According to the Doomsday Clock, the world is now “100 seconds to midnight”.
It Is the closest the world has ever been to “doom”.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by the University of Chicago scientists who had participated in the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two years later, they developed the concept of Doomsday Clock to measure, from time to time, how close humanity and the planet earth were to a life-ending catastrophe. Apocalypse – meaning the end of life as we know It, is depicted as “Midnight”.
The founding of the Bulletin by the scientists who, technically at least, bore a vicarious responsibility for the science that enabled America to kill of hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women and children may be seen as an attack of conscience in people appalled by the sheer destructive potential of the forces they had unleashed. It was no rocket science to discern, even at that time, that the horror was not going to end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Given the propensity of nations to strive to outdo one another, they foresaw there would be a race to build bigger, more powerful bombs than the ones that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nations would assert their power by stockpiling nuclear weapons. In short order, there would be a real risk that two nuclear-armed nations would confront one another. The genie of nuclear conflagration was out of the bottle, and could never be squeezed back in.
The worst fears of the scientists have been realised, and more. The end of the Second World War, hastened by the thermonuclear roasting of hapless Japanese, immediately unleashed a cold war between the “East” and the “West” – headlined by a nuclear arms race between America and the Soviet Union in which each contender amassed a nuclear arsenal with sufficient reach and power to blow up the world and everything in it several times over.
More lately concern about the role of the internet in cyber-warfare and other disruptive technologies has been added to the worry list of the Doomsday Clock. Internet-driven wars of disinformation prosecuted through the social media are sowing distrust among races and nations influencing elections and civil strife in other countries
If some people took comfort in the common sense fact that nuclear war was inconceivable because there could be no “victor” and it was bound to end in “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD), it quickly became clear after incidents such as the Cuban Missile Crisis that the possibility of one leader miscalculating and sparking off “the mother of all wars” was very real. The leader did not have to be a red-eyed “mad” despot. He could just be a nationalist, flexing patriotic muscle and playing “chicken” with his neighbour.
The original danger the Atomic Scientists foresaw to humanity was a thermonuclear war. Over time, it became clear to Science that planet Earth might not even require a nuclear war to kill off all life. The degradation of the Environment, the loss of the ozone layer, would, unchecked, kill the planet, and all in it.
More lately concern about the role of the internet in cyber-warfare and other disruptive technologies has been added to the worry list of the Doomsday Clock. Internet-driven wars of disinformation prosecuted through the social media are sowing distrust among races and nations influencing elections and civil strife in other countries.
The hands of the Doomsday Clock have sailed perilously close to “midnight” several times in the past. Before 2020, the “lowest” points occurred in 1953 and 2018, when the clock was set at “Two Minutes to Midnight”. In 1953 the USA and Soviet Union began to test hydrogen bombs which were vastly more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan. On 24th January 2018, the clock was moved again to “Two Minutes to Midnight” in the heat of the hyperbolic hair-trigger exchange between Donald Trump and Kim Jung Un.
The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin meet twice a year to assess the current risk to humanity.
A conflation of risk issues has driven the world closer to apocalypse now that it has ever been.
In setting the 2020 Doomsday Clock, the experts from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists were joined by “The Elders” – a body of leading statesmen and thinkers formed by Nelson Mandela, with the lofty concern of bringing peace and harmony to the world. Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and current Chairman of The Elders, as well as Ban Ki-Moon, former UN Secretary General and Deputy Chairman of The Elders joined the Scientists to emphasise present peril and the need for urgent corrective action.
With erratic temperamental “nationalist” strongmen like Donald Trump squaring off against the Confucian mystique of Xi Jinping, mixing it up with boy-king Kim Jung Un, and the climate change and coronavirus-denying Brazilian Bolsonaro trying to out-Trump Donald Trump, while cold calculating “Leader-for Life” Vladimir Putin rides the Russian bear, consideration for the well-being of humanity is all too often relegated to the back-burner in the power corridors of the world. America and Russia are back to testing medium range nuclear missiles.
China is threatening to overtake America in technology, as in economy, which America considers an unacceptable, existential threat. Meanwhile, the Chinese are already posturing like a racist colonial power in Africa. Cyberwarriors from Iran and China penetrate the most elaborate antivirus firewalls to hack into banks and shut down electricity networks in foreign countries. Perhaps they already have the power to reach nuclear launch consoles and steal the codes!
And now there is COVID19 – a baby beside the “Spanish Flu” of 1918, which killed fifty million people. Even if it cannot match the “Spanish flu” in deadliness, the economic, social and political havoc it has wreaked is unmatched in the history of human society. The world will never be quite the same again.
And now also there are “Black Lives Matter” placards on the streets of Western nations, and black and white protesters, demanding restitution for four hundred years of evil that built the foundation for the “civilization” we know.
It is one hundred seconds to midnight.
Can anyone turn back the hands of the Doomsday Clock?
