Three minutes to midnight

Those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s remember, as if it were yesterday, the climate of the Cold War between The Soviet Union (Russia and its then-communist empire) and the West, a dark climate in which we all lived in the terrifying knowledge that the hostile relations between the world’s nuclear giants could, at any time, boil over into a nuclear holocaust capable of wiping out civilization as the world knew it. In fact, such an atomic war scenario could, we were assured, lead to a “nuclear winter” in which humankind would be one of the many species that would end up becoming extinct. Planet Earth would be rendered a hostile environment in which only the most adaptable of species—cockroaches and rats, we were told—would be able to survive and dominate.

Advocates of the nuclear defense industry always argued that the best defense was a good offense and that maintaining a “nuclear balance” (read: arms race) between Russia and the United States was the only way to ensure that neither power would ever use weapons of mass destruction in a world conflict because doing so would bring an immediate and devastating response—a theory belied by the nuclear holocaust rained down without apparent qualms on Japan by the United States at the end of World War II.

Last year, I read an article in a publication called Open Democracy, which talked about how, already in 1947, atomic scientists were taking the threat of nuclear war so seriously that they invented what was to be known as “The Doomsday Clock”. According to the article’s author, Dr. Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, a well-known researcher and director of the Department of Political Science and International Studies at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, this “clock” was to become “a respected measure of the world’s nearness to catastrophe,” with midnight being the hour of planetary doom.

Tokatlian ominously entitled his article Three Minutes to Apocalypse? In it, he explains a few essentials about the Doomsday Clock, including the fact that it’s not really a clock, but a graph that charts a number of beneficial and/or catastrophic factors, not the least of which is the expansion of nuclear arsenals, but also, very high on the list as well, global warming and whether or not anyone’s doing anything about it.

Dr. Tokatlian’s article piqued my curiosity and I did a little research into the Doomsday Clock myself. While most people who have ever heard of it think of it as a measure of how close the world is to nuclear war, this is not strictly true. Maintained and periodically adjusted since 1947, it was the creation of members of the Science and Security Board, who, having witnessed the nuclear havoc wreaked in two Japanese cities—almost single-handedly by US President Harry S. Truman—at the end of World War II, first published it in their Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It has remained a fixture in that publication and organization ever since.

In many cases, the original members of the august scientific group were researchers and inventors who had taken part in some stage in the development of nuclear arms. But like their renowned colleague, Leó Szilárd—a Hungarian-born immigrant to the United States who was the virtual discoverer of the nuclear chain reaction—they were often also among the staunchest critics of Truman’s decision to bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In my book, War: A Crime Against Humanity, I recall a 1960 interview in which Szilárd said that America’s nuclear bombing of Japan “made it difficult for (the US) to take the position after the war that we wanted to get rid of atomic bombs because it would be immoral to use them against the civilian population.” Szilárd concluded, “We lost the moral argument with which, right after the war, we might have perhaps gotten rid of the (atomic) bomb.”

He indirectly accused the Truman administration of war crimes, saying with regard to the moral issues involved, “Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then, having run out of bombs, she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?”

I also recall in my book how, months before the two bombs were actually dropped on Japan, an advisory committee headed by James Franck—winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize for Physics, who, as a German Jew, immigrated to the United States during Nazi rule, and there also became involved in the Manhattan Project—warned President Truman:  “If the United States were to be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon Mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race for armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.”

Clearly, Franck hit the nail squarely on the head. So it is that, currently, as Dr. Tokatlian points out in his article, “nine states possess some 10,215 nuclear warheads with a destructive power equivalent to a million times those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” He adds that, “in the last five years there has been a growing number of incidents (theft, loss, accidents) involving sensitive nuclear material.” But other factors make the Doomsday Clock tick as well, such as, “the average global temperature, the sea level, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere…all on the rise (and) to this list can be added other disturbing phenomena such as the spread of massive spying and of cyber-attacks between nations, together with worrisome technological transformations derived from robotics and (their) application in the field of lethal weapons.” And that’s without counting the political madness of contenders for the US presidency like the inimitably clueless and potentially dangerous Donald Trump who has lately suggested that the US should help Japan and South Korea arm themselves with atomic firepower in order to face the nuclear threat posed by North Korea’s insanely bellicose and autocratic leader, Kim Jong-un.

Today, the Science and Security Board is advised on the Doomsday Clock and other research by a Governing Board and Board of Sponsors that include, among others, 18 Nobel Prize-winners. As one might imagine, the clock is a scientifically developed measuring tool that has no intention of merely recording the vicissitudes of international political rivalry but weighs, rather, hard evidence of our location at any given time in history on the path to tranquility or doom. As such, it gauges basic changes in the level of continuous danger in which mankind lives in the nuclear age, but measures a lot more than the risk of nuclear holocaust and by its criteria, the worst threat facing the world today is unchecked global climate change and the lack of practical plans for confronting it.

So where do we stand now, and where have we been by comparison?

As Tokatlian’s title suggests, we are currently a scant three minutes from worldwide catastrophe. In other words, we are teetering on the brink, like never before in history, and the clock has been frozen at this mortally dangerous point since January of last year. Have things ever been better? Much…although not stunningly much. In a world rife with weapons of mass destruction, it’s been hard to be optimistic ever since the Doomsday Clock’s inception. It has never been, say, five after eleven or even eleven-thirty, but we did make it to seventeen minutes to twelve once.  That was at the end of 1991, when the United States and Russia signed a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and the Soviet Union announced its dissolution a day after Christmas.

The last time we were this close to Zero Hour on the Doomsday Clock was in 1984, with the Soviets’ ongoing war in Afghanistan and US President Ronald Reagan’s push to “win” the Cold War by massively intensifying the arms race—deploying Pershing II missiles in Europe and announcing plans to create the Star Wars defense system in space. But added to the current crisis is the fact that the world is on the verge of ecological disaster and in the clutches of massive wars and terrorism that have given birth to the worst refugee crisis since the inferno of World War II. At three minutes to midnight, the situation is grave beyond imagination.

The good thing about the Doomsday Clock is that, unlike time itself—or perhaps more like Einstein told time than like most of us do—its hands can be turned back. The clock never has to strike twelve, if only all of us can wake up in time to stop it (if it’s not too late already). Some will argue that things have looked hopeless before…but then again, perhaps never this hopeless.

At just three minutes to midnight mankind seems deaf to the truth about peace: that it’s the only thing that will save us. Those who say that the idea of world peace is “naïve” are, themselves, living in a fantasy world in which they can’t see that the single probable consequence of the current path of war and rampant self-destruction is oblivion…and sooner rather than later. World peace and cooperation—right now (!)—form, then, the only practical response to the earth’s dilemma. The only path to turning back the clock.