Despite Growing Nuclear Threats, the ‘Doomsday Clock’ Is Stuck

Nuclear threats are flying from Russia to Communist China to Iran, but the Doomsday Clock has stopped cold under President Biden, lulling us into the very complacency that its founders set out to avoid.The clock first started ticking in 1947, two years after Nagasaki. Set at seven minutes to midnight — as in, Armageddon — it reflected the fears held by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Manhattan Project veterans who delivered “The Bomb.”The group has moved the clock’s hands 24 times in the 75 years since, keeping the attention flowing even after the Cold War ended by including trendy new threats far outside their expertise, like “climate change” and “nationalism.”In short, like so many institutions that began with noble and neutral missions, the clock decided that it was time to jump into politics. It was for this reason that its arms landed on their current location, 100 seconds from midnight, just days after President Trump’s 2017 inauguration.Leaping forward a full half minute, the winders said, “Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the clock largely because of the statements of a single person.”That fear was common on the far left at the time, but when Mr. Trump met with the dictator of North Korea and peace was in the air, a fair-minded person might have expected it would shave a few seconds off our date with death. Nope.Fast-forward to today with President Biden clutching the Nuclear Football. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, “established the nuclear threat at the start of the war,” the Guardian reported in March, “warning that western intervention would reap ‘consequences you have never seen.’”His counterpart in Ukraine, President Zelensky, responded to the Kremlin’s repeated atomic sable rattling by saying, “Russia is deliberating bragging they can destroy with nuclear weapons, not only a certain country but the entire planet.”Watching all this unfold, the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, warned yesterday that we are “just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”In response, the clock watchers shrugged, as they did over the weekend when Iran International of London reported the “Death to America” crowd’s threats to “build nuclear warheads” aimed at “turning New York into hellish ruins.” It’s hard to imagine that such threats wouldn’t have gotten the Doomsday Clock’s attention back in 1947. Instead, all we have are things like the public service announcement New York City’s Emergency Management Department released last week on “surviving a nuclear attack,” as if it’s a bout of bad weather.“The likelihood of a nuclear weapon incident occurring in/near New York City,” an agency spokesperson told the New York Post, “is very low,” which was somehow more unsettling than the PSA itself. “However,” the spokesperson added, “it’s important New Yorkers know the steps to stay safe. The new PSA encourages New Yorkers to take key, simple steps in the event of such an incident.”It’s hard to imagine a softer selling of nuclear Armageddon, since as tough as New Yorkers are, there are precisely zero “steps to stay safe” from a four-megaton blast short of slathering Manhattan in SPF-8000 sunblock. As if there weren’t enough radioactive Swords of Damocles dangling over our heads, Communist China has embarked upon what the Pentagon describes as a “large-scale expansion of its nuclear forces.” The Washington Post reported last year that they are “building more than 100 new missile silos” for ICBMs, a “spree that could signal a major expansion of Beijing’s nuclear capabilities.” Communist China isn’t expanding its capabilities as a deterrent because it’s still haunted by Japan’s World War II invasion or memories of the Boxer Rebellion. It does so while making bellicose threats against Free China. That last bastion of Chinese democracy, by the way, possesses the technological knowhow to become a nuclear power overnight, raising the specter of an atomic exchange across the Taiwan Strait. Yet in the face of all these dangers, the Doomsday Clock remains stuck, a useless artifact. It might have been useful once upon a time, but now it’s the only broken clock in the world that isn’t even right twice a day.

Despite Growing Nuclear Threats, the ‘Doomsday Clock’ Is Stuck

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