Medea Benjamin
and Nicolas J. S. Davies
This year’s
Doomsday Clock Statement landed like a damp squib in a Trump-swamped corporate
news cycle on January 28th. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists only moved
the hands of the Clock forward by one second, from 90 seconds up to 89 seconds
to midnight, which must have come as a relief to the few members of the public
who heard about it.
But this minimal
advance in the hands of the Clock was a strange and misleading top-line for the
Bulletin’s actual Doomsday Clock Statement, which was brimming with extremely
dire warnings that deserve far greater official and public attention.
This disconnect
between the movements of the hands of the Doomsday Clock and Bulletin’s
underlying threat assessments is deeply troubling. If the positioning of the
hands of the Clock does not accurately reflect the seriousness of the dangers
it represents, then the powerful symbolism of the Doomsday Clock is lost,
undermining the very purpose for which Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer
and their colleagues invented it.
The new Clock
Statement began, “In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Trends
that have deeply concerned (us) continued, and despite unmistakable signs of
danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed
to change course.”
The original
atomic scientists created the Doomsday Clock to symbolize humanity’s suicidal
march toward annihilation by nuclear war, and that is still the greatest danger
that midnight on the Clock represents, even as it now incorporates the added
dangers of climate change, biological threats and disruptive technologies.
The threat
assessments in the 2025 Clock statement begin with the warning that the war in
Ukraine “still looms over the world,” and that it “could become nuclear at any
moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation.”
It was this
danger of escalation to nuclear war over Ukraine that led the Bulletin to move
the hands of the Clock forward by 10 seconds in January 2023, from 100 to 90seconds to midnight.
Since then,
despite President Biden’s warning in 2022 that war between Russia and the
United States would be the suicidal Third World War that we must avoid at all
costs, the U.S. and NATO have blasted through every self-imposed “red line”
designed to prevent that, providing Ukraine with tanks, F-16 warplanes,
long-range missiles, and approval to use them inside Russia as well as in
Ukraine.
The roles of
U.S. and NATO personnel in targeting, planning, surveillance, intelligence and
secret “special operations” involving Western weapons have escalated into the
very war between the United States and Russia that Biden promised to avoid.
So we cannot
understand the Bulletin’s decision to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock only
one second closer to the global mass suicide it symbolizes, as if these
developments in the war between NATO and Russia have not brought us
significantly closer to self-destruction than we were two years ago.
The Clock
Statement then addresses the crisis in the Middle East. In January 2023, when
the Bulletin last moved the hands of the clock forward, the U.S. and Israel
were enjoying a false sense of security and normalcy in that region, believing
that they had suppressed and tamed armed resistance to Israel’s illegal
occupation of Palestine.
Now, since the
Palestinian breakout in October 2023 and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the new
Doomsday Clock statement warns that, “Conflict in the Middle East threatens to
spiral out of control into a wider war without warning.”
With
nuclear-armed Israel threatening to launch a major war on Iran and ready to use
its nuclear weapons before it would accept an existential defeat in such a war,
and with no real limits to U.S. support for Israeli war-making and genocide,
the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is right to warn that this could spiral
out of control at any moment. Yet it seems to have ignored this danger too in
its one-second tick forward of the Doomsday Clock.
While these
raging conflicts involving nuclear weapons states may be the most dangerous
current flashpoints for a nuclear war, nothing reflects the relentless nature
of our accelerating march toward Armageddon more clearly than the determination
with which the nuclear weapons powers, led by the United States, are expanding
and “modernizing” their nuclear arsenals, even as they complete the dismantling
of all Cold War-era arms control treaties and nuclear safeguards.
The 2025
Doomsday Clock Statement makes it clear that the Bulletin’s analysts understand
this only too well:
“The countries
that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their
arsenals, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy
civilization. The nuclear arms control process is collapsing, and high-level
contacts among nuclear powers are totally inadequate given the danger at hand.”
And yet they
insist that the inexorable advance of these Doomsday plans over the past two
years has only brought us one second closer to Doomsday. How can that be?
The next and
final sentence in the paragraph on nuclear weapons addresses the dangers of
nuclear proliferation, which is the widely predicted result of the failure of
the nuclear powers to pursue genuine nuclear disarmament:
“Alarmingly, it
is no longer unusual for countries without nuclear weapons to consider
developing arsenals of their own – actions that would undermine long-standing
nonproliferation efforts and increase the ways in which nuclear war could
start.”
The next
paragraph in the Doomsday Clock Statement addresses the dangers of the Climate
Crisis. It explains that global greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing
and global temperatures are still rising, causing extreme weather, floods,
tropical cyclones, heat waves, droughts and wildfires on every continent.
