The Doomsday Clock is now just 2 minutes to 'midnight,' the symbolic hour of the apocalypse

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: January 25, 2018 at 5:14:46 PM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Doomsday Clock is now just 2 minutes to 'midnight,' the symbolic hour of the apocalypse
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The Doomsday Clock is now just 2 minutes to ‘midnight,’ the symbolic hour of the apocalypse
> By Lindsey Bever, Sarah Kaplan and Abby Ohlheiser
> Jan 25 2018
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/25/after-a-missile-scare-and-insult-war-with-north-korea-its-time-to-check-the-doomsday-clock/>
>
> Alexa, what time is the apocalypse?
>
> Ulp.
>
> The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced the symbolic Doomsday Clock a notch closer to the end of humanity 
> Thursday, moving it ahead by 30 seconds after what the organization called a “grim assessment” of the state of 
> geopolitical affairs.
>
> “As of today,” Bulletin president Rachel Bronson told reporters, “it is two minutes to midnight” — as close as the 
> world has ever been to the hour of apocalypse.
>
> In moving the clock forward, the group cited “the failure of President Trump and other world leaders to deal with 
> looming threats of nuclear war and climate change.”
>
> The organization — which has 15 Nobel laureates on its board — now believes “the world is not only more dangerous now 
> than it was a year ago; it is as threatening as it has been since World War II,” Bulletin officials Lawrence M. 
> Krauss and Robert Rosner wrote in an op-ed published Thursday by The Washington Post. “In fact, the Doomsday Clock is 
> as close to midnight today as it was in 1953, when Cold War fears perhaps reached their highest levels.”
>
> The last time the clock advanced so far, the United States had just tested its first thermonuclear device, and the 
> Soviet Union had tested a hydrogen bomb.
>
> Today, said the Bulletin president Bronson, “to call the world’s nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger 
> and its immediacy.”
>
> At a news conference Thursday, Bronson and a group of colleagues that included Krauss and Rosner listed a litany of 
> grim developments over the past year: North Korea made rapid progress in developing a thermonuclear weapon capable of 
> reaching the United States. Relations between the United States and Russia deteriorated, with no high-level arms 
> control negotiations happening between the two countries. Nations around the world have moved to modernize and 
> enhance their nuclear arsenals.
>
> Meanwhile, Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have engaged in a my-nuclear-button-is-bigger-than-yours war of 
> words.
>
> “There is little doubt that the risk that nuclear weapons may be used — intentionally or because of miscalculation — 
> grew last year around the globe,” Rosner said.
>
> The decision to move the clock forward was motivated largely by the Bulletin's sense of looming nuclear peril. But 
> the danger is compounded by humanity's continued inaction on climate change, they said, as well as vaguer concerns 
> about unchecked artificial intelligence, the spread of disinformation, and the public's eroding trust in institutions 
> that could keep these threats at bay.
>
> The clock, a metaphorical measure of humankind's proximity to global catastrophe, also advanced 30 seconds last year, 
> to 2½ minutes to “midnight.”
>
> Even before Thursday's announcement, experts said there was only one direction the clock could possibly move, given 
> recent events.
>
> “I think it would be very hard for the clock not​ to move forward,” said Alex Wellerstein, who specializes in the 
> history of nuclear weapons at the Stevens Institute of Technology. “We have members of Congress, White House 
> advisers, and even the president implying that they think war with a nuclear state is not only likely, but 
> potentially desirable. That's unusual and disturbing.
>
> “The question I have is: How much forward can they go?”
>
> Another 30 seconds, to be exact.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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