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We could soon see several nuclear powers pitted against each other and dragging the world closer to nuclear annihilation.
For nearly 30 years, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has driven the Middle East into war and destruction. The man is a powder keg of violence. Throughout all the wars that he has championed, Netanyahu has always dreamed of the big one: to defeat and overthrow the Iranian Government. His long-sought war, just launched, might just get us all killed in a nuclear Armageddon, unless Netanyahu is stopped.
Netanyahu’s fixation on war goes back to his extremist mentors, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Yitzhak Shamir, and Menachem Begin. The older generation believed that Zionists should use whatever violence–wars, assassinations, terror–is needed to achieve their aims of eliminating any Palestinian claim to a homeland.
The founders of Netanyahu’s political movement, the Likud, called for exclusive Zionist control over all of what had been British Mandatory Palestine. At the start of the British Mandate in the early 1920s, the Muslim and Christian Arabs constituted roughly 87% of the population and owned ten times more land than the Jewish population. As of 1948, the Arabs still outnumbered the Jews roughly two to one. Nonetheless, the founding charter of Likud (1977) declared that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” The now infamous chant, “from the River to the Sea,” which is characterized as anti-Semitic, turns out to be the anti-Palestinian rallying call of the Likud.
Israel’s war on Iran is the final move in a decades-old strategy. We are witnessing the culmination of decades of extremist Zionist manipulation of US foreign policy.
The challenge for Likud was how to pursue its maximalist aims despite their blatant illegality under international law and morality, both of which call for a two-state solution.
In 1996, Netanyahu and his American advisors devised a “Clean Break” strategy. They advocated that Israel would not withdraw from the Palestinian lands captured in the 1967 war in exchange for regional peace. Instead, Israel would reshape the Middle East to its liking. Crucially, the strategy envisioned the US as the main force to achieve these aims—waging wars in the region to dismantle governments opposed to Israel’s dominance over Palestine. The US was called upon to fight wars on Israel’s behalf.
The Clean Break strategy was effectively carried out by the US and Israel after 9/11. As NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark revealed, soon after 9/11, the US planned to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.”
The first of the wars, in early 2003, was to topple the Iraqi government. Plans for further wars were delayed as the US became mired in Iraq. Still, the US supported Sudan’s split in 2005, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and Ethiopia’s incursion into Somalia that same year. In 2011, the Obama administration launched CIA operation Timber Sycamore against Syria and, with the UK and France, overthrew Libya’s government through a 2011 bombing campaign. Today, these countries lie in ruins, and many are now embroiled in civil wars.
Netanyahu was a cheerleader of these wars of choice–either in public or behind the scenes–together with his neocon allies in the U.S. Government including Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and others.
Testifying in the U.S. Congress in 2002, Netanyahu pitched for the disastrous war in Iraq, declaring “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” He continued, “And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.” He also falsely told Congress, “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons.”
The slogan to remake a “New Middle East” provides the slogan for these wars. Initially stated in 1996 through “Clean Break,” it was popularized by Secretary Condoleezza Rice in 2006. As Israel was brutally bombarding Lebanon, Rice stated:
“What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East not going back to the old one.”
In September 2023, Netanyahu presented at UN General Assembly a map of the “New Middle East” completely erasing a Palestinian state. In September 2024, he elaborated on this plan by showing two maps: one part of the Middle East a “blessing,” and the other–including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran–a curse, as he advocated regime change in the latter countries.
Israel’s war on Iran is the final move in a decades-old strategy. We are witnessing the culmination of decades of extremist Zionist manipulation of US foreign policy.
The premise of Israel’s attack on Iran is the claim that Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Such a claim is fatuous since Iran has repeatedly called for negotiations precisely to remove the nuclear option in return for an end to the decades of US sanctions.
Since 1992, Netanyahu and his supporters have claimed that Iran will become a nuclear power “in a few years." In 1995, Israeli officials and their US backers declared a 5-year timeline. In 2003, Israel’s Director of Military Intelligence said that Iran will be a nuclear power “by the summer of 2004.” In 2005, the head of Mossad said that Iran could build the bomb in less than 3 years. In 2012, Netanyahu claimed at the United Nations that “it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.” And on and on.
