All
my reading life I have been paying attention to the Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists cover which has a Doomsday Clock that is now set for 5
minutes to midnight. The furthest the minute hand has been from
midnight was 17 minutes in 1991.
As a teenager, the goddamn clock generated fear and panic in my innocent life. Especially since I respected scientists most of whom were at the U. of Chicago where the Bulletin was published and where I was a student.
So how reliable has this clock been?
Not
one bit reliable. Scientists, as measured by this magazine, have not a
scintilla of common sense or understanding of how the world works.
The reality is that no nuclear war was possible for the first fifteen years of the Bulletin. Only the U.S. had the bomber capacity to successfully deliver bombs to the USSR and the U.S. was not and is not a military provocateur. By the mid 1960's both the U.S. and the USSR had doomsday capacities but a very good hot-line system was put in place to prevent a nuclear doomsday. Since then nothing has changed. Nothing.
Now these pathetic pedants are listing N. Korea and Iran as global nuclear threats along with climate change.
Once
again they are loony. North Korea can never launch even one nuclear missile without it
being destroyed on take-off because their rocket site is on the Japan
Sea. The same is true of Iran. As Jacques Chirac said of Iran, 'their
nuclear missile couldn't get 200 meters in the air before Iran was
destroyed.' The possibility exists that North Korea and Iran could
export nuclear weapons, or non-state users could get their hands on
them. That probability has not been calculated and it is not an immediate
threat that anyone is estimating.
To consider climate change as
anything related to Doomsday is the height of absurdity. Humans have
adapted for thousands of years to far greater climate changes than are
expected in the coming century. The world of commerce provides humans
with greater tools for climate accommodation than humans ever had in
the past (Commerce evaporated the Y2K doomsday computer scenario). We might be growing coffee in the Sierra and wine in British
Columbia...so what?
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is a badge of shame for the world of science. Hopefully some group of scientists will publicly announce their disdain for the shameful rag.