Slowing Doomsday Clock’s advance
The Doomsday Clock is at “90 seconds to midnight,” which means humanity is the closest it’s ever been to oblivion. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently updated the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic gesture it has made periodically since 1947 to reflect the risk of global cataclysm.
A panel of scientists, including 10 Nobel laureates, determine the minute hand’s proximity to midnight, an apocalypse, based on world events. What started as a metaphor for a countdown to a nuclear bomb’s detonation has grown to include other threats to human existence — climate change, lab accidents, disinformation, cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence and other “disruptive” technologies.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, two minutes was the closest the clock came to midnight. In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union and signing of the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the time moved to 17 minutes from midnight, the furthest it’s ever been.
Since then, we’ve inched closer to midnight. In 2010, we gained a minute after a new strategic arms treaty — called New START — and the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, but the clock has ticked down. In 2018 it hit two minutes again. And since 2020, it’s hovered at 100 seconds.
The group cited “mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine,” including “Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons”; military operations near nuclear reactors; and threats to New START, “the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty between Russia and the U.S.”
It quoted U.N. Secretary-general António Guterres’ August warning that the world is in “a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War.”
The Doomsday Clock is a Cold War throwback that ticks louder this year as the signs of a new Cold War keep stacking up — Russian aggression, tensions with China, the unveiling of a $692 billion bomber, hypersonic weapons and a renewed space race.
As we approach the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the ceaseless flow of Western money and weapons continues with few calls for negotiation or peace.
To be clear, we support this aid to Ukraine. There can be no capitulation to Russia. But the goal should be peace. For the military-industrial complex, however, peace is not profitable. There’s much talk about the number of dollars, tanks, armored vehicles, missiles and artillery rounds headed to Ukraine but little clarity on the actual human cost.
The United Nations reported the war
in Ukraine has killed at least 7,068 civilians and wounded 11,415. It also estimated 17.6 million Ukrainians, roughly half the country’s population, need humanitarian assistance. The war has displaced 6 million internally and created 8 million refugees.
The Defense Department claimed that both Russian and Ukrainian forces have incurred more than 100,000 casualties each, but both sides dispute that.
Consider America’s $858 billion defense budget and the rhetoric of “great power competition” with Russia and China. The term “competition” veils the truth that such a strategy is a blank checkbook into oblivion.
The strategy of outspending one’s opponent with military power reaffirms old ways of thinking — that wars are inevitable, and the best offense is a good defense.
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe,” wrote Albert Einstein, one of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists founders, in a 1946 telegram to several hundred prominent Americans.
The world has not heeded Einstein’s warning.
We must challenge world leaders to develop new ways of thinking about conflict resolution. They should prioritize cooperation over competition and peace instead of war.
We need to act fast because we’re almost out of time.
Make cooperation and peace the priority, not competition and war