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bulletin of the atomic scientists
Mad King Donald Leads a MAD World
Mutually Assured Destruction may have kept the world free of nuclear war for the last eight decades, but it hasn’t kept the world free of Donald Trump.
May 28, 2026
If nothing else, Donald Trump pushes the nation’s—the world’s—thought process beyond anything that feels normal and comfortable. Consider the “MADness” of the last eight decades: You know, how “mutually assured destruction” has kept humanity from nuking itself into oblivion because... uh, mass murder could have consequences.
Thus, the planet’s nine nuclear powers have refrained (so far) from unleashing a nuclear assault on an enemy for fear of getting nuked back. Hey, what a solid foundation for building peace! Of course, the nuclear nine have spent billions of dollars over the years expanding and developing the nuclear arsenals they will allegedly never use. But they’ve also made it clear that no other nation on the planet is “authorized” to possess nukes.
This has been the foundation for the pseudo-peace—the avoidance of nuclear omnicide—that has existed throughout my lifetime, and also Donald Trump’s lifetime. (Little known fact: He’s two months older than me). Thus humanity, or at least its global leaders, haven’t had to take on the difficult task of envisioning “peace” beyond militarism. Nor has the media. Military-industrialism maintains its assumed dominance over Planet Earth: We’ll always have war, no matter how many people suffer horrifically from it, no matter how many devote their lives to ending it.
But then along comes Donald Trump, bringing something unique to his position as most powerful person on the planet: his own personal madness. I am not referring to “mutually assured destruction,” but the other kind of mad: He’s losing it mentally. Here’s how members of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War put it, in a statement entered into the US Congressional Record a month ago:
It is our professional opinion, based on previous and ongoing assessments, that Donald Trump’s mental state since our 2024 statement has deteriorated even further. In keeping with our professional ethics, and for those of us who are physicians, with the Declaration of Geneva—the successor to the Hippocratic Oath that binds us to the humanitarian principles of medicine since the Nuremberg trials—we are compelled to warn of a President of the United States who is increasingly a danger to the public.
Among his symptoms: rambling digressions and frequent confusion when he speaks; grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility and unlimited authority (for instance, his release of AI-created pictures and videos, such as a video depicting himself as a combat pilot dropping feces on No Kings protesters); and his reckless threats of violence (such as his social media post to Iran last month: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back”).
The physicians conclude:
It is our professional opinion that the behaviors of Donald Trump, tragically, are neither momentary lapses nor political theater. It is our professional opinion that they reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline. If we were called upon under the 25th Amendment to judge the President’s present ability to discharge the duties of his office, we would have to conclude that he lacks the capacity to do so.
For the reasons cited above, emphasizing that he presents a clear and present danger to our country and to the world, it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the President of the United States, and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency, with vital responsibilities on the shoulders of those in positions of leadership
Psychotherapist John Gartner put it a bit more directly in a recent interview:
Trump’s going full Hitler... demonizing minorities, putting them in concentration camps, seizing control over elections, destroying free speech, using the government to go after his enemies, purging government of people who aren’t lackeys... He’s doing it at a manic pace, on all fronts, so we can’t even focus our outrage.
But Trump, in his unfitness for office, in his grandiosity and self-worship—though he may be a lost soul—is not wrong about the amount of power he has. This is what stuns me beyond comprehension: that the world we have created is open to him. It’s now his for the taking. Mutually Assured Destruction may have kept the world free of nuclear war for the last eight decades, but it hasn’t kept the world free of Donald Trump.
Has the world evolved to its own endpoint? I don’t know. But we have definitely evolved to a state of complex, unanticipated danger. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—whose Doomsday Clock is now set at 89 seconds to midnight—recently published a piece urging that the US pass a law taking the decision to use nukes away from the president alone, requiring the agreement of at least two people before it can be acted on.
How amazing that such a law doesn’t already exist. Even more amazing is that calls for nuclear disarmament are hardly in the news these days. If humanity wants to continue evolving, we have to envision a world beyond nuclear war... beyond all wars.
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'85 Seconds to Midnight': Doomsday Clock Ticks Down as Trump Drags World Toward New Low
"Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline, and we are running out of time."
Jan 28, 2026
A "failure of leadership" by the world's most powerful governments and leaders, particularly President Donald Trump, has pushed the annually updated Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than ever, said the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the organization that monitors global existential threats including nuclear bombs, on Tuesday.
The clock was set to 85 seconds to midnight—or global destruction—four seconds closer than one year ago.
The Bulletin has updated the clock each year since 1947, when scientists set it at seven minutes to midnight, emphasizing that the world had little time to get the proliferation of nuclear weapons under control following the United States' bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The scientists who announced the latest ticking of the clock on Tuesday stressed that a number of other threats appear closer then ever to dooming humanity and called for urgent action to limit nuclear arsenals as well as creating "international guidelines" for the use of artificial intelligence, solving the climate crisis, and forming "multilateral agreements to address global biological threats."
“The Doomsday Clock’s message cannot be clearer. Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline, and we are running out of time," said Alexandra Bell, president and CEO of the Bulletin. "Change is both necessary and possible, but the global community must demand swift action from their leaders.”
The organization, whose Doomsday Clock is monitored by its Science and Security Board (SASB) and Board of Sponsors, which includes eight Nobel laureates, said that countries including the US, China, and Russia did not heed the Bulletin's warning last year when it moved the clock's hands to 89 seconds to midnight.
Instead, major powers in the past year have become "increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic."
"Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers," said the group. "Far too many leaders have grown complacent and indifferent, in many cases adopting rhetoric and policies that accelerate rather than mitigate these existential risks. Because of this failure of leadership, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board today sets the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe."
International failures from 2025 include:
- Russia's testing of nuclear-capable weapons as it continued its war on Ukraine;
- The US and Israel's attacks on Iranian nuclear sites;
- China's increase of its nuclear warhead stockpile;
- Fueled by the continued extraction of fossil fuels, the global average temperature was the third-highest on record and the climate crisis caused disasters including deadly flooding and heatwaves;
- The treaty between the US and Russia on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, also known as the New START Treaty, inched closer to its expiration date on February 4, 2026;
- The Trump administration dismantled public health infrastructure and climate regulations, making the US and the world more vulnerable to pandemics and the climate emergency; and
- Artificial intelligence grew more sophisticated as the Trump administration refused to rein in the technology.
Daniel Holz, chair of the SASB, said that the "dangerous trends" outlined by the Bulletin "are accompanied by another frightening development: the rise of nationalistic autocracies in countries around the world."
"Our greatest challenges require international trust and cooperation, and a world splintering into ‘us versus them’ will leave all of humanity more vulnerable," said Holz.
The Bulletin emphasized that with political will, the world's leaders are entirely capable of pulling humanity "back from the brink."
The US and Russia could resume dialogue about limiting their nuclear arsenals, and all nuclear-armed states could observe the existing moratorium on nuclear testing.
Through multilateral agreements and national regulations, the international community could also cooperate to "reduce the prospect that AI be used to create biological threats."
And in the US, Congress could take action to repudiate Trump's "war on renewable energy, instead providing incentives and investments that will enable rapid reduction in fossil fuel use."
Maria Ressa, co-founder and CEO of Rappler and a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said that world leaders must also come to an agreement that the climate crisis, nuclear proliferation, and unregulated AI are grave threats, as the majority of the global community has.
