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#Post#: 2768--------------------------------------------------
Nuclear Threat History
By: AGelbert Date: March 2, 2015, 1:57 pm
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March: This Month in Nuclear Threat History
by Jeffrey W. Mason
March 1, 1982 – President Ronald Reagan watched the Pentagon’s
National Military Command Center rehearse a full-scale nuclear
exchange between the United States and Soviet Union. Thousands
of red dots appeared on the map of the United States, each
indicating the impact of thermonuclear warheads on U.S.
territory and each symbolizing the resulting deaths and injuries
of hundreds of millions of Americans. The same was true for the
map of the Soviet Union. The 40th President eventually
pronounced that, “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be
fought.” (Source: Craig Nelson. “The Age of Radiance.” New York:
Simon & Shuster, 2014, p. 328.)
March 3, 1980 – The Convention on the Physical Protection of
Nuclear Materials, which set out levels of physical protection
during the transport of nuclear materials and established a
framework of international cooperation in the recovery and
return of stolen nuclear material, was signed at U.N.
Headquarters in New York City on this date, ratified by the U.S.
on December 13, 1982 and by the Soviet Union of May 25, 1983,
and entered into force on February 8, 1987. Comments: These and
other agreements could be substantially strengthened with the
multilateral negotiation and ratification of a comprehensive
fissile materials elimination agreement and an international
campaign, ideally initiated by President Barack Obama, to phase
out and clean up all global civilian nuclear power generating
plants as well as all global nuclear weapons production
facilities by the year 2030. (Source: Jack Mendelsohn and David
Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:
Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 64.)
March 10, 1956 – A U.S. Air Force B-47 bomber, carrying two
capsules of payload pits for nuclear warheads, crashed and was
lost at sea while flying from MacDill Air Force Base, Florida to
a NATO base in Western Europe. Comments: This incident
represents yet another example of hundreds of nuclear accidents,
near-misses, and “Broken Arrows,” only some of which the
Pentagon and other members of the Nuclear Club have formally
acknowledged. (Source: Eric Schlosser. “Command and Control:
Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of
Safety.” New York: Penguin Press, 2013.)
March 11, 1985 – After the demise of Konstantin Chernenko,
Mikhail Gorbachev was selected to serve as General Secretary of
the Communist Party Central Committee (and eventually as
President of the Soviet Union). This new generation Soviet
leader promoted glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika
(“restructuring”) and other reforms including reductions in the
size of the Soviet military. On March 24, 1985, Gorbachev wrote
the first of a series of letters to President Reagan pleading
for peaceful coexistence. On January 15, 1986, he announced a
three-stage proposal to eliminate nuclear weapons by the year
2000 but, influenced by hardline advisors, President Reagan
rejected this plan. Eventually both sides, including Reagan’s
successor George H. W. Bush, signed the START I treaty and the
Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991. The Cold War was
over. Gorbachev accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and
retired from politics. In January of 2015, Gorbachev warned that
the current confrontation between NATO and Russia in Ukraine
could trigger an all-out war. “I can no longer say that this
Cold War will not lead to a ‘Hot War’,” he said, “I fear that
they (U.S./E.U., Ukraine, and Russian governments) could risk
it.” Comments: The risks of nuclear war are as high as ever
and yet politicians, pundits, and so-called “experts” on both
sides continually downgrade and disregard the threat of
Omnicide. (Source: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.
“Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense
Information, 2002, pp. 30-31.)
March 12, 1995 – America’s Defense Monitor, a half-hour
documentary PBS-TV series that premiered in 1987, released a new
film, “Managing America’s Nuclear Complex” produced by the
Center for Defense Information, a non-partisan, nonprofit
organization and independent monitor of the Pentagon, founded in
1972, whose board of directors and staff included retired
military officers (Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr.), former
U.S. government officials (Philip Coyle, who served as assistant
secretary of defense), and civilian experts (Dr. Bruce Blair, a
former U.S. Air Force nuclear missile launch control officer).
