and conflict resolution,” warns: “The instability of our current president has exposed the insanity of the underlying nuclear policy. We have far more nuclear weapons then we could ever use in any conceivable situation. One man controls them all. He can launch these weapons whenever he wants, for whatever reason he wants — and no one can stop him.”
Bottom line: Wake up, Americans! We’re in a new nuclear arms race, led by Donald Trump. If that’s not enough to scare the bejeezus out of you, I don’t know what will.