“Without facts, there is no truth. Without truth, there is no trust. And without these, the radical collaboration this moment demands is impossible," said Ressa. "We cannot solve problems we cannot agree exist. We cannot cooperate across borders when we cannot even share the same facts. Nuclear threats, climate collapse, AI risks: none can be addressed without first rebuilding our shared reality. The clock is ticking."
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A Hiroshima Survivor Reminds the World Why History Must Not Repeat Itself
Eighty years have passed since the bombing of Hiroshima, when Kodama’s life and the world changed dramatically. She has not forgotten that day, but she said looking at today’s conflicts, it seems like the world has.
Aug 21, 2025
Michiko Kodama was only seven years old when the world’s first nuclear weapon was dropped on her hometown of Hiroshima. Since then, she has dedicated her life to ensuring that her generation remains the only victims of a nuclear holocaust.
“When you witness something like this, you think how can I live? Am I allowed to live? But, I’m glad I’m alive,” Kodama said. “I’m glad I had the life I wanted, and I think it’s because I can tell the stories of those who have passed away.”
Kodama is the assistant secretary general of Nihon Hidankyo, an organization composed of Hibakusha, the Japanese word that refers to the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In 2024, Nihon Hidankyo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their advocacy work on nuclear nonproliferation.
“To fight against nuclear weapons is to preserve life because it is the weapon that is capable of completely destroying the entire Earth. It’s the weapon that’s capable of stopping time,” Kodama, 87, said.
“The atomic bombs that I experienced 80 years ago were like babies compared to today’s nuclear weapons,” said Kodama.
Eighty years have passed since the bombing of Hiroshima, when Kodama’s life and the world changed dramatically. She has not forgotten that day, but she said looking at today’s conflicts, it seems like the world has. And she’s determined to continue reminding the world of the terrors of nuclear weapons.
She remembers being under her desk as the bomb hit. She saw a flash of light followed by an extreme wave of heat. Somehow she survived along with her classmates. She recalled the horrific sight of people who had come to her families’ suburb to try and get relief from the epicenter. People who had been so badly burnt that their skin was coming off their flesh.
“These sorts of images show the differences between conventional weapons and nuclear weapons. It’s just a weapon that is so inhumane, so indiscriminate that we just should not have it,” Kodama said.
The Doomsday Clock, which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created in 1947 to measure how close the world is to man-made catastrophe, signals that the world has moved closer to nuclear catastrophe than it ever has been. In January 2025, the clock was moved one second closer to midnight, sending a stark signal to the global community that we are moving closer toward the brink of nuclear holocaust. The clock currently looms at a mere 89 seconds to midnight.
“I fear that World War III will turn into a nuclear war,” she said.
Nine countries currently have nuclear weapons, and many more are seeking to get it as a deterrent.
“I think it’s a huge mistake,” Kodama said. “Nuclear weapons and humans, and of course the Earth, cannot coexist. I know this from personal experience.”
In June 2025, the US bombed Iran’s nuclear sites out of fear they were getting closer and closer to developing a nuclear weapon. Experts said that Iran’s aspirations will not stop and that other countries could follow its example
“In the span of two weeks, Iran was bombed by two nuclear powers, the US and Israel. That could lead to a perverted logic in which developing the nuclear bomb is seen as their only way to be safe from further attacks,” said Thomas Countryman, president of the board at the Arms Control Association.
Kodama warned that more countries with nuclear weapons would only increase the likelihood that a nuclear holocaust would take place.
Kodama described apocalyptic scenes from when the bomb first hit in the center of Hiroshima. People riding on Hiroshima’s famous tram instantly turned to charcoal; those that didn’t die instantly had their skin stripped off from the heat of the ground, and many ended up jumping in the river for relief where they also died.
Although she was one of the fortunate ones to survive the bombing, the consequences of the bomb continued well after August 6 for Kodama.
“I’ll be a victim of the atomic bomb until I die. Yes, I can’t escape the fact that I was a victim of the atomic bomb” Kodama said.
For example, Kodama recalled how she faced discrimination within Japan as a survivor and was told that would have to live alone without getting married because people at the time did not want their future generations “mixed” with those that survived an atomic bomb. Moreover, even after she married and had kids, her daughter suddenly died at 45 after contracting cancer, which Kodama believes was passed down from herself.
Her mother, father, and two brothers, one of whom was born after the bombing Hiroshima, also died of cancer which she attributed to the effects of radiation exposure.
However, even with the devastating effects of Hiroshima, Kodama warned that the bomb dropped 80 years ago would only cause a fraction of the damage that today’s weapons could inflict.
“The atomic bombs that I experienced 80 years ago were like babies compared to today’s nuclear weapons,” said Kodama.
In fact, just 20 days before the bomb exploded she moved from the center of Hiroshima to a suburb. Everyone in her former school was killed. Kodama noted that in some ways she was lucky because the Hiroshima bomb didn’t completely destroy life.
“When the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, it was said that no plants would grow for 80 years, but the following year, those trees in the garden sprouted young shoots,” Kodama said. “If something like that were to happen again, no plants would really grow. They wouldn’t grow for 80 years, or even a hundred years. It would be impossible to survive.”
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From the Doomsday Clock to a Peace Clock: The Time Has Come
Instead of counting down the minutes and seconds to our extinction, the Peace Clock calls on the U.S. government to take a series of specific, concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament.
Feb 06, 2025
This year’s Doomsday Clock Statement landed like a damp squib in a Trump-swamped corporate news cycle on January 28th. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists only moved the hands of the Clock forward by one second, from 90 seconds up to 89 seconds to midnight, which must have come as a relief to the few members of the public who heard about it.
But this minimal advance in the hands of the Clock was a strange and misleading top-line for the Bulletin’s actual Doomsday Clock Statement, which was brimming with extremely dire warnings that deserve far greater official and public attention.
This disconnect between the movements of the hands of the Doomsday Clock and Bulletin’s underlying threat assessments is deeply troubling. If the positioning of the hands of the Clock does not accurately reflect the seriousness of the dangers it represents, then the powerful symbolism of the Doomsday Clock is lost, undermining the very purpose for which Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and their colleagues invented it.
The new Clock Statement began, “In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Trends that have deeply concerned (us) continued, and despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course.”
The original atomic scientists created the Doomsday Clock to symbolize humanity’s suicidal march toward annihilation by nuclear war, and that is still the greatest danger that midnight on the Clock represents, even as it now incorporates the added dangers of climate change, biological threats and disruptive technologies.
The threat assessments in the 2025 Clock statement begin with the warning that the war in Ukraine “still looms over the world,” and that it “could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation.”
It was this danger of escalation to nuclear war over Ukraine that led the Bulletin to move the hands of the Clock forward by 10 seconds in January 2023, from 100 to 90 seconds to midnight.
Since then, despite President Biden’s warning in 2022 that war between Russia and the United States would be the suicidal Third World War that we must avoid at all costs, the U.S. and NATO have blasted through every self-imposed “red line” designed to prevent that, providing Ukraine with tanks, F-16 warplanes, long-range missiles, and approval to use them inside Russia as well as in Ukraine.
The roles of U.S. and NATO personnel in targeting, planning, surveillance, intelligence and secret “special operations” involving Western weapons have escalated into the very war between the United States and Russia that Biden promised to avoid.
So we cannot understand the Bulletin’s decision to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock only one second closer to the global mass suicide it symbolizes, as if these developments in the war between NATO and Russia have not brought us significantly closer to self-destruction than we were two years ago.
The Clock Statement then addresses the crisis in the Middle East. In January 2023, when the Bulletin last moved the hands of the clock forward, the U.S. and Israel were enjoying a false sense of security and normalcy in that region, believing that they had suppressed and tamed armed resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.