The program discussed issues associated with the underfunded
(then and now) cleanup of dozens of major sites (such as
Fernald, Ohio, Hanford, Washington, Paducah, Kentucky, and Oak
Ridge, Tennessee) and hundreds of smaller Pentagon and
Department of Energy installations involved in nuclear weapon
production. Comments: Today, there remain serious concerns about
the continuing health and environmental risks of not only these
military nuclear sites but of nearly one hundred civilian
nuclear power reactors and the accompanying infrastructure
including the flawed Waste Isolation Pilot Plant nuclear waste
storage site near Carlsbad, New Mexico.
March 15, 1954 – Although President Dwight Eisenhower later
rejected a Joint Chiefs of Staff Advanced Study Group
recommendation that the United States, “deliberately precipitate
(nuclear) war with the U.S.S.R. in the near future… :o >:(
before the U.S.S.R. could achieve a large enough thermonuclear
capability to be a real menace to the continental U.S.,” on this
date, consistent with that study, a Strategic Air Command
briefing given by General Curtis LeMay advocated the use of
600-750 atomic bombs in a two-hour period so that, “all of
Russia would be nothing but a smoking radioactive ruin.”
(Source: Richard Rhodes. “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen
Bomb.” New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996, pp. 563-564.)
March 21, 1997 – At the Helsinki Summit, Presidents William
Clinton and Boris Yeltsin issued a Joint Statement on the
Parameters of Future Reductions in Nuclear Forces with
significant START II reductions to 2,000 to 2,500 deployed
strategic nuclear warheads by December 31, 2007 and with a
bilateral goal of making the START treaties permanent.
Presidents Obama and Medvedev reduced strategic nuclear weapons
further in the New START Treaty however, despite Obama’s April
2009 Prague speech rhetoric about eliminating nuclear weapons,
both nations have recently proposed increased spending for
nuclear weapons, laboratory upgrades, and a new generation of
launch platforms with the U.S. potentially spending $1 trillion
in the next 30 years. (Sources: Jack Mendelsohn and David
Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:
Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 40-44, and mainstream
and alternative news media reports from November 2014-February
2015.)
March 26, 1999 – With the start of the NATO campaign of air
strikes against Bosnian Serb forces, the Russian Duma postponed
a vote on the START II Treaty (which was later ratified on April
14, 2000 by a vote of 288-131). Comments: Just as today, NATO
considers direct Russian military intervention in Ukraine a
violation of the 35-nation August 1975 Helsinki Final Act, so
too did Russia consider NATO military action against her Serbian
allies in the Balkans as a similar violation of the 1975
agreement to prevent future nation-state conflict in Europe.
The U.S., NATO, Russia, and Ukraine all need to make major
concessions to de-escalate the current Ukraine Crisis, which
could conceivably trigger a wider European war or even a nuclear
conflict! (Source: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.
“Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense
Information, 2002, pp. 42, 119.)
March 28, 1979 – A partial meltdown of two reactors at the Three
Mile Island nuclear power plant in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania
near Harrisburg was one of the most serious nuclear accidents in
history. It caused a massive release of radioactive products
endangering residents in the region in the immediate aftermath
and for decades after this incident. The “cleanup” of the
accident between August 1979 and December 1993 cost taxpayers
approximately $1 billion. The incident came four years after
the Norman C. Rasmussen-chaired Nuclear Regulatory
Commission-sponsored report (designated “WASH-1400”), which
downgraded the nuclear accident consequences noted in previous
government and nongovernmental reports. German-American
nuclear physicist Hans Bethe (1906-2005) wrote an article in the
January 1976 edition of Scientific American, which provided a
more realistic threat assessment of a catastrophic nuclear
reactor meltdown than the Rasmussen Report. Bethe’s analysis
concluded that a serious nuclear accident would claim 3,300
prompt fatalities, create 45,000 instances of early radiation
illness, impact 240,000 individuals with cancerous thyroid
nodules over a 30-year period, produce 45,000 latent cancer
fatalities over the same time period, and trigger approximately
30,000 genetic defects spanning a 150-year period. His estimated
cost (in 1976 dollars) of such an accident was $14 billion.
