The Clock is ticking
As you’ve probably heard, yesterday, in a ceremony hosted by the British theoretical physicist Steven Hawking, the directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, moved the minute hand of its famed “Doomsday Clock” forward by two minutes.
A group of scientists
from the University of Chicago conceived the clock in 1948, three years after
the
The clock hands are now positioned at five minutes to midnight. This is the closest it has come since the end of the Cold War. The statement released