Climate change is considered a major risk as well, and while the record on 2016 was somewhat optimistic-work on the Paris Agreement to reduce carbon emissions and continued and renewable energy kept growing-we’re not doing anywhere near enough to avert a dangerously warm and unstable future. Today the Doomsday Clock is meant to reflect more than just the threat of nuclear weapons. In a piece for the New Yorker last month, Schlosser noted that nuclear systems in both countries face entirely new risks: “malware, spyware, worms, bugs, viruses, corrupted firmware, logic bombs, Trojan horses, and all the other modern tools of cyber warfare.” Even putting aside questions about the fitness and emotional state of the people now in control of the world’s nuclear weapons, the nature of the systems themselves put us at grave risk. And while controls have improved since the day in 1960 when the computer at the North American Air Defense Command mistook the moon rising over Norway for a missile attack from Siberia- that actually happened-even today’s much smaller nuclear arsenals are kept on a hair trigger that raises the chance of an accidental or mistaken launch. And I suspect the latter in greatest proportionĮric Schlosser’s sobering book Command and Control details dozens of such near-misses through the Cold War-on both sides. Strategic Command, in his memoir Uncommon Cause. “We escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention,” wrote General George Lee Butler, the former head of U.S. He was right-and the rest of us are still around. launch was real, and whether to fire back, which would have led to nuclear holocaust.īut-putting his career at risk-Petrov decided that the alert must be a false alarm, and decided not to report it. Petrov was on duty that morning, and he should have alerted his superiors, who in turn would have had minutes to decide whether the U.S. Last year my TIME colleague Simon Shuster interviewed Stanislav Petrov, a former Soviet military officer who in 1983 essentially saved the world when the Soviet Union’s early-warning systems showed detected an incoming missile strike from the U.S. or the Soviet Union, but because of repeated, near-miss accidents. In fact, a quick survey of the history of nuclear weapons shows that humanity has been incredibly lucky to survive this long-and not so much because of decisions by leaders of the U.S. Still, while the world may feel as if it has spun out of control, there’s no doubt that we were in much greater danger during the darkest days of the Cold War. And after years that saw the global nuclear arsenal slashed, major nuclear powers-foremost among them Russia and the U.S.-have embarked or are considering modernization programs for their weapons. India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed rivals that have already fought several conventional wars, experienced renewed tensions over disputed territory in Kashmir. North Korea conducted two underground nuclear tests last year, and claims it is read to test an intercontinental ballistic missile. and Russia-which together possess more than 90 percent of the world’s atomic weapons-have been at loggerheads over Ukraine, Syria and the alleged Russian hacking of the U.S. “We want to send a message that things are not going in the right direction.” “It is now only six or seven days of the Administration, and actions speak louder than words,” said Krauss. must “greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its sense regarding nukes”-it was too early to know exactly what he would do as President. Nuclear time clock full#Moving the Clock 30 seconds, rather than a full minute or more, was a first as well, meant to reflect the fact that while Trump’s words on the campaign trail raised the specter of a renewed arms race-Trump tweeted in December that the U.S. “There are a slate of things that we need to face with our eyes wide open.” “Our world is facing threats we didn’t face sixty or seventy years ago,” said Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and the chair of the Bulletin‘s Board of Sponsors. Better to think of the Clock as an indicator of trends, not a measurement of absolute risk-and few people would argue that the world hasn’t gotten at least 30 seconds more dangerous during 2016, a year that saw the election of an unstable global actor in Trump, and was the hottest on record to boot. It is meant to move the public to action-not to accurately represent how close humanity is to doomsday-which, unless you can see the future, isn’t calculable anyway. The Clock is a triumph of iconography more than science, a symbol of the danger that human technology in its broadest sense poses to humans.
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