Comments: In addition to the dangerous risk of nuclear power
plant accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and
Fukushima, the tremendously out-of-control civilian and military
nuclear waste sequestration, remediation, and permanent storage
conundrum, as well as the terrorist targeting potential, the
economic unsustainability of civilian nuclear power, and the
potential for nuclear proliferation points logically to an
accelerated phase-out of global civilian nuclear power plants
over the next decade. (Sources: “14 Year Cleanup at Three Mile
Island Concludes.” New York Times. Aug. 15, 1993 accessed on
February 6, 2015 at www.nytimes.com and various news media
reports.)
This entry was posted in Nuclear Threat on February 26, 2015 by
Jeffrey W. Mason.
HTML http://www.wagingpeace.org/march-this-month-in-nuclear-threat-history-2/
Agelbert NOTE: And then we are told how sober and serious our
military leaders are... ::)
Get this, people: The military is full of bat sh it crazy "apex
predator" (better to pollute the entire planet than risk losing
a war that might never be fought if we cooperate
HTML http://www.pic4ever.com/images/126fs2277341.gif)
generals that
tell non-thinking drones (like I used to be) to do WHATEVER for
"national Security".
Or just keep believing the baloney you have been fed all your
deluded life! [img width=120
height=70]
HTML http://www.pic4ever.com/images/minzdr.gif[/img]
If you think that the mindset and ACTIONS of the military have
changed in ANY WAY since that idiotic and insane recommendation
by the Joint chiefs of Staff back in Eisenhower's day, you are
worthy of being called SHEEPLE.
img]
HTML http://www.pic4ever.com/images/snapoutofit.gif[/img]
#Post#: 15340--------------------------------------------------
“It is now 100 seconds to midnight.”
By: Surly1 Date: January 25, 2020, 5:59 am
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[I]"We move the Clock toward midnight because the means by which
political leaders had previously managed these potentially
civilization-ending dangers are themselves being dismantled or
undermined, without a realistic effort to replace them with new
or better management regimes. In effect, the international
political infrastructure for controlling existential risk is
degrading, leaving the world in a situation of high and rising
threat."[/i]
“It is now 100 seconds to midnight.”
HTML https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/
Such was the ominous headline Thursday from the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists after moving its Doomsday Clock ahead 20
seconds.
[img
width=640]
HTML https://thebulletin.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/bulletin-clock-100-r-black-1536x1536.jpg[/img]
To: Leaders and citizens of the world
Re: Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight
Date: January 23, 2020
A retreat from arms control creates a dangerous nuclear reality
The world is sleepwalking its way through a newly unstable
nuclear landscape. The arms control boundaries that have helped
prevent nuclear catastrophe for the last half century are being
steadily dismantled.
In several areas, a bad situation continues to worsen.
Throughout 2019, Iran increased its stockpile of low-enriched
uranium, increased its uranium enrichment levels, and added new
and improved centrifuges—all to express its frustration that the
United States had withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal (formally
known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA),
re-imposed economic sanctions on Iran, and pressured other
parties to the Iran nuclear agreement to stop their compliance
with the agreement. Early this year, amid high US-Iranian
tensions, the US military conducted a drone air strike that
killed a prominent Iranian general in Iraq. Iranian leaders
vowed to exact “severe revenge” on US military forces, and the
Iranian government announced it would no longer observe limits,
imposed by the JCPOA, on the number of centrifuges that it uses
to enrich uranium.
Although Iran has not formally exited the nuclear deal, its
actions appear likely to reduce the “breakout time” it would
need to build a nuclear weapon, to less than the 12 months
envisioned by parties to the JCPOA. At that point, other parties
to the nuclear agreement—including the European Union and
possibly Russia and China—may be compelled to acknowledge that
Iran is not complying. What little is left of the agreement
could crumble, reducing constraints on the Iranian nuclear
program and increasing the likelihood of military conflict with
the United States.