This 30-year-plus pattern of shifting deadlines has marked a deliberate strategy, not a failure in prophecy. The claims are propaganda; there is always an “existential threat.” More importantly, there is Netanyahu’s phony claim that negotiations with Iran are useless.
Iran has repeatedly said that it does not want a nuclear weapon and that it has long been prepared to negotiate. In October 2003, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa forbidding the production and use of nuclear arms—a ruling later officially cited by Iran at an IAEA meeting in Vienna in August 2005 and referenced since as a religious and legal barrier to pursuing nuclear weapons.
Even for those skeptical of Iran’s intentions, Iran has consistently advocated for a negotiated agreement supported by independent international verification. In contrast, the Zionist lobby has opposed any such settlements, urging the US to maintain sanctions and reject deals that would allow strict IAEA monitoring in exchange for lifting sanctions.
In 2016, the Obama Administration, together with the UK, France, Germany, China, and Russia, reached the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran—a landmark agreement to strictly monitor Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Yet, under relentless pressure from Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby, President Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. Predictably, when Iran responded by expanding its uranium enrichment, it was blamed for violating an agreement that the US itself had abandoned. The double-standard and propaganda is hard to miss.
On April 11, 2021, Israel’s Mossad attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz. Following the attack, on April 16, Iran announced that it would increase its uranium enrichment further, as bargaining leverage, while repeatedly appealing for renewed negotiations on a deal like the JCPOA. The Biden Administration rejected all such negotiations.
At the start of his second term, Trump agreed to open a new negotiation with Iran. Iran pledged to renounce nuclear arms and to be subject to IAEA inspections but reserved the right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. The Trump Administration appeared to agree to this point but then reversed itself. Since then, there have been five rounds of negotiations, with both sides reporting progress on each occasion.
The sixth round was ostensibly to take place on Sunday, June 15. Instead, Israel launched a preemptive war on Iran on June 12. Trump confirmed that the US knew of the attack in advance, even as the administration was speaking publicly of the upcoming negotiations.
Israel’s attack was made not only in the midst of negotiations that were making progress, but days before a scheduled UN Conference on Palestine that would have advanced the cause of the two-state solution. That conference has now been postponed.
Israel’s attack on Iran now threatens to escalate to a full-fledged war that draws in the US and Europe on the side of Israel and Russia and perhaps Pakistan on the side of Iran. We could soon see several nuclear powers pitted against each other and dragging the world closer to nuclear annihilation. The Doomsday Clock is at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest to nuclear Armageddon since the clock was launched in 1947.
Over the past 30 years, Netanyahu and his US backers have destroyed or destabilized a 4,000-km swath of countries stretching across North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Western Asia. Their aim has been to block a Palestinian State by overthrowing governments supporting the Palestinian cause. The world deserves better than this extremism. More than 170 countries in the UN have called for the two-state solution and regional stability. That makes more sense than Israel bringing the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon in pursuit of its illegal and extremist aims.
Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills?
Some experts worry that, if the country went to war, many reserve units might be unable to deploy. A U.S. official who works on these issues put it simply: ‘We can’t get enough people.’”
“Vietnam Syndrome” hasn’t gone away! It resulted in the elimination of the draft and ultimately morphed into “Iraq Syndrome”—so it seems—and even though those lost, horrific wars are now nothing but history, the next American war is ever-looming (against Canada?... against Greenland?). And yet, good God, the military is having a hard time recruiting a sufficient amount of patriotic cannon fodder.
“We can’t get enough people”—you know, to kill the enemy and to risk coming home in a box. And maybe that’s a good thing! The public is kind of getting it: War is obsolete (to put it politely). War is insane; it threatens the future of life on the planet—even though a huge swatch of the American media seems unwilling to get it and continues to report on war and militarism as though they literally equaled “national defense.” After all, we spend a trillion dollars annually on it.
