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According to experts, the apocalypse is nigh. On Thursday, the scientists behind the Doomsday Clock moved its hands to 2 1/2 minutes to midnight — almost as close to the end of the world as we were during the Cold War.
Let's take a moment to register our collective surprise at this unexpected news. Source: Giphy
In a statement explaining the decision to move the clock's hands
forward, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist's Science and Security board
pointed the finger squarely at one man: President Donald Trump.
While there are a huge number of ominous factors at play worldwide,
Trump's presidency seemed the biggest red flag of all. He may only
have been in office "a matter of days," the board's statement read, but his consistent rhetoric and the actions he's already taken were clear enough warning signs to warrant adjusting the Doomsday Clock.
"In short, even though he has just now taken office, the president’s
intemperate statements, lack of openness to expert advice, and
questionable cabinet nominations have already made a bad international
security situation worse," the statement reads.
In 1945, the scientists involved in creating the first atomic weapons
founded the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, its Doomsday Clock charting
our path toward total destruction through some of the most precarious
moments in history. At two minutes to midnight — which is to say, the
end of days — our projected demise has not been so near since 1953, when the United States and the Soviet Union began testing hydrogen bombs. Source: Giphy
Conceptualized as a measure of the threat nuclear weapons posed our global well-being, the Doomsday Clock now accounts for climate change and other technologies
as well. In 2016 and 2015, the clock held steady at three minutes to
midnight, and its hands have moved backward and forward as international
nuclear tensions ease and escalate.
Given that the infamously brash leader of the free world now has the
nuclear codes at his fingertips, it makes sense that we would inch
closer to midnight. He has also ordered the Environmental Protection
Agency to scrub any information about climate change from its website and has enabled
the continued construction of crude oil pipelines that critics say will
undoubtedly damage the environment. As if all this weren't
disconcerting enough on its own, he slapped a gag order on scientists and researchers, prohibiting them from sharing their work with the public or press.
Then there's Trump's uncomfortably cozy relationship to Russia and habit of antagonizing his neighbors, fostering an international mood that is singularly tense, to say the least. Plus, Trump himself is worried about "the cyber," and the fact that he doesn't seem to know what that means does not exactly assuage popular fears.
Which is why the scientists behind the Doomsday Clock are asking Trump to please pump the brakes.
"We call on these leaders — particularly in Russia and the United
States — to refocus in the coming year on reducing existential risks and
preserving humanity, in no small part by consulting with top-level
experts and taking scientific research and observed reality into
account," the statement reads.
If only.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 16, 2013, on pageA23of theNew York editionwith the headline: Deafness at Doomsday
-Yarek Waszul
January 15, 2013
Deafness at Doomsday
By LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
TEMPE, Ariz.
TO our great peril, the scientific community has had little success in recent years influencing policy on global security. Perhaps this is because the best scientists today are not directly responsible for the very weapons that threaten our safety, and are therefore no longer the high priests of destruction, to be consulted as oracles as they were after World War II.
The problems scientists confront today are actually much harder than they were at the dawn of the nuclear age, and their successes more heartily earned. This is why it is so distressing that even Stephen Hawking, perhaps the world’s most famous living scientist, gets more attention for his views on space aliens than his views on nuclear weapons.Scientists’ voices are crucial in the debates over the global challenges of climate change, nuclear proliferation and the potential creation of new and deadly pathogens. But unlike in the past, their voices aren’t being heard.
Indeed, it was Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, warning of the possibility that Hitler might develop a nuclear weapon, that quickly prompted the start of the Manhattan Project, the largest scientific wartime project in history. Then, in 1945, the same group of physicists who had created the atomic bomb founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to warn of the dangers of nuclear weapons, and to promote international cooperation to avoid nuclear war. As Einstein said in May 1946, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
In June 1946, for instance, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had helped lead the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M., argued that atomic energy should be placed under civilian rather than military control. Within two months President Harry S. Truman signed a law doing so, effective January 1947.
Today, nine nuclear states have stockpiled perhaps 20,000 nuclear weapons, many of which dwarf the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet proliferation is as alarming as ever, even though President Obama signed, and Congress ratified, the new strategic arms-reduction treaty in 2010. Iran’s nuclear program could lead to conflict. So could the animosity between India and Pakistan, which both have nuclear weapons.
The United States is complicit, because whatever our leaders may say, our actions suggest that we have no real intention to disarm. The United Nations adopted the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would ban countries from testing nuclear weapons, in 1996. But it has not come into force; the Senate rejected ratification in 1999, and while President Obama has promised to obtain ratification, he has not shown enough urgency in doing so.
What’s striking is that today’s version of the Manhattan Project scientists — not the weapons researchers at our maximum-security national laboratories, but distinguished scientific minds at our research universities and other national labs — provide advice that is routinely ignored.
Last year, the National Academy of Sciences published a report demonstrating that all the technical preconditions necessary for ratifying the United Nations treaty were in place. But this vital issue did not come up in the presidential campaign and is barely mentioned in Washington. Another study by the academy last year, on flaws in America’s costly ballistic missile defense program, has had little impact even as the Pentagon considers cuts in military spending.
I am co-chairman of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has supported the call for a world free of nuclear weapons — a vision backed by major foreign policy figures in both parties. But ideological biases have become so ingrained in Washington that scientific realities are subordinated to political intransigence.
Do scientists need to develop new doomsday tools before our views are again heard? Will climate researchers remain voiceless unless they propose untested geoengineering technologies that could have insidious consequences? Will biologists be heard only if their work spawns new biotechnologies that could be weaponized?
Because the threat of nuclear proliferation is not being addressed, because missile defense technologies remain flawed and because new threats exposed by scientists have been ignored, the Bulletin’s annual Doomsday clock — which was updated on Tuesday — still sits at five minutes to midnight. The clock is meant to convey the threats we face not only from nuclear weapons, but also from climate change and the potential unintended consequences of genetic engineering, which could be misused by those seeking to create bioweapons.
Until science and data become central to informing our public policies, our civilization will be hamstrung in confronting the gravest threats to its survival.
Lawrence M. Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, is the author, most recently, of “A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing.”