The demise of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty
became official in 2019, and, as predicted, the United States
and Russia have begun a new competition to develop and deploy
weapons the treaty had long banned. Meanwhile, the United States
continues to suggest that it will not extend New START, the
agreement that limits US and Russian deployed strategic nuclear
weapons and delivery systems, and that it may withdraw from the
Open Skies Treaty, which provides aerial overflights to build
confidence and transparency around the world. Russia, meanwhile,
continues to support an extension of New START.
The assault on arms control is exacerbated by the decay of great
power relations. Despite declaring its intent to bring China
into an arms control agreement, the United States has adopted a
bullying and derisive tone toward its Chinese and Russian
competitors. The three countries disagree on whether to pursue
negotiations on outer space, missile defenses, and cyberwarfare.
One of the few issues they do agree on: They all oppose the
Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which opened for
signature in 2017. As an alternative, the United States has
promoted, within the context of the review conference process of
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), an initiative called
“Creating the Environment for Nuclear Disarmament.” The success
of this initiative may depend on its reception at the 2020 NPT
Review Conference—a landmark 50th anniversary of the treaty.
US efforts to reach agreement with North Korea made little
progress in 2019, despite an early summit in Hanoi and
subsequent working-level meetings. After a North Korean deadline
for end-of-year progress passed, Kim Jong Un announced he would
demonstrate a new “strategic weapon” and indicated that North
Korea would forge ahead without sanctions relief. Until now, the
willingness of both sides to continue a dialogue was positive,
but Chairman Kim seems to have lost faith in President Trump’s
willingness to come to an agreement.
Without conscious efforts to reinvigorate arms control, the
world is headed into an unregulated nuclear environment. Such an
outcome could reproduce the intense arms race that was the
hallmark of the early decades of the nuclear age. Both the
United States and Russia have massive stockpiles of warheads and
fissile material in reserve from which to draw, if they choose.
Should China decide to build up to US and Russian arsenal
levels—a development previously dismissed as unlikely but now
being debated—deterrence calculations could become more
complicated, making the situation more dangerous. An
unconstrained North Korea, coupled with a more assertive China,
could further destabilize Northeast Asian security.
As we wrote last year and re-emphasize now, any belief that the
threat of nuclear war has been vanquished is a mirage.
An insufficient response to an increasingly threatened climate
In the past year, some countries have taken action to combat
climate change, but others—including the United States, which
formalized its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and Brazil,
which dismantled policies that had protected the Amazon
rainforest—have taken major steps backward. The highly
anticipated UN Climate Action Summit in September fell far short
of Secretary General António Guterres’ request that countries
come not with “beautiful speeches, but with concrete plans.” The
60 or so countries that have committed (in more or less vague
terms) to net zero emissions of carbon dioxide account for just
11 percent of global emissions. The UN climate conference in
Madrid similarly disappointed. The countries involved in
negotiations there barely reached an agreement, and the result
was little more than a weak nudge, asking countries to consider
further curbing their emissions. The agreement made no advances
in providing further support to poorer countries to cut
emissions and deal with increasingly damaging climate impacts.
Lip service continued, with some governments now echoing many
scientists’ use of the term “climate emergency.” But the
policies and actions that governments proposed were hardly
commensurate to an emergency. Exploration and exploitation of
fossil fuels continues to grow. A recent UN report finds that
global governmental support and private sector investment have
put fossil fuels on course to be over-produced at more than
twice the level needed to meet the emissions-reduction goals set
out in Paris.
Unsurprisingly, these continuing trends are reflected in our
atmosphere and environment: Greenhouse gas emissions rose again
over the past year, taking both annual emissions and atmospheric
concentrations of greenhouse gases to record highs. The world is
heading in the opposite direction from the clear demands of
climate science and plain arithmetic: Net carbon dioxide
emissions need to go down to zero if the world is to stop the
continuing buildup of greenhouse gases. World emissions are
going in the wrong direction.