Now, since the Palestinian breakout in October 2023 and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the new Doomsday Clock statement warns that, “Conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral out of control into a wider war without warning.”
With nuclear-armed Israel threatening to launch a major war on Iran and ready to use its nuclear weapons before it would accept an existential defeat in such a war, and with no real limits to U.S. support for Israeli war-making and genocide, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is right to warn that this could spiral out of control at any moment. Yet it seems to have ignored this danger too in its one-second tick forward of the Doomsday Clock.
While these raging conflicts involving nuclear weapons states may be the most dangerous current flashpoints for a nuclear war, nothing reflects the relentless nature of our accelerating march toward Armageddon more clearly than the determination with which the nuclear weapons powers, led by the United States, are expanding and “modernizing” their nuclear arsenals, even as they complete the dismantling of all Cold War-era arms control treaties and nuclear safeguards.
The 2025 Doomsday Clock Statement makes it clear that the Bulletin’s analysts understand this only too well:
“The countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their arsenals, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy civilization. The nuclear arms control process is collapsing, and high-level contacts among nuclear powers are totally inadequate given the danger at hand.”
And yet they insist that the inexorable advance of these Doomsday plans over the past two years has only brought us one second closer to Doomsday. How can that be?
The next and final sentence in the paragraph on nuclear weapons addresses the dangers of nuclear proliferation, which is the widely predicted result of the failure of the nuclear powers to pursue genuine nuclear disarmament:
“Alarmingly, it is no longer unusual for countries without nuclear weapons to consider developing arsenals of their own—actions that would undermine long-standing nonproliferation efforts and increase the ways in which nuclear war could start.”
The next paragraph in the Doomsday Clock Statement addresses the dangers of the Climate Crisis. It explains that global greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing and global temperatures are still rising, causing extreme weather, floods, tropical cyclones, heat waves, droughts and wildfires on every continent.
“The long-term prognosis for the world’s attempts to deal with climate change remains poor,” it reads, “as most governments fail to enact the financing and policy initiatives necessary to halt global warming.”
But this is just one more dire warning that is not reflected in the hands of the Doomsday Clock.
On biological threats, the Clock statement warns, “Supposedly high-containment biological laboratories continue to be built throughout the world, but oversight regimes for them are not keeping pace, increasing the possibility that pathogens with pandemic potential may escape. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have increased the risk that terrorists or countries may attain the capability of designing biological weapons for which countermeasures do not exist.”
On disruptive technologies, it warns that, “Systems that incorporate artificial intelligence in military targeting have been used in Ukraine and the Middle East, and several countries are moving to integrate artificial intelligence into their militaries. Such efforts raise questions about the extent to which machines will be allowed to make military decisions—even decisions that could kill on a vast scale, including those related to the use of nuclear weapons.”
The strange decision to only advance the Doomsday Clock by one second appears to be a hedge against the possibility that all these current trends will continue, but that, by some miracle, none of them will actually succeed in destroying us all in the next few decades. This could leave BAS in the embarrassing position of a Chicken Little predicting a calamity that has not come to pass, even as the hands of the Doomsday Clock advance to within a few seconds of midnight.
But this way of thinking defeats the very purpose of the Doomsday Clock, which is to raise the alarm with policy-makers and the public about the dangerous course we are on. The existential dangers we face are only too real, and the failure of our public and private institutions to address and resolve them is the most egregious and potentially suicidal failure in the history of our species.
In abdicating its responsibility to warn us of the gravity of these dangers, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists risks turning Einstein and Oppenheimer’s call for sanity into yet another mechanism to normalize the suicidal insanity of our 21st century rulers.
The Bulletin appears to have joined all the other mainstream institutions of American society - the White House, Congress, the military-industrial complex, the Republican and Democratic Parties, the corporate media, Wall Street, academia - in normalizing the collective denial by which our corrupt ruling class lulls the public into sleepwalking toward mass extinction.
Remarkably, while the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists seems to have abandoned its founders’ commitment to the urgency of nuclear disarmament, President Trump apparently recognizes that ending the nuclear arms race would be the crowning diplomatic achievement of his, or any, U.S. presidency.
In off-the-cuff remarks in a video call to the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 23rd, Trump suddenly raised the tantalizing prospect of nuclear disarmament negotiations with Russia and China. Talking about a phone call with President Xi of China, Trump elaborated,
“We’d [Trump and Xi?] like to see denuclearization. In fact, with President Putin, prior to an election result, which was, frankly, ridiculous, we were talking about denuclearization of our two countries, and China would have come along. China has a much smaller, right now, nuclear armament than us or field than us, but they’re going to be catching up at some point over the next four or five years.”
“And I will tell you that President Putin really liked the idea of cutting way back on nuclear. And I think the rest of the world, we would have gotten them to follow. And China would have come along too. China also liked it. Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it. It’s too depressing.”
“So, we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible. And I can tell you that President Putin wanted to do it. He and I wanted to do it. We had a good conversation with China. They would have been involved, and that would have been an unbelievable thing for the planet. And I hope it can be started up again.”
What Trump says in these unscripted, off-the-cuff remarks is encouraging. It seems that President Xi reminded Trump of their discussions during his first term, and, at least for a moment, turned his attention to the ultimate “elephant in the room” hanging over all our heads.
As the fate of the world teeters in the hands of an unpredictable U.S. president and the enfeebled Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists muffles the powerful symbolism of its Doomsday Clock, CODEPINK has created an alternative for the precarious times we live in: the Peace Clock. Instead of counting down the minutes and seconds to our extinction, the Peace Clock calls on the U.S. government to take a series of specific, concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament.
That starts with agreeing to Russian and Chinese proposals for a ban on weapons in space and reinstating the 1972 ABM Treaty with Russia, including the removal of formerly prohibited U.S. anti-ballistic-missile installations in Poland and Romania. By such concrete, practical steps, the Peace Clock would, step by step, make the world safer and safer, leading sooner rather than later to its sixth and final step: the complete nuclear disarmament of all the nuclear weapons powers.
You can learn more about the Peace Clock and sign the Peace Clock Manifesto here.
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At 89 Seconds to Midnight, Doomsday Clock Now 'Closest It Has Ever Been to Catastrophe'
China, Russia, and the United States "have the collective power to destroy civilization," so they also "have the prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink," according to The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Jan 28, 2025
Highlighting the threat posed by nuclear weapons, the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, the potential misuse of biological science, and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Tuesday moved the Doomsday Clock "from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to catastrophe."
The Bulletin was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and University of Chicago scientists involved with the Manhattan Project. The clock was launched two years later, as a symbol of how close the world is to apocalypse due to nuclear arms. The Science and Security Board now considers various threats with its annual updates.
"The purpose of the Doomsday Clock is to start a global conversation about the very real existential threats that keep the world's top scientists awake at night," explained Daniel Holz, a University of Chicago professor who chairs the board. "National leaders must commence discussions about these global risks before it's too late. Reflecting on these life-and-death issues and starting a dialogue are the first steps to turning back the clock and moving away from midnight."
The clock announcement came just over a week after the return of Republican U.S. President Donald Trump, whose country has a sizable nuclear arsenal.
"Blindly continuing on the current path is a form of madness."
"Long-standing concerns about nuclear weapons—involving the modernization and expansion of arsenals in all nuclear weapons
countries, the build-up of new capabilities, the risks of inadvertent or deliberate nuclear use, the loss of arms control agreements, and the possibility of nuclear proliferation to new countries—continued or were amplified in 2024,"
notes The Bulletin's statement on the clock. "The outgoing Biden administration showed little willingness or capacity to pursue new efforts in these areas, and it remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will seize the initiative."
