But the more the fake clock ticks, the safer we are.
“These scientists say the world is closer than ever to ‘doomsday,’” blared the Washington Post. “Atomic scientists set ‘Doomsday Clock’ closer to midnight than ever,” fussed Reuters. “Doomsday Clock hits record, nears midnight. What it means for Alabama,” the Montgomery Advertiser advertised.
Every year, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (who are not atomic scientists and don’t have a bulletin) announce that the world is closer to destruction than ever as long as Trump is here.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bulletin (which back then at least had both a ‘bulletin’ and ‘atomic scientists’) set the ‘Doomsday Clock’ at 12 minutes to midnight. By 2020, the clock of doom had run out of minutes and was down to seconds. Last year the fake clock ticked down to 89 seconds, and now it’s down to 85. When it finally hits zero, Ed McMahon will return from the dead to tell us we’ve all won the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes award.
That joke is not exactly a tangent because the official statement of doom was issued by the editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists John Mecklin. Mecklin’s branch of ‘atomic science’ is ‘journalism’ and he was the editor for such prestigious nuclear publications as Key West Magazine, High Country News where he authored such radioactive items as “Have Bee, Will Travel” and “Schooling, Fish.”
At the top, the Bulletin cites Albert Einstein and Soviet spy J. Robert Oppenheimer as its founders, but it’s being written by a guy whose contribution to deeply insightful scientific reporting was stuff like “in Hollywood science fiction, genetic modification leads to monsters with extensible jaws and rampaging epidemics that threaten mankind’s existence.”
Not exactly ‘an Einstein’.
But as the publication admits, well down below in the fine print, “at our core, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a media organization.” But the ‘Bulletin of the Media Hacks’ doesn’t impress people as much as the ‘Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ and so the doomsday show must go on. And the media helpfully doesn’t report any of these minor details so as not to disillusion those members of the public who still believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Clock.
“Leaders of the United States, Russia, and China greatly vary in their autocratic leanings, but they all have approaches to international relations that favor grandiosity and competition over diplomacy and cooperation,” the former Key West Magazine/Atomic Scientist magazine editor complains.
China harvests organs from political prisoners, Russia invaded Ukraine and, according to the leading nuclear expert in Key West Magazine, “the Trump administration has essentially declared war on renewable energy and sensible climate policies, relentlessly gutting national efforts to combat climate change.” Who can tell the difference between gutting political prisoners and ‘gutting’ useless wind turbines to fight global warming.
The actual Doomsday Clock (or perhaps DOOMSDAY CLOCK to better emphasize its doomed qualities) is supposed to be set by the Bulletin’s ‘Science and Security Board’ whose executive chair is prominent nuclear scientist Gov. Jerry Brown. While the former governor, who inherited the job from his crooked dad, doesn’t have a background in nuclear science, he did more damage to California than any nuclear bomb could have. But if that’s the criteria for serving on the Science Board of the Atomic Scientists, Gov. Gavin Newsom should be the executive chair for having exceeded Brown in ‘nuking’ California’s communities in every respect. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Photo by AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster |
This year's edition literally claims that if governments don't police social media better, the world will be destroyed
Today, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that they had moved their Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight, their most dire reading since the invention of the hydrogen bomb in 1953.
The 71-year-old Doomsday Clock may be one of the world’s most recognizable warnings of nuclear weapons, but it’s also a wildly unscientific annual ritual that is shockingly bad at predicting actual nuclear risk.
Below is a repost of a story from 2017, with updates, on the severe problems with the Do
The Doomsday Clock never fails to grab headlines. The sight of dour old men portending global doom has a tendency to do that.
But when it comes to actually predicting nuclear Armageddon, it’s difficult to imagine a worse indicator than the Doomsday Clock.
First of all, what does it mean to be two-and-a-half minutes to midnight? Is the world going to end in 150 seconds? And, since we’re talking about nuclear Armageddon here, isn’t any amount of time bad? Even if the Doomsday Clock gave us three days to annihilation, that would still seem to be an extremely panic-worthy indicator.
However, the lowest the clock has ever been was in 1991, when the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cheered the end of the Cold War by setting the clock to 17 minutes before midnight.
One of the greatest coups for peace in history, and the best they could do is give humanity just enough time to listen to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida before the world ended.
More importantly, the Doomsday Clock has proved to be a terrible predictor of actual nuclear risk.
During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — the point at which historians generally agree the world came closest to nuclear war — the clock was set at a relaxed seven minutes to midnight.
And what about September 26, 1983? That was the day when a malfunction caused the Soviet Union to falsely detect an incoming missile strike from the United States.
As sirens sounded around him, a single duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, made the gut decision to forego the required protocol to order a retaliatory nuclear strike.
Chillingly, Petrov has since said it was a “50-50” chance that he would have made the decision he did, that saved so much of humanity. Even more frightening, he is pretty confident that his by-the-book colleagues would have ordered retaliation. “They were lucky it was me on shift that night,” Petrov later told a BBC interviewer. --->READ MORE HERE
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