The consequences of climate change in the lives of people around
the world have been striking and tragic. India was ravaged in
2019 both by record-breaking heat waves and record-breaking
floods, each taking a heavy toll on human lives. Wildfires from
the Arctic to Australia, and many regions in between, have
erupted with a frequency, intensity, extent, and duration that
further degrade ecosystems and endanger people. It is not good
news when wildfires spring up simultaneously in both the
northern and southern hemispheres, making the notion of a
limited “fire season” increasingly a thing of the past.
The dramatic effects of a changing climate, alongside the
glacial progress of government responses, have unsurprisingly
led to rising concern and anger among growing numbers of people.
Climate change has catalyzed a wave of youth engagement,
activism, and protest that seems akin to the mobilization
triggered by nuclear disaster and nuclear weapons fears in the
1970s and 1980s. Politicians are taking notice, and, in some
cases, starting to propose policies scaled to the urgency and
magnitude of the climate problem. We hope that public support
for strong climate policies will continue to spread,
corporations will accelerate their investments in low-carbon
technologies, the price of renewable energy will continue to
decline, and politicians will take action. We also hope that
these developments will happen rapidly enough to lead to the
major transformation that is needed to check climate change.
But the actions of many world leaders continue to increase
global risk, at a time when the opposite is urgently needed.
The increased threat of information warfare and other disruptive
technologies
Nuclear war and climate change are major threats to the physical
world. But information is an essential aspect of human
interaction, and threats to the information ecosphere—especially
when coupled with the emergence of new destabilizing
technologies in artificial intelligence, space, hypersonics, and
biology—portend a dangerous and multifaceted global instability.
In recent years, national leaders have increasingly dismissed
information with which they do not agree as fake news,
promulgating their own untruths, exaggerations, and
misrepresentations in response. Unfortunately, this trend
accelerated in 2019. Leaders claimed their lies to be truth,
calling into question the integrity of, and creating public
distrust in, national institutions that have historically
provided societal stability and cohesion.
In the United States, there is active political antagonism
toward science and a growing sense of government-sanctioned
disdain for expert opinion, creating fear and doubt regarding
well-established science about climate change and other urgent
challenges. Countries have long attempted to employ propaganda
in service of their political agendas. Now, however, the
internet provides widespread, inexpensive access to worldwide
audiences, facilitating the broadcast of false and manipulative
messages to large populations and enabling millions of
individuals to indulge in their prejudices, biases, and
ideological differences.
The recent emergence of so-called “deepfakes”—audio and video
recordings that are essentially undetectable as false—threatens
to further undermine the ability of citizens and decision makers
to separate truth from fiction. The resulting falsehoods hold
the potential to create economic, social, and military chaos,
increasing the possibility of misunderstandings or provocations
that could lead to war, and fomenting public confusion that
leads to inaction on serious issues facing the planet. Agreement
on facts is essential to democracy and effective collective
action.
Other new technologies, including developments in biological
engineering, high-speed (hypersonic) weapons, and space weapons,
present further opportunities for disruption.
Genetic engineering and synthetic biology technologies are now
increasingly affordable, readily available, and spreading
rapidly. Globally, governments and companies are collecting vast
amounts of health-related data, including genomic data,
ostensibly for the purpose of improving healthcare and
increasing profits. But the same data could also be useful in
developing highly effective biological weapons, and
disagreements regarding verification of the Biological and Toxin
Weapons Convention continue to place the world at risk.
Artificial intelligence is progressing at a frenzied pace. In
addition to the concern about marginally controlled AI
development and its incorporation into weaponry that would make
kill decisions without human supervision, AI is now being used
in military command and control systems. Research and experience
have demonstrated the vulnerability of these systems to hacking
and manipulation. Given AI’s known shortcomings, it is crucial
that the nuclear command and control system remain firmly in the
hands of human decision makers.