Indeed, war unites us... in hell.
The above quote is from a fascinating—and troubling—piece by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker, which has long been my favorite magazine. What troubled me was the unquestioned acceptance in the piece of the inevitability, indeed, the normalcy, of going off to war. In that context, war is simply an abstraction—a real-life game of Risk, you might say—and the proclaimed enemy is, ipso facto, less human than we are, and thus more easily reduced to collateral damage.
The article addresses a highly problematic (from a military point of view) diminishing of the military’s recruitment base. For instance: “Recruiters,” Filkins writes, “are contending with a population that’s not just unenthusiastic but incapable. According to a Pentagon study, more than three-quarters of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible, because they are overweight, unable to pass the aptitude test, afflicted by physical or mental-health issues, or disqualified by such factors as a criminal record. While the political argument festers, military leaders are left to contemplate a broader problem: Can a country defend itself if not enough people are willing or able to fight?”
While this is no doubt a legitimate question—militarism, after all, exists in a social context—what’s missing from this question, from my point of view, is the larger one that hovers above it, emerging from the future. Perhaps the larger question could be put this way: In a world that is hostage to multi-thousands of nuclear weapons across the planet, and on the edge of ecological collapse—with its Doomsday Clock currently set at 89 seconds to midnight—can a country defend itself from its greatest risks by going to war? Or will doing so simply intensify those risks?
Here’s a slightly simpler way to put it: For God’s sake, isn’t war obsolete by now? Isn’t militarism obsolete? I’m surprised The New Yorker piece didn’t reach a little further into the stratosphere to establish the story’s context. Come on! This is the media’s job.
Actually, there’s also a second question emerging as well. Let me put it this way: Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills? Could this be so despite the quasi-meaningless borders the world has divided itself into, which must be “protected” with ever more omnicidal violence?
The story notes: “After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a groundswell of patriotic feeling encouraged young people to volunteer for the military. The sentiment held as the U.S. attacked the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and then as it launched an invasion of Iraq, which quickly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. But, as those wars dragged on, the public mood soured. The troops deployed there were unprepared and ill-equipped, sent to pursue objectives that could be bafflingly opaque.”
The public mood soured? Could this possibly be described in a more simplistic way—with less respect for the national collective awareness? What if something a bit more significant were actually happening, e.g., a public majority began seeing the invasion, the devastation of hundreds of thousands of lives, as... wrong?
And might, let us say, enormous human change be brewing? The same thing happened in Vietnam. It turned into hell, not just for the people of Vietnam—the war’s primary victims—but for the U.S. troops waging it. It became unendurable. “Fragging”—the killing of officers—started happening. So did moral injury: psychological woundedness that wouldn’t go away. Vet suicides started becoming common.
Back to Iraq. At one point the story mentions Bravo Company, a Marine battalion that had led the bloody assault on Fallujah in 2004. Two decades later, some of the surviving members held a reunion, which was permeated with anguish and guilt. For many, the trauma of Fallujah hadn’t gone away, and they remained emotionally troubled, often turning for relief to painkillers, alcohol, and methedrine.
All of which is deeply soul-cutting, but there’s a bit missing from the context: “Twenty years after the U.S. military offensive in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, locals are still suffering from the lasting impacts of the use of internationally banned weapons by U.S. forces,” according to Global Times. This includes such hellish instruments of war as white phosphorous and depleted uranium, the effects of which—on local air, soil, water, and vegetation—do not go away.
And of course the consequences for the locals have been ghastly, including enormous increases in cancer, birth defects, leukemia, still births, infant mortality and so, so much more, including “the emergence of diseases that were not known in the city before 2004.” And these effects will remain present in Fallujah, according to the article, for hundreds of years.
But the U.S. had to defend itself!
This is insane. War, as I have noted previously, is humanity’s cancer. It affects all of us, whether we belong to “us” or “them.” It affects us collectively. Indeed, war unites us... in hell. The mainstream media needs to stop pretending it doesn’t realize this.
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.
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.