Why it’s time to find an alternative to the Doomsday Clock.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists a nnounced last week it is two- anda-half minutes to midnight. The or g a n i z a t i o n’s 70-year-old Doomsday Clock — one of the world’s most recognizable warnings of nuclear weapons — is now prophesizing the end of the world with more alarm than it has at any time since the 1950s’ invention of the hydrogen bomb.
The clock never fails to grab headlines. The sight of dour old men portending global doom has a tendency t o do t hat. But when it comes to actually predicting nuclear Armageddon, it’s difficult to imagine a worse indicator than the Doomsday Clock.
First of all, what does it mean to be two- and- ahalf minutes to midnight? Is the world going to end in 150 seconds? And, since we’re talking about nuclear Armageddon here, isn’t any amount of time bad? Even if the Doomsday Clock gave us three days to annihilation, that would still seem to be an extremely panic- worthy indicator.
However, the lowest the clock has ever been was in 1991, when the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cheered the end of the Cold War by setting the clock to 17 minutes before midnight.
One of the greatest coups for peace in history, and the best they could do is give humanity just enough time to listen to In-A- Gadda- DaVida before the world ended.
More i mportantly, the Doomsday Clock has proved to be a terrible predictor of actual nuclear risk.
During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — the point at which historians generally agree the world came closest to nuclear war — the clock was set at a relaxed seven minutes to midnight.
And what about September 26, 1983? That was the day when a malfunction caused the Soviet Union to falsely detect an incoming missile strike from the United States.
As sirens sounded around him, a single duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, made the gut decision to forgo the required protocol to order a retaliatory nuclear strike.
Chillingly, Petrov has since said it was a “50- 50” chance he would have made the decision he did, that saved so much of humanity. Even more frightening, he is pretty confident his by- thebook colleagues would have ordered retaliation.
“They were lucky it was me on shift t hat night,” Petrov l ater t old a BBC interviewer.
The Doomsday Clock, meanwhile, was at four minutes to midnight.
Does the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists honestly believe we are now in more peril than when Petrov sat pulling the night shift in a Soviet command centre and holding the fate of the world in his hands?
The Arctic no l onger hosts a 24- hour presence of airborne nuclear bombers ready to lay waste to Russia at a moment’s notice. Missile silos that once held city- destroying weapons have been converted into underground villas for eccentric millionaires.
All around t he world, militaries have been stood down from a hair- trigger footing of destroying all life within 24 hours.
Far be it for me to say the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists are crying wolf, but they seem to be running out of minutes.
What if, this time next year, Iran obtains a nuclear bomb, a Pakistani missile base is seized by jihadists and Vladimir Putin starts moving nuclear- capable weaponry into the Middle East?
That would be way more dangerous than the world situation now, but there isn’t much room left on the clock for that: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has already essentially moved us to the edge of Doomsday.
Part of the problem is the keepers of the Doomsday Clock have greatly expanded their purview.
What started out as a Cold War indicator meant to tell people the likelihood of their city being turned to dust is now used to sound the alarm on a whole range of global ills.
Last week’s Doomsday Cl ock update i ncl uded warnings about climate change, cybersecurity and — somewhat incredibly — fake news.
“Information monocultures, fake news, and the hacking and release of politically sensitive emails may have had an illegitimate impact on the U. S. presidential election, threatening the fabric of democracy,” wrote the Bulletin in its justification for why the world is now closer to the brink of annihilation.
These problems might be worthy causes, but they don’t hold a candle to total nuclear destruction. No rational person thinks cli- mate change i s anything like an immediate “doomsday” in which all life is instantaneously erased.
The Doomsday Clock, of course, is governed by a panel of scientists, includi ng 15 Nobel l aureates. Perhaps they could devise an indicator that was a bit more … scientific.
Maybe they could look to other indicators that are infinitely better at alerting people to risk.
The U. S. and Canadian debt clocks provide a running tally of each country’s surging debt — a much more accurate measure than if they were simply static analogue clocks readi ng “two minutes to default.”
Colour- coded wildfire indicators let vacationers know how vigilant t hey should be about campfires or cigarette smoking. Imagine if Parks Canada simply put up pictures of giant clocks at all its parks reading “it is 10 minutes to wildfire.”
To take the vagaries out of atomic prediction, various groups over the years have attempted to measure the probability that the earth would face nuclear war.
One organization called the Project for the Study of the 21st Century polled national security experts and concluded that, in the next 25 years, there was a 6.8 per cent chance that the world would face a nuclear war that would kill more people than the Second World War.
Scientist Anders Sandberg, in a 2015 critique of the Doomsday Clock, calculated the probability of nuclear war by looking at all the years in which there has not been nuclear war, and then working backwards.
Hi s conclusion was 1.4 per cent, although he warned given the complexity of how wars start, it was based on “potentially suspect assumptions.”
“The chance of at least one of them being wrong is high,” he wrote.
Still, how about a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists press conference where they unveil a giant Price Is Right- style wheel in which 1.4 per cent of the outer surface is covered with a red strip reading “nuclear war.” Then, the assembled media hold their breath as the wheel is spun.
When t he wheel t hen thankfully settles on a nonnuclear war part of t he wheel, a grey- haired scientist takes to a microphone to stoically warn, “we were lucky this time, but we must remain vigilant.”
That would be a visceral, specific and poignant illustration of pending catastrophe — rather than what is now essentially a political op-ed fronted by a giant clock illustration.
Humanity should count itself very lucky that the Doomsday Clock has been a terrible indicator of actual doomsday.
Still, it remains troubling to see atomic scientists — the very people we need to remain calm, meticulous and professional — engaging in an annual ritual that is profoundly unscientific.
FAR BE IT FOR ME TO SAY THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS ARE CRYING WOLF, BUT THEY SEEM TO BE RUNNING OUT OF MINUTES.