There is increasing investment in and deployment of hypersonic
weapons that will severely limit response times available to
targeted nations and create a dangerous degree of ambiguity and
uncertainty, at least in part because of their likely ability to
carry either nuclear or conventional warheads. This uncertainty
could lead to rapid escalation of military conflicts. At a
minimum, these weapons are highly destabilizing and presage a
new arms race.
Meanwhile, space has become a new arena for weapons development,
with multiple countries testing and deploying kinetic, laser,
and radiofrequency anti-satellite capabilities, and the United
States creating a new military service, the Space Force.
The overall global trend is toward complex, high-tech, highly
automated, high-speed warfare. The computerized and increasingly
AI-assisted nature of militaries, the sophistication of their
weapons, and the new, more aggressive military doctrines
asserted by the most heavily armed countries could result in
global catastrophe.
How the world should respond
To say the world is nearer to doomsday today than during the
Cold War—when the United States and Soviet Union had tens of
thousands more nuclear weapons than they now possess—is to make
a profound assertion that demands serious explanation. After
much deliberation, the members of the Science and Security Board
have concluded that the complex technological threats the world
faces are at least as dangerous today as they were last year and
the year before, when we set the Clock at two minutes to
midnight (as close as it had ever been, and the same setting
that was announced in 1953, after the United States and the
Soviet Union tested their first thermonuclear weapons).
But this year, we move the Clock 20 seconds closer to midnight
not just because trends in our major areas of concern—nuclear
weapons and climate change—have failed to improve significantly
over the last two years. We move the Clock toward midnight
because the means by which political leaders had previously
managed these potentially civilization-ending dangers are
themselves being dismantled or undermined, without a realistic
effort to replace them with new or better management regimes. In
effect, the international political infrastructure for
controlling existential risk is degrading, leaving the world in
a situation of high and rising threat. Global leaders are not
responding appropriately to reduce this threat level and
counteract the hollowing-out of international political
institutions, negotiations, and agreements that aim to contain
it. The result is a heightened and growing risk of disaster.
To be sure, some of these negative trends have been long in
development. That they could be seen coming miles in the
distance but still were allowed to occur is not just
disheartening but also a sign of fundamental dysfunction in the
world’s efforts to manage and reduce existential risk.
Last year, we called the extremely troubling state of world
security an untenable “new abnormal.”
“In this extraordinarily dangerous state of affairs, nuclear war
and climate change pose severe threats to humanity, yet go
largely unaddressed,” we wrote. “Meanwhile, the use of
cyber-enabled information warfare by countries, leaders, and
subnational groups of many stripes around the world exacerbates
these enormous threats and endangers the information ecosystem
that underpins democracy and civilization as we know it. At the
same time, other disruptive technologies complicate and further
darken the world security situation.”
This dangerous situation remains—and continues to deteriorate.
Compounding the nuclear, climate, and information warfare
threats, the world’s institutional and political capacity for
dealing with these threats and reducing the possibility of
civilization-scale catastrophe has been diminished. Because of
the worldwide governmental trend toward dysfunction in dealing
with global threats, we feel compelled to move the Doomsday
Clock forward. The need for emergency action is urgent.
There are many practical, concrete steps that leaders could
take—and citizens should demand—to improve the current,
absolutely unacceptable state of world security affairs. Among
them:
US and Russian leaders can return to the negotiating table to:
reinstate the INF Treaty or take other action to restrain an
unnecessary arms race in medium-range missiles; extend the
limits of New START beyond 2021; seek further reductions in
nuclear arms; discuss a lowering of the alert status of the
nuclear arsenals of both countries; limit nuclear modernization
programs that threaten to create a new nuclear arms race; and
start talks on cyber warfare, missile defenses, the
militarization of space, hypersonic technology, and the
elimination of battlefield nuclear weapons.
