They're setting the Doomsday Clock 2 minutes closer to midnight today. They've cited 11 September, terrorist attempts to procure nuclear materiel, lack of security in nuclear nations, rising Indo-Pakistani tensions, & the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty.
Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :
So how close are we until midnight now? I can't remember what the clock reads.
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
Three cheers for paranoia!
Posted by First of Two (Member # 16) on :
So if the Doomsday clock gets moved to midnight, and nobody dies, does it seize the launch codes, or what?
I'd like to see the argument behind having it start out as close to midnight as it is. When was it half-past six? When was it noon? When was it 1:00 AM the night before?
Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :
It's not an indicator of the end of the world, it's a gauge of how close the world is coming to brink of nuclear devastation. It premeired 55 years ago with a setting of 7 minutes to midnight. The closest it came was 2 minutes to midnight in 1954 after the USA and USSR tested thermonuclear devices within nine months of each other.
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
I thought the closest to midnight was during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
If the world ends, it ends. *shrugs*
Posted by First of Two (Member # 16) on :
As it is explained on the site, the original placing at "seven minutes to midnight" wasn't based on any actual gauge of danger, but for design purposes.
In other words, seven minutes looked good.
The actual placement means very little.
And from the looks of it, it's not possible to go much farther back than, say, 11:30. So no matter what, to them we're always going to be less than a half-hour from destruction. There's an optimistic outlook for you.
Posted by thoughtcriminal84 (Member # 480) on :
Atomic scientists are not noted for being optimistic people. What was the last practical thing they contributed to society? The atomic clock? Combine that with the fact that they are never going to get much tail in real life as they do in 1950's science fiction, and you have a recipe for dark, dark pessimism.
Ver is Doktor StrangeLove when you need him?
I admit the clock is a stark image to present to the usually dull public, but I wonder: Why not just show everybody pictures of 1945 Hiroshima victims with the caption: Got Nuke?
Personally, I don't see us any closer to doomsday than before September 11.
The Game that's being played right now shapes up like this: Either the U.S. will find and kill all the plutonium terrorists in the world, or a nuclear weapon is going to be detonated inside U.S. borders.
Either way, people are going to die. It's just far more extreme if They 'splode a nuke first. Not just in American deaths, but in World deaths, because there is no way this country will step back and absorb it, even if it costs the planet life itself.
If it happens, the nukes will fly like snowballs in December. Mutually assured destruction.
Fun fucking game. Quoth the computer: The only winning move is not to play.
Too late for that, I'm afraid. Sixty years too late...so their little picture opportunity clock doesn't impress me one bit. And civilization has been trying to commit suicide for too long for September 11th to speed up the process that much.
Posted by Shik (Member # 343) on :
"Midnight" has been revised not so that it's "nuclear war" as such, but rather the detonation of any nuclear device in an aggressive from. This includes the use of so-called "tactical" nukes & terrorist usage of a device.
quote:Originally posted by thoughtcriminal84: I admit the clock is a stark image to present to the usually dull public, but I wonder: Why not just show everybody pictures of 1945 Hiroshima victims with the caption: Got Nuke?
Good in theory, bad in practice. We're WAY beyond Hiroshima. People see those images & think we'll be OK since they saw rubble. Uh-uh. I don't think the majority of humanity can comprehend the concept of a place being vaporized, of it being simply erased from the map, a shiny spot in the land.
Go read "Warday" by Whitley Streiber & James Kunetka. Old, but well worth it & still valid.