The other eight nations with nuclear weapons are China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea, Russia, and the United Kingdom. The statement points out that "against the backdrop of Russia's continuing war against Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended compliance with the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), and Russia's Duma voted to withdraw Moscow's ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty."
While the United States and Russia have the most nukes, "China's nuclear arsenal has grown to about 600 warheads, and China may also now be deploying a small number of warheads on missiles during peacetime," the statement says. Additionally, "Iran continues to increase its stockpile of enriched uranium" and "Kim Jong Un recently declared his goal was to 'exponentially expand' North Korea's nuclear arsenal in coming years."
Along with detailing "extremely dangerous trends" on the nuclear front, the statement spotlights "devastating impacts and insufficient progress" in terms of climate. As board member and Princeton University professor emeritus Robert Socolow summarized Tuesday: "2024 was the hottest year on record. Extreme weather and other climate events—floods, tropical cyclones, extreme heat, drought, and wildfires—devastated societies, rich and poor, as well as ecosystems around the world."
"Yet the global greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change continued to rise. And investments to adapt to climate change and cut fossil fuel emissions were way below what is needed to avoid the worst impacts," he added. "There were formidable policy headwinds globally: Particularly worrisome, electoral campaigns showed climate change to be a low priority in the United States and many other countries."
The board's statement also lays out "daunting biological threats," including emerging and reemerging infectious diseases, proliferation of high-containment laboratories, artificial intelligence involvement in research and development, and weapons programs.
Artificial intelligence also features prominently in the statement's section on "disruptive technologies," which warns that "increasing chaos, disorder, and dysfunction in the world's information ecosystem threaten society's capacity to address difficult challenges, and it is clear that AI has great potential to accelerate these processes of information corruption."
The tech section also states that "the growing presence of hypersonic weapons in contested regional theaters substantially increases the risk of escalation," and "there is a growing belligerence among the United States, Russia, and China in space."
Those three countries, the statement stresses, "have the collective power to destroy civilization," so they also "have the prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink, and they can do so if their leaders seriously commence good-faith discussions about the global threats outlined here."
"Blindly continuing on the current path is a form of madness," the document declares. "It is 89 seconds to midnight."
The #DoomsdayClock moves to 89 seconds to midnight. Humanity stands closer to catastrophe than at any moment in its history. How did we get here and what must we do now? Chair of The Elders, Juan Manuel Santos, gives an urgent diagnosis. @thebulletin.org
[image or embed]
— The Elders ( @theelders.bsky.social) January 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
In anticipation of the clock update, Dr. Robert Dodge from Physicians for Social Responsibility and nuclear activist Talia Wilcox
pointed to some recent progress in a Tuesday opinion piece for Common Dreams, writing that "there is great hope arising from the international community as the fourth anniversary of the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons."
"The timing of this Doomsday Clock unveiling could not be more critical," the pair wrote, acknowledging Trump's expressions of "concern about the existential consequences of nuclear war throughout his public life" and urging him to seize "one last chance to make the ultimate deal for the future of humanity."
Meanwhile, in a Monday piece for Common Dreams, Danaka Katovich, CodePink's national co-director, argued that "doom isn't good enough to get us to where we need to go."
"At CodePink, we've created a Peace Clock to give us ways not to just move away from doom, but to bring us closer to the kind of world we want to see," she explained. "It's something that's been within our sight a thousand times. We have to sprint toward it."
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The Commemoration of the Criminal Bravo H-Bomb Test Is a Cry for a Nuclear Free World
We will be reminding the world of the Hibakusha truth that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
Feb 11, 2024
Later this month I will return to Japan for the annual Bikini commemoration and the Gensuikyō, or Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, annual conference. There won’t be a bikini fashion show.
The commemoration of what can only be called the criminal U.S. Bravo H-bomb test on March 1, 1954, is one of two annual anchor events of the Japanese peace movement. Although Covid-19 is still with us, these events will play important roles in revitalizing the Japanese peace movement; one of the most effective in the world.
Over the years, this movement has played a major role in preventing Japan from becoming a nuclear weapons state, and the testimonies of Hibakusha (victims and witnesses of the A-bombings) have played critical roles in inspiring the nuclear disarmament diplomacy and the international negotiations that resulted in the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Although I initially met several Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb survivors as early as the 1978 U.N. Second Session of Nuclear Disarmament, it wasn’t until I first traveled to Hiroshima in 1984 that I began what became a 40-year engagement with Hibakusha and the Japanese movement.
Bikini Day will be little remarked here in the United States: Cowboys and Indians all over again, and quite literally a case of nuclear colonialism.
In an effort to compensate for his earlier support for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign and to bring nonexistent jobs bacon to Boston, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and, following him, the Massachusetts congressional delegation and the city’s business establishment were suckered into Reagan-administration planning to transform Boston Harbor into a nuclear weapons base. Knowing the Navy’s record of nuclear weapons accidents, the ways that the base would ratchet up tensions with Moscow and violate the freeze, and with knowledge of better economic and social uses for the waterfront property, several of us organized at the grassroots level to prevent construction of the base. We prevailed, and I was invited to give a brief inspirational speech at the World Conference against A- and H- Bombs. Needless to say, my first trip to Hiroshima was a transformative experience.
Not long thereafter, I returned to Japan for the Bikini Day commemorations and was shocked by what I learned from the testimonies of Rongelap and Japanese survivors of the March 1, 1954, Bravo “test.” Bravo was by far the most devastating of the United States’ nuclear weapons explosions that pulverized Bikini between 1946 and 1958. It was detonated a year after the Soviets tested their first H-bomb and two years before a culturally explosive women’s two-piece swimsuit was first marketed in Paris.
Washington responded to the Soviet Union’s first H-bomb with a bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb that destroyed an entire city, initially killed 100,000 people—almost all civilians—and poisoned survivors, the environment, and future generations. Ninety-eight miles away from the Bikini H-bomb test site, inhabitants of tropical Rongelap Atoll were showered by and played with radioactive ash that they first thought was snow. Just 500 miles from the equator, they had never seen snow. Japanese fishing boats hundreds of miles from Bikini Atoll and fish that comprised a major portion of Japan’s ocean-based food supply were also irradiated.
Before the year was out, natives of Rongelap and Japanese fishermen began to die from radiation diseases and cancer. Still births and numerous birth defects including jellyfish babies (transparent skin and no bones), anencephaly (infants born without portions of their brain or skull), and other mutations followed.
Secrecy was immediately imposed by both the U.S. and Japanese governments. But as word got out following the return of the Lucky Dragon V tuna fishing boat’s sickened crew to Yaizu City, women with memories of Hiroshima launched a petition campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It garnered 25 million Japanese signatures, leading to the convening of the first World Conference against A- and H- Bombs, which attracted delegates from across Japan and around the world.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb victims, many of whom had hidden themselves from the world due to their disfigurements, excruciating physical and emotional pains, and popular fears that their radiation diseases were contagious began to tell their stories. What became the world’s most powerful and long enduring nuclear disarmament social movement was born.
Two years after Bravo, in 1956, the first Godzilla film was released. Unlike the deracinated version shown across the United States, it was not the compelling story of a love triangle. It was a powerful expression of rage against the A-and H- bombs, a cry for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Watching it now, the desperate fear of nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini bombs—fears blunted over the decades—remains palpable.
