The minute hand of the Doomsday Clock was moved on Thursday to two minutes to midnight, as close as it was in 1953, at the height of the Cold War.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock to indicate the world’s vulnerability to nuclear catastrophe, and has since added concerns about climate change and new unregulated technologies that might threaten our existence. The clock tells whether the scientists believe the world is safer or more dangerous than it was last year, or over the past 70 years.
They say: “To call the world situation dire is to understate the danger — and its immediacy.”
Somehow, we need a global alarm attached to the Doomsday Clock to wake us up. At the end of the Cold War in 1991, the hands moved back to 15 minutes to midnight, and we all pushed the snooze button and went on to other things.
Now the U.S. and North Korea are both armed with nuclear weapons, recklessly hurling insults at one another and threatening nuclear war. The nuclear-weapons states are not only ignoring their solemn obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to eliminate their nuclear weapons, they are modernizing and planning to increase their weapons.
Under the new Nuclear Posture Review, the U.S. is reversing its “no first use” policy and lowering the threshold for use of nuclear weapons in battle. Russia is violating its obligations under the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty by land incursions. Tensions have increased in India and Pakistan, leading them to increase their arsenals, and uncertainty about the landmark Iran nuclear deal makes the situation bleak.
Nuclear war between North Korea and the U.S. seems to be a distant concern for most of us — something that might happen “over there.” In fact, a nuclear war today would not be limited to the Korean Peninsula because the size and number of the bombs that might be used mean the effects would be global.
Nuclear bombs are 10 to hundreds of times the size of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War. The risk of accidental or inadvertent nuclear war is increased by the military exercises planned by the U.S. and South Korea and by the provocative missile tests by North Korea.
Explosion of less than one per cent of the world’s nuclear arsenals could put two billion people at risk of starvation. The explosions would send soot and debris high into the atmosphere where they would be carried on the wind to come down as black, radioactive rain on Japan, Hawaii and North America. The cloud would also rise into the stratosphere, where it would stay for months or years, blotting out the sun, causing sudden temperature drops and crop failures worldwide.
The Bulletin is deeply concerned by the loss of public trust in science, in political leaders, in media and in facts themselves. This seems to be a result of misrepresentations on the internet and other media, leading to conflicting impressions of what is true.
As Laurence Krauss, the chairman of the Bulletin’s board of sponsors, said: “We need evidence-driven policy, not policy-driven evidence.” Without a sound basis for policy, we flounder in misunderstandings and louder and louder rhetoric.
The Bulletin calls on us to rewind the Clock. A great first step would be for Canada to return to its role at the United Nations as the "honest broker" and sign the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. And each of us can join the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). No membership fee, no meetings. You can take an action on your own or in a group and post a photo of it to #iamican. I am ICAN.
Dr. Mary-Wynne Ashford is a past co-president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the organization that won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