“The long-term
prognosis for the world’s attempts to deal with climate change remains poor,”
it reads, “as most governments fail to enact the financing and policy
initiatives necessary to halt global warming.”
But this is just
one more dire warning that is not reflected in the hands of the Doomsday Clock.
On biological
threats, the Clock statement warns, “Supposedly high-containment biological
laboratories continue to be built throughout the world, but oversight regimes
for them are not keeping pace, increasing the possibility that pathogens with
pandemic potential may escape. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have
increased the risk that terrorists or countries may attain the capability of
designing biological weapons for which countermeasures do not exist.”
On disruptive
technologies, it warns that, “Systems that incorporate artificial intelligence
in military targeting have been used in Ukraine and the Middle East, and
several countries are moving to integrate artificial intelligence into their
militaries. Such efforts raise questions about the extent to which machines
will be allowed to make military decisions – even decisions that could kill on
a vast scale, including those related to the use of nuclear weapons.”
The strange
decision to only advance the Doomsday Clock by one second appears to be a hedge
against the possibility that all these current trends will continue, but that,
by some miracle, none of them will actually succeed in destroying us all in the
next few decades. This could leave BAS in the embarrassing position of a
Chicken Little predicting a calamity that has not come to pass, even as the
hands of the Doomsday Clock appropriately advance to within a few seconds of
midnight.
But this way of
thinking defeats the very purpose of the Doomsday Clock, which is to raise the
alarm with policy-makers and the public about the dangerous course we are on.
The existential dangers we face are only too real, and the failure of our
public and private institutions to address and resolve them is the most
egregious and potentially suicidal failure in the history of our species.
In abdicating
its responsibility to warn us of the gravity of these dangers, the Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists risks turning Einstein and Oppenheimer’s call for sanity
into yet another mechanism to normalize the suicidal insanity of our 21st
century rulers.
The Bulletin
appears to have joined all the other mainstream institutions of American
society – the White House, Congress, the military-industrial complex, the
Republican and Democratic Parties, the corporate media, Wall Street, academia –
in normalizing the collective denial by which our corrupt ruling class lulls
the public into sleepwalking toward mass extinction.
Remarkably,
while the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists seems to have abandoned its founders’
commitment to the urgency of nuclear disarmament, President Trump apparently
recognizes that ending the nuclear arms race would be the crowning diplomatic
achievement of his, or any, U.S. presidency.
In off-the-cuff
remarks in a video call to the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 23rd,
Trump suddenly raised the tantalizing prospect of nuclear disarmament
negotiations with Russia and China. Talking about a phone call with President
Xi of China, Trump elaborated,
“We’d [Trump and
Xi?] like to see denuclearization. In fact, with President Putin, prior to an
election result, which was, frankly, ridiculous, we were talking about
denuclearization of our two countries, and China would have come along. China
has a much smaller, right now, nuclear armament than us or field than us, but
they’re going to be catching up at some point over the next four or five
years.”
“And I will tell
you that President Putin really liked the idea of cutting way back on nuclear.
And I think the rest of the world, we would have gotten them to follow. And
China would have come along too. China also liked it. Tremendous amounts of
money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something
that we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it.
It’s too depressing.”
“So, we want to
see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible. And I can tell
you that President Putin wanted to do it. He and I wanted to do it. We had a
good conversation with China. They would have been involved, and that would
have been an unbelievable thing for the planet. And I hope it can be started up
again.”
What Trump says
in these unscripted, off-the-cuff remarks is encouraging. It seems that
President Xi reminded Trump of their discussions during his first term, and, at
least for a moment, turned his attention to the ultimate “elephant in the room”
hanging over all our heads.
As the fate of
the world teeters in the hands of an unpredictable U.S. president and the
enfeebled Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists muffles the powerful symbolism of
its Doomsday Clock, CODEPINK has created an alternative for the precarious
times we live in: the Peace Clock. Instead of counting down the minutes and
seconds to our extinction, the Peace Clock calls on the U.S. government to take
a series of specific, concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament.
That starts with
agreeing to Russian and Chinese proposals for a ban on weapons in space and
reinstating the 1972 ABM Treaty with Russia, including the removal of formerly
prohibited U.S. anti-ballistic-missile installations in Poland and Romania. By
such concrete, practical steps, the Peace Clock would, step by step, make the
world safer and safer, leading sooner rather than later to its sixth and final
step: the complete nuclear disarmament of all the nuclear weapons powers.
You can learn
more about the Peace Clock and sign the Peace Clock Manifesto here.
No comments:
Post a Comment