Race was, of course, a factor. During the Pacific War, The New York Times quoted a U.S. general as saying that he and his troops saw Japanese as “vermin” to be eradicated. The implicit assumption was that Marshallese were darker skinned primitives who could be sacrificed, ostensibly in the pursuit of world peace. In both cases, Japanese Hibakusha and Rongelap claimed that they were used as human “guinea pigs,” monitored by doctors and other scientists but not given medicine.
This outrageous charge was difficult and painful to believe, bringing to mind as it did Dr. Joseph Mengele’s murderous experiments at the Auschwitz death camp. But in 2000, in the course of hosting a “Global Hibakusha delegation” for a conference at the United Nations, several of us met with the senior Department of Energy (DOE) official who was responsible for studies of the impacts of radiation on people. I explained that in Japan I had heard Hibakusha cry out that they had been used as “guinea pigs” in experiments conducted by the Atomic Bomb Causality Commission. I said that I could understand victims thinking the worst of their tormentors, but expressed some doubt and asked if he could say it wasn’t so.
“No,” he responded. The experiments had indeed been conducted. And a Utah downwinder who was with us raged in response that the same was secretly being done across the western United States. She was a woman who had lost her father and father-in-law to uranium mining, her sister and daughter to Nevada test fallout, and who consumed a daily meal of pills simply to stay alive
Some years later I experienced an equally sobering reverberation from the Bikini H-bomb. It came during a lunch break in a well-appointed conference site during another annual Bikini commemoration. A descendant of Rongelap Hibakusha was given a book about the Bikini H-bomb and its devastations. It included a list of the names of each of Rongelap’s inhabitants on that 1954 March 1 morning. One by one this young man placed a check mark next to the name of each person who had died of cancer and other radiation diseases from the Bravo “test.” I watched amidst very painful silence as he methodically checked off the names of nearly every person on the list. Some were women and men I had met along our ways.
This is not simply history. In preparation for the Bikini commemoration, this year I came across two recent articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists written by Robert Alverez, formerly a senior policy adviser at the DOE. Coincident with the release of Oppenheimer, Alvarez reported that Oppie and Lawrence (for whom the Lawrence Livermore lab is named) performed a “vaudeville” on themselves and others. To keep up their teams’ morale, they drank glasses of water with radioactive sodium and in some cases had lower level workers consume plutonium. More than a few, including Oppenheimer—who was also a smoker—subsequently died of cancer.
In his article “Seeking Justice for Radiation Victims of the U.S. Nuclear Program,” Alverez reviewed the campaigns of downwinders and tribal uranium miners for compensation via the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). He reports that, ostensibly to limit federal spending (at the same time that the U.S. has embarked on a nearly $2 trillion nuclear weapons “modernization” campaign) Congress recently refused to extend support for “victims not accounted for in earlier legislation.”
Bikini Day will be little remarked here in the United States: Cowboys and Indians all over again, and quite literally a case of nuclear colonialism. But those who gather in the Marshall Islands and Yaizu City in Japan will not only be marking the 70th anniversary of the devastating Bravo test and honoring those victimized and lost. We will also be reminding the world of the Hibakusha truth that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
The hands of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock are now set at 90 second to midnight. We face the risks of possible nuclear escalation in Ukraine, the Middle East, and over Taiwan tensions. With the post-Cold War order in free fall, all nine nuclear weapons states are escalating their arms racing, “modernizing” or expanding their nuclear arsenals. In these critical movements the messages from the Marshall Islands, Yaizu City, and nearby Shizuoka will be clear: The U.N. Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons must be universally signed and ratified to make way for a nuclear weapons-free world. And here in the United States, campaigns like Back from the Brink provide paths and hope for human survival.
What must be found is the will!
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Bringing the Nuclear Threat Out of the Basement
Am I the only person who noticed that, just recently, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists decided to keep its Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds (yes, 90 seconds!) to midnight?
Feb 07, 2024
What’s in your basement? Mine is full of things I’ve mostly forgotten about—tools I bought for projects I never completed, long abandoned sports equipment, furniture I planned on refinishing ages ago, and unused cans of paint I thought I wanted when someone was giving them away.
We’ve owned this house for nearly 12 years, since just weeks before our son was born. In all that time, I’ve regularly gone down there to do the laundry and store my things (which never seem to stop accumulating). And somehow, it went from being empty when we bought it to chock-a-block full today in a way that would make Marie Kondo’s perfect hair stand straight up.
One day recently, I noticed two booklets attached by a screw with an outdated head to one of the beams under the basement stairs. That roused my curiosity since I had no memory of putting them there and, without laundry to distract me, I tried to free them, using a dozen different screwdrivers, none of which had that old-fashioned head, so eventually I pulled them loose with the claw end of a hammer.
Keep Calm and Head West
The top one was entitled “Emergency Planning at Connecticut’s Nuclear Power Plants: A Guidebook for Our Neighbors” and was addressed to “Resident.” Nowhere in that 23-page booklet was there a date, but it referred to our power company as Connecticut Light and Power and mentioned Connecticut Yankee, a local nuclear power plant that closed nearly 30 years ago.
We still get a similar booklet every couple of years, because we live seven miles from the area’s remaining nuclear power plant, all too aptly named Millstone and situated on a picturesque peninsula that juts into Long Island Sound. I sat in my kitchen, holding that ancient booklet and listening to the hum of the refrigerator (powered by—yes!—nuclear energy). The current PR line on nuclear power is that it’s a cheap and reliable bridge to renewable energy and a crucial partner in generating a carbon-free future. Here in Connecticut, half of all our power comes from Millstone, which is managed by Dominion Energy.
On its peninsula between Pleasure Beach and Hole in the Wall Beach, Millstone draws 2.2 billion gallons of water from Long Island Sound daily to use in its cooling towers. That water, according to a report from the Yale School of Management, is then returned to the Sound 32°F warmer than when it was pulled out. Scientists are now studying warm water plumes from Millstone, Indian Point, and other East Coast nuclear power plants to try to understand their impact on oxygen and nutrient levels in those waters. The Yale report notes that “populations of several commercially important species, including lobster and winter flounder, have steeply declined in Long Island Sound over the past two decades, but scientists are unsure whether overfishing, habitat degradation, disease, or warm water discharge from Millstone is to blame.”
As someone whose parents were well-known anti-nuclear activists and who’s always feared the possibility of a future nuclear war, I found myself riveted to the spot in the basement of my 1905 home, imagining my family of five seeking shelter here during some kind of nuclear catastrophe.
Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, just about 80 miles due north of Baltimore, my childhood home, suffered a meltdown three days before my fifth birthday. So, I have a visceral fear of cooling towers and nuclear radiation. The booklet I found didn’t exactly allay my anxieties. It suggested that, in the event of a crisis at the plant, we should evacuate along a series of two-lane roads that have only gotten more congested in the decades since that booklet was published. “If possible, use only one car. If you have room, please check to see if any of your neighbors need a ride. Keep your car windows and air vents closed.” It suggested packing for a three-day trip and included a helpful list of things not to forget like pillows and toiletries. The booklet advised calm again and again, offering these (cold) comforting words, “Contrary to some popular misconceptions, a nuclear plant emergency would not be a sudden event. A severe nuclear accident would take considerable time to develop, enabling state and local officials to take the necessary protective actions in a timely fashion.” Tell that to the people of Chernobyl and Fukushima. How much time is time enough?