The countries of the world should publicly rededicate themselves
to the temperature goal of the Paris climate agreement, which is
restricting warming “well below” 2 degrees Celsius higher than
the preindustrial level. That goal is consistent with consensus
views on climate science, and, notwithstanding the inadequate
climate action to date, it may well remain within reach if major
changes in the worldwide energy system and land use are
undertaken promptly. If that goal is to be attained,
industrialized countries will need to curb emissions rapidly,
going beyond their initial, inadequate pledges and supporting
developing countries so they can leapfrog the entrenched, fossil
fuel-intensive patterns previously pursued by industrialized
countries.
US citizens should demand climate action from their government.
Climate change is a serious and worsening threat to humanity.
Citizens should insist that their government acknowledge it and
act accordingly. President Trump’s decision to withdraw the
United States from the Paris climate change agreement was a dire
mistake. Whoever wins the 2020 US presidential election should
reverse that decision.
The United States and other signatories of the Iran nuclear deal
can work together to restrain nuclear proliferation in the
Middle East. Iran is poised to violate key thresholds of the
deal. Whoever wins the United States’ 2020 presidential election
must prioritize dealing with this problem, whether through a
return to the original nuclear agreement or via negotiation of a
new and broader accord.
The international community should begin multilateral
discussions aimed at establishing norms of behavior, both
domestic and international, that discourage and penalize the
misuse of science. Science provides the world’s searchlight in
times of fog and confusion. Furthermore, focused attention is
needed to prevent information technology from undermining public
trust in political institutions, in the media, and in the
existence of objective reality itself. Cyber-enabled information
warfare is a threat to the common good. Deception campaigns—and
leaders intent on blurring the line between fact and politically
motivated fantasy—are a profound threat to effective
democracies, reducing their ability to address nuclear weapons,
climate change, and other existential dangers.
The global security situation is unsustainable and extremely
dangerous, but that situation can be improved, if leaders seek
change and citizens demand it. There is no reason the Doomsday
Clock cannot move away from midnight. It has done so in the past
when wise leaders acted, under pressure from informed and
engaged citizens around the world. We believe that mass civic
engagement will be necessary to compel the change the world
needs.
Citizens around the world have the power to unmask social media
disinformation and improve the long-term prospects of their
children and grandchildren. They can insist on facts, and
discount nonsense. They can demand—through public protest, at
the ballot box, and in many other creative ways—that their
leaders take immediate steps to reduce the existential threats
of nuclear war and climate change. It is now 100 seconds to
midnight, the most dangerous situation that humanity has ever
faced. Now is the time to unite—and act.
Statement from the President and CEO
Inside the two-minute warning
In the year 2020, several important anniversaries should cause
us all to assess progress, or lack thereof, toward a safer and
more secure planet. April marks the 50th anniversary of Earth
Day, established to advocate for a healthy and sustainable
environment. On the first Earth Day—April 22, 1970—20 million
Americans, almost 10 percent of the US population, took to the
streets to advocate for more sustainable practices. May 2020
also marks the 50th anniversary of the Treaty on the
Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), a landmark agreement
that became the bedrock for global efforts at nuclear arms
control. July and August 2020 will also mark the 75th
anniversary of the testing and then the use of nuclear weapons
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first and only time such weapons
have been brandished as an instrument of war. Efforts to curb
their use have been on-going ever since.
The past 75 years have seen the risks of nuclear war reach
startling heights that have included the United States and
Soviet Union testing hydrogen bombs; multiple moments when by
either accident or design a nuclear exchange between the great
powers seemed possible if not probable; an increasing number of
states obtaining nuclear weapons; and most recently North Korean
and American leaders exchanging childish name calling and
not-so-childish nuclear threats. On the climate side, the past
50 years have resulted in a growing consensus that humans are
dangerously disrupting their environment. As early as 1978, the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asked the question “Is mankind
warming the earth?” with a cover story that answered “Yes.”
But just as humanity has come perilously close to obliterating
itself, it has also experienced moments of exquisite
forethought, well-planned efforts to protect the planet
accomplished by determined people. Political leaders were able
to cut the number of total nuclear warheads significantly, and
undertake a series of confidence-building measures that reduced
the likelihood of nuclear war. In 2016, another optimistic
moment appeared: Countries from around the world began charting
paths toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions and investing in
bridges to a cleaner future by adopting the Paris agreement,
which builds on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
process.
The Bulletin’s Science and Security Board convened in Chicago in
November 2019 with a keen recognition of this year’s historic
anniversaries. What follows is an acknowledgment that we live in
troubling times, with the risk of nuclear accident seemingly
growing by the day as the time available to responsibly stem the
climate crisis shrinks just as quickly. For these reasons, and
others spelled out in the pages that follow, the time on the
Doomsday Clock continues to tick ever closer to midnight.
As seasoned watchers know, the Doomsday Clock did not move in
2019. But the Clock’s minute hand was set forward in January
2018 by 30 seconds, to two minutes before midnight, the closest
it had been to midnight since 1953 in the early years of the
Cold War. Previously, the Clock was moved from three minutes to
midnight to two and a half minutes to midnight in January 2017.
This year, the Science and Security Board moved the time from
two minutes to 100 seconds to midnight, a decision taken in full
recognition of its historic nature. You will see in the
following statement the articulation of why board members reset
the clock, and what they suggest leaders and citizens around the
world do to eventually begin moving it away from midnight.
US sports terminology provides an analogy for the current
moment. As fans who watch it know, American football
incorporates a two-minute warning, a break at the end of each
half that differentiates the last two minutes from all that came
before. Decisions are made with different strategic reference
points, and expectations are raised for decisive action. The
last two minutes bring newfound vigilance and focus to
participants and viewers alike. Every second matters.
As far as the Bulletin and the Doomsday Clock are concerned, the
world has entered into the realm of the two-minute warning, a
period when danger is high and the margin for error low. The
moment demands attention and new, creative responses. If
decision makers continue to fail to act—pretending that being
inside two minutes is no more urgent than the preceding
period—citizens around the world should rightfully echo the
words of climate activist Greta Thunberg and ask: “How dare
you?”
Public engagement and civic action are needed and needed
urgently. Science and technology can bring enormous benefits,
but without constant vigilance, they bring enormous risks as
well. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is grateful to our
supporters, who allow us to carry on our important work and
share it with our growing global audience. More people came to
the Bulletin’s website in 2019 than any year prior, and our
magazine continues to be read and downloaded by followers around
the world. The resurgent interest in issues of nuclear risk,
climate change, and other disruptive technologies, especially
among those 35 years and younger, shows that young people are
hardly apathetic to the deteriorating environment in which we
now operate. Rather, it shows that tomorrow’s leaders are
seeking new images, messages, policies, and approaches and no
longer assume that today’s leaders will keep them safe and
secure.
I thank the members of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board
for once again taking seriously their responsibility for setting
the Doomsday Clock and producing this statement to explain their
decision. John Mecklin, the Bulletin’s editor-in-chief and the
writer of this report, ensured that it offers the strongest
possible articulation of the ideas and approaches that were
discussed among the Board’s expert membership. None of this
would have been possible without the support of foundations,
corporations and individuals who contribute to the Bulletin year
in and year out. For a full listing of our financial supporters,
please see our annual report on our website at the
thebulletin.org.
In addition to the anniversaries listed above, December 2020
also marks the 75th anniversary of the first edition of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, initially a six-page,
black-and-white bulletin and later a magazine, created in
anticipation that “the atom bomb would be on the first of many
dangerous presents from Pandora’s box of modern science.” Over
the years, we’ve published debates and recommendations that have
laid the foundation for turning the hands of the Doomsday Clock
away from midnight. We have done it before, which means we can
certainly do it again. In 2020, however, world leaders have less
time before midnight in which to make their decisions, and the
need to take urgent action to reduce the risk of nuclear war and
climate change is great. Please continue to petition your
leaders to act now, and as if their lives depend upon it.
Because theirs—and ours—most certainly do.
Rachel Bronson, PhD
President & CEO
January 23, 2020
Chicago, IL
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