Build a Bunker, Survive the Fallout (But Not the Blast)
The second booklet was emblazoned with the all-caps title “FALLOUT PROTECTION FOR HOMES WITH BASEMENT” and was sent to our address in May 1967 by the Department of Defense’s Office of Civil Defense with the descriptor “Family Residing At.” As I leafed through the 60-year-old pages, I realized that the long-time homeowner had screwed it to the underside of the basement stairs in response to a suggestion on the back of the booklet: “For quick reference, hang this booklet in the corner of your basement having the best fallout protection.”
The booklet was personalized for our very basement based on a questionnaire the homeowner must have filled out once upon a time, because we were instructed to follow plans C through F to increase our “Protection Factor,” or PF, from radiation by 40%. Any “Home Handy Man,” we were assured, could construct a permanent shelter in the basement or at least pre-plan one to be quickly constructed after a nuclear attack. The booklet also had recommendations for how to improvise a shelter once you were cowering in that post-nuclear basement of yours. It did warn, however, that even if you had indeed constructed one, a “fallout shelter provides only limited protection against blast.”
There was, as it happened, no third booklet offering instruction to the home handyman on just how to protect his family from a future neighborhood nuclear blast and, of course, all these years later, there’s no fallout shelter in our basement and no stack of materials to make one with. Still, as someone whose parents were well-known anti-nuclear activists and who’s always feared the possibility of a future nuclear war, I found myself riveted to the spot in the basement of my 1905 home, imagining my family of five seeking shelter here during some kind of nuclear catastrophe. The walls are stones cobbled together with mortar and painted. That painted mortar regularly flakes onto the cement floor, coating it in a sort of crumbly dry snow. We occasionally squirt expanding foam into the holes in the foundation, but there’s still one corner where my kids like to hold their hands and exclaim: “I can feel the breeze” and “it smells like mud right here.” According to our Fallout Protection booklet, that corner is the “strongest” one, so before a nuclear attack, I do hope that I’ll get around to closing up all those holes.
Nuclear war is a constant hum in the back of my mind.
In truth, it would be a mighty grim existence in that basement of ours. Especially if I don’t fix the corner where the kids feel the breeze. There are lots of bikes, a massive canoe and life preservers, plenty of canning supplies, a dehydrator, heat lamps and other accessories for raising chickens, and my husband’s beer-making and distilling supplies. Most of these cool homesteadish things are useless without electricity, heat, or potable water.
The booklet offers no advice on how to supply a fallout shelter with water or beer or anything else, nor does it tell us how long we’d need to be down there. It does say: “Until the extent of the radiation threat in your town is determined by trained monitors using special instruments, you should stay in your shelter as much as possible. For essential needs, you can leave your shelter for a few minutes.” It suggests we get a battery-powered radio.
Of course, the information in that booklet is now 57 years old, long before the world of modern media arrived. I could go online and stream untold numbers of DIY tutorials on bunker-building and provisioning. By now, prepping for disasters, whether nuclear, conventional, or farcical is a multibillion-dollar business. You can even attend a weekend course on wilderness survival techniques for $800. However, nothing I read about that class offered guidance on surviving “a war, societal collapse, or some other calamity” with three kids, so I’m probably staying put. A battery-operated radio might not be a bad idea, though.
You Can’t Hide from Nukes
I mostly head down to the basement in a “keep the laundry-train running” fog. Nuclear war is a constant hum in the back of my mind. It’s a fear that won’t go away and that sets me apart from most Americans. It seems as if most of us deal with nuclear issues by—should the thought even occur to us—trying to push them away as quickly as possible. In an annual survey, Chapman University has been tracking American fears for nearly a decade now. Government corruption and economic collapse top the list, which also includes loved ones getting sick and dying. Fears of war are similarly prevalent, but the specific fear that stalks my dreams isn’t there—the possibility that the nightmare that rained down on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing more than 100,000 of them, when the United States became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons, could happen again.
I know I’m an odd duck with my nuclear preoccupation. Of course, I live in the self-declared “Submarine Capital of the World.” New London/Groton has been building nuclear submarines since the 1950s, and the U.S. naval base here is home port to 15 nuclear attack submarines. So that’s one reason nukes are on my mind.
Then there are those two terrible wars raging right now between nuclear-armed invaders (Russia and Israel) and non-nuclear entities (Ukraine and Hamas). Those nuclear-tinged wars worry me. And am I the only person who noticed that, just recently, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists decided to keep its Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds (yes, 90 seconds!) to midnight? I also read enough to know that our government is going to spend more than $55 billion on nuclear weapons research, development, and testing in 2024 alone. And that figure doesn’t even include the whopping sums being invested in new nuclear delivery systems like Columbia class submarines or the upgrading of the B2 Spirit Stealth Bomber. I can get stuck there sometimes, especially when schools, clinics, and homeless shelters around me are struggling to keep their doors open.Watching the (Nuclear) Clock at Family Gatherings
Such facts swirl in my head all the time—sometimes emitting a low hum, sometimes growing uncomfortably shrill. But I work hard to have other interests and worries. My anti-nuclear activist mother was constitutionally unable not to talk about nuclear weapons and that’s a cautionary tale for me. I can still remember how we wouldn’t go to family weddings or reunions or anything else scheduled in the first 10 days of August, because we were memorializing the bombings of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). Since my mother was one of seven siblings in a big Irish Catholic family and had dozens of nieces and nephews, we missed a lot of family summer gatherings thanks to that principle.
Perhaps it was for the best, though, since I do remember one truly awkward exchange between my mother and a relative:
“Oh hi, Liz, good to see you. You look lovely. How have you been?”
And my mom replied: “Well, I’ve been better. We’re three minutes to nuclear midnight, you know. It keeps us very busy.” (In those days, the Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock was slightly farther from “midnight.”)
An uncomfortable silence followed, spreading like nuclear winter and eventually the relative excused herself to get another martini.
Now that I think about it, the best protection to be found in that basement of mine is our stash of anti-nuclear protest signs.
I try not to do that myself to unsuspecting friends and relatives, but I’d be lying if I told you that sometimes I didn’t think like my mom.
Unlike me, most people have, I suspect, stuck the whole history, science, and politics of that world-killing technology in the proverbial basement (though not ours, of course). So, imagine my surprise when I found all that strange history stuck in my own basement!
The Only Protection is Prohibition
Now that I think about it, the best protection to be found in that basement of mine is our stash of anti-nuclear protest signs. In one corner are all the ones the Connecticut Committee to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons uses in its protests. There are “disarm now” signs, a sturdy yellow banner with quotes from the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and a stack of 70 “Thank You” posters for each of the nations that are party to that Treaty. My kids, some of our friends, and I made those signs to express our gratitude to countries like Benin, Honduras, and Thailand that have agreed (unlike the nine countries with such weaponry) not to develop, test, produce, manufacture, acquire, or possess, no less stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or accept nuclear weapons from other countries, or allow them to be stored on their territory.
Mark Twain supposedly said that war is how Americans learn geography. In making those signs and waving them near the local General Dynamics complex contracted to design the next generation of nuclear-capable submarines, my kids and I are learning a different kind of geography. As we resist, we celebrate the geography of the true superpowers on this planet, the nations that are trying to lead the way to a nuclear-free, bunker-free future where children won’t have to even imagine hiding in their basements.
In the meantime, I’m going to hang these two booklets back up under the basement stairs as relics of what I’d love to think of as a bygone era. I just have to find the right screwdriver.
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How Dare You Shrug at the Doomsday Clock?
The very essence of evolution is the expansion of our thinking to embrace ever-larger realities of cooperation, connection, and understanding.
Jan 28, 2024
I inhale the big, do-nothing shrug that always follows the annual posting, by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, of its global metaphor for Armageddon.
For the second year in a row, the Doomsday Clock has been set—by scientists analyzing the dangers faced by Planet Earth due to human exploitation and nuclear-armed geopolitics—at 90 seconds to midnight. In other words, be afraid. Be very afraid.
The dangers include ongoing nuclear-weapons development by both major and minor national powers, combined with the planet’s current slaughter-wars—in Ukraine, Palestine, and elsewhere—and the ever-looming possibility that they could go nuclear. In other words, human civilization’s collective thinking remains trapped in an us-vs-them modality. One of the weirdest aspects of this that the Bulletin cited was the fact that artificial intelligence has begun assuming control of our fate:
Military uses of AI are accelerating. Extensive use of AI is already occurring in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, simulation, and training. Of particular concern are lethal autonomous weapons, which identify and destroy targets without human intervention. Decisions to put AI in control of important physical systems—in particular, nuclear weapons—could indeed pose a direct existential threat to humanity.
Join me as I let loose a child’s scream of terror and disbelief.
And of course this is all combined with the planet’s ongoing climate collapse. As the Bulletin pointed out, 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded, greenhouse gas emissions are still on the rise, the ice is still melting in Antarctica and... uh, we’re not addressing this with any effectiveness. You know, we’re still too busy playing war and exploiting what’s left of the planet’s resources.
This is how human civilization has organized itself—and nothing can change it, right? That seems to be the attitude of much of the media, which largely contextualizes the news it brings us in a mainstream shrug. Climate collapse? Nuclear war and global annihilation? That’s way too complicated to write about. Come on, we’ve got an election coming up. Us vs. them!
This, at any rate, is what occurred to me when I read a story in The Washington Post the other day, which kept trying to make the point that the country is collapsing into what it called “tribalism,” that is, left-vs.-rightism, with both sides equally convinced of their rectitude and equally snarky toward the other guys. Both sides—get it? When the corporate media serves us politics this way, it displays its (centrist) “objectivity,” which, as far as it’s concerned, is simply reality and not something to be critically analyzed.
War isn’t the result of evolution but sheerly the unevolved aspect of who we are.
The problem, according to centrist analysis, is that the country is getting more and more polarized, both politically and culturally. On one side you’ve got Trump and the MAGA Republicans. On the other side, you’ve got Bernie Sanders supporters. Pretty scary! The USA has never been this divided, the story notes, apparently failing to remember slavery, Jim Crow lynchings, race-separated bathrooms, and such.
What was most unsettling to me about the story, however, was its pulling in several social scientists who explained the nature of evolution to us. While, yes, human beings learned to work together over the millennia and created self-sustaining communities, aka, tribes, the “evolution of cooperation required out-group hatred,” according to a Yale sociologist. In other words, there could be no “us” without a “them” lurking just around the bend—not simply different from us but scary, threatening, and no doubt evil.
While the Post story had no connection whatsoever to The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and its 90-seconds-to-midnight global prognosis, I felt a shrug of indifference toward it nonetheless, in that it remained quietly caged in the us-vs.-them mindset that makes human collective thinking and, oh my God, geopolitical cooperation a cynical joke. That ain’t gonna happen. War is inevitable. So is our trillion-dollar military budget. Any questions?
My primary question is this: How dare you shrug at the Doomsday Clock, at the looming inevitability of climate collapse, at the ongoing expansion of nukes, and the ultimate certainty of nuclear war... if nothing changes?
We are capable of larger thinking than this! That’s the ultimate message of the atomic scientists, and for corroboration I turn to World Beyond War, which makes the point that the very essence of evolution is the expansion of our thinking to embrace ever-larger realities of cooperation, connection, and understanding. And not only that, killing our fellow human beings is not the simplistic result of what our DNA tells us to do but a political creation of the last several millennia that is anything but universally accepted.
“According to myth, war is ‘natural,’” a World Beyond War essay points out. “Yet a great deal of conditioning is needed to prepare most people to take part in war, and a great deal of mental suffering is common among those who have taken part...
“ ...We need to understand war as the cultural creation that it is and stop imagining it as something imposed on us by forces beyond our control... In fact, war is not required by a particular lifestyle or standard of living because any lifestyle can be changed, because unsustainable practices must end by definition with or without war, and because war actually impoverishes societies that use it.”
In other words, war isn’t the result of evolution but sheerly the unevolved aspect of who we are. Humanity did “evolve with habits of cooperation and altruism,” and in so doing created communities of connection and trans-individual support. And yes, any community has an edge, beyond which looms the unknown. But as we encounter the unknown, we needn’t see it, simplistically, as “the enemy,” but rather as part of a larger community, which requires larger understanding. Our need to understand never stops.
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With Doomsday Clock at 90 Seconds to Midnight, 'It's Time to Act'
"Humanity continues to face an unprecedented level of danger," says The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. "Leaders and citizens around the world should take this statement as a stark warning and respond urgently."
Jan 23, 2024
"Ominous trends continue to point the world toward global catastrophe," The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned Tuesday, explaining why the Doomsday Clock remains at 90 seconds to midnight.
Since its 1947 debut, the Doomsday Clock has represented how close humanity is to destroying the world. While it was initially created in response to nuclear arms risks, in 2024, the climate emergency, biological threats, and disruptive technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) also factor into the clock's position.
The Bulletin's new statement says that "the members of the Science and Security Board have been deeply worried about the deteriorating state of the world. That is why we set the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight in 2019 and at 100 seconds to midnight in 2022."
"Last year, we expressed our heightened concern by moving the clock to 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been—in large part because of Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine," the publication continues. "Today, we once again set the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight because humanity continues to face an unprecedented level of danger."
"Our decision should not be taken as a sign that the international security situation has eased," the statement stresses. "Instead, leaders and citizens around the world should take this statement as a stark warning and respond urgently, as if today were the most dangerous moment in modern history. Because it may well be."
Nearly two years since the invasion, "a durable end to Russia's war in Ukraine seems distant, and the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in that conflict remains a serious possibility," the document states. However, Russia is just one of the world's nine nuclear-armed nations.
"Spending programs in the three largest nuclear powers—China, Russia, and the United States—threaten to trigger a three-way nuclear arms race as the world's arms control architecture collapses," the statement notes. "And the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas has the potential to escalate into a wider Middle Eastern conflict that could pose unpredictable threats, regionally and globally."
On the climate front, "the world in 2023 entered uncharted territory as it suffered its hottest year on record and global greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise," the publication highlights. "Current efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are grossly insufficient to avoid dangerous human and economic impacts from climate change, which disproportionately affect the poorest people in the world."
The statement also points out that "the revolution in life sciences and associated technologies continued to expand in scope last year," and "the convergence of emerging artificial intelligence tools and biological technologies may radically empower individuals to misuse biology."
Other AI-related concerns include the "great potential to magnify disinformation" as well as military uses. The statement says that "decisions to put AI in control of important physical systems—in particular, nuclear weapons—could indeed pose a direct existential threat to humanity."
While sounding the alarm about the world's top threats on Tuesday, the Bulletin also emphasized that it's possible to turn back the clock.
"For decades, scientists have been warning us of the dangers facing humankind," said science communicator Bill Nye, who participated in the 2024 Doomsday Clock announcement. "We could be facing catastrophe unless we better manage the technologies we've created. It's time to act."
The Bulletin's executive chair, former Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown, asserted that "only the big powers like China, America, and Russia can pull us back. Despite deep antagonisms, they must cooperate—or we are doomed."
Outside organizations, including the U.K.-based Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), also issued calls to action.
"The Doomsday Clock remaining at 90 seconds to midnight must be a wake-up call for the entire world," said the group's general secretary, Kate Hudson. "We're fast approaching the point of no return. CND calls on all those who want peace to prevail to join us in doing everything we can to turn back the clock."
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Tensions in Ukraine Show Why 'Nuclear Power Is the Most Dangerous Way to Boil Water'
"Calling for a no-fire zone around Zaporizhzhia is not enough," said Beyond Nuclear. "We must call for no nuclear power at all."
Jul 06, 2023
With Ukrainian and Russian officials trading accusations about a possible looming attack on Europe's largest nuclear power plant this week, global experts and campaigners are sharing fresh concerns about the facility and the energy source more broadly.
Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and took control of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) the following month. Since then, fighting near the facility—with six reactors that are currently shut down—has generated fears around the world and controversial references to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the site of which is located in present-day Ukraine.
In recent days, an adviser to Russia's nuclear agency has claimed Ukraine will imminently cause a nuclear disaster at the ZNPP while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned of a potential false flag operation, claiming that "the Russian military has placed objects resembling explosives on the roof of several power units."
While International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts at the facility have so far not observed any visible indications of mines or explosives, the new accusations led the United Nations watchdog on Wednesday to request additional access—specifically to the rooftops of two reactors along with parts of the turbine halls and cooling system.
"With military tension and activities increasing in the region where this major nuclear power plant is located, our experts must be able to verify the facts on the ground," said IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi. "Their independent and objective reporting would help clarify the current situation at the site, which is crucial at a time like this with unconfirmed allegations and counterallegations."
"In a time of national crises in multiple countries, increasing natural disasters, and a worsening climate emergency, nuclear power is demonstrating that it is a liability rather than an asset."
The U.S.-based group Beyond Nuclear noted in a lengthy statement Thursday that "Zaporizhzhia is in the news now almost every day. The propaganda may be deliberately alarmist, but the basis for the alarm is very real or it would not be the subject matter for headline-getting in the first place."
"The reason is simple. Nuclear power is the most dangerous way to boil water. It is unnecessary, expensive, and an obstacle to renewable energy development," the group argued. "It is time to see sense. Calling for a no-fire zone around Zaporizhzhia is not enough. We must call for no nuclear power at all."
Highlighting that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is far from the only threat to the world's nuclear facilities, the group added that "in a time of national crises in multiple countries, increasing natural disasters, and a worsening climate emergency, nuclear power is demonstrating that it is a liability rather than an asset."
Beyond Nuclear also weighed in on the intense debate among activists, Ukrainian and Russian officials, reporters, scientists, and others regarding the dangers of a nuclear disaster at the ZNPP, offering a list of unanswered questions:
- Has the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in fact been wired for detonation and whose interests would be served by blowing up the plant?
- Why is there an exodus of both Russian and Ukrainian plant personnel?
- Will the sabotage of the downstream Kakhovka dam that resulted in catastrophic flooding also lead to an equally catastrophic loss of available cooling water supplies for the reactors and fuel pools?
- Will the backup diesel generators, frequently turned to for powering the essential cooling each time the plant has lost connection to the electricity grid, last through each crisis, given their fuel must also be replenished, potentially not possible under war conditions?
"None of these threats would make headlines if Zaporizhzhia was instead home to a wind farm or utility-scale solar array," asserted Beyond Nuclear. "This perhaps explains the rush now to downplay the gravity of the situation, with claims in the press that a major attack on the plant would 'not be as bad as Chernobyl' and that radioactive releases would be minimal and barely travel beyond the fence line. This is an irresponsible dismissal of the real dangers."
As the group detailed:
After the massive explosion at Chernobyl, the graphite moderator used in the reactor fueled the fire, with the smoke further lofting radioactive fallout far and wide. This has led to an assumption that major fires and explosions at Zaporizhzhia would result in less serious consequences since the reactor designs are not the same as Chernobyl's.
However, if the uranium fuel in the Zaporizhzhia reactors or irradiated fuel storage pools overheats and ignites, it could then heat up the zirconium cladding around it, which would ignite and burn fiercely as a flare at temperatures too hot to extinguish with water. The resulting chemical reaction would also generate an explosive environment. The heat of the release and detonation(s) could breach concrete structures, then loft radioactive gas and fallout into the environment to travel on the weather.
Fallout could contaminate crucial agricultural land, potentially indefinitely, and would include Russia, should prevailing winds travel eastward at the time of the disaster.
Some have suggested that an attack on the plant would not seriously threaten surrounding communities. The American Nuclear Society, for example, said Wednesday that "our experts have carefully considered 'worst-case scenarios,' including bombardment and deliberate sabotage of the reactors and spent fuel storage canisters. They cannot foresee a situation that would result in radiation-related health consequences to the public."
"ZNPP's six reactors have been shut down for over 10 months and are no longer making enough heat to cause a prompt radiological release," the society said. "ZNPP is designed to withstand natural and manmade hazards. Thick, steel-reinforced concrete containment buildings protect the reactor cores and are designed to keep any radioactive materials isolated from the environment."
"In the unlikely event that containment structures were breached, any potential release of radiological material would be restricted to the immediate area surrounding the reactors. In this regard, any comparison between ZNPP and 'Chernobyl' or 'Fukushima' is both inaccurate and misleading," the group added, referencing the 2011 disaster in Japan.
Matthew Bunn, the James R. Schlesinger professor of the practice of energy, national security, and foreign policy at Harvard Kennedy School, made the case at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Thursday that the biggest danger regarding the ZNPP is intentional sabotage.
"How serious is the risk of a major radioactive disaster?" Bunn wrote. "That depends on whether we're talking about an intentional or inadvertent radioactive release. If the Russian forces that control the site want to cause a major radiation release—and are willing to use explosives to do it—they could contaminate a huge area. Although the reactors have been largely shut down and cooling for months, they still contain a huge amount of intensely radioactive material that explosives could disperse."
He continued:
A couple of mines on the roof of a reactor would not be enough. Causing a big release would require some serious demolition with explosives. But that's what was needed to destroy Ukraine's Kakhovka dam—which it appears was done with explosives from within, while Russian forces controlled the site—so a similar operation at Zaporizhzhia can't be ruled out.
No one can accurately evaluate how big an area might be affected; the extent of contamination would depend on how the disaster was caused, how hard the wind was blowing, whether rain brought the radioactive material back to the ground, and more. But one could easily imagine that Russia might hope that such a release would interfere with Ukraine's counteroffensive, forcing some units to focus on evacuating people and cleaning up radioactive fallout rather than battling Russian forces.
By contrast, looking only at inadvertent damage, there are reasons to be optimistic. The Zaporizhzhia reactors are built with thick concrete containment structures, have been cooling for months, and have extra safety features installed after the Fukushima accident in Japan. It is very unlikely that a few stray shells from fighting in the area would cause any serious radioactive release.
Bunn concluded that "over the longer term, there's a need to rethink nuclear safety and security in the context of the possibility that nuclear facilities can be exposed to war, mass civil unrest, or governmental collapse. And there's a need for new agreements to reduce the chance that major civilian nuclear facilities under international inspection will again be targets of military assault."
Meanwhile, Beyond Nuclear charged that "if Zaporizhzhia comes to harm, each side in the conflict will likely hold the other responsible. But ultimately, the responsibility we all share is to reject the continued use of a technology that has the potential to wreak such disastrous consequences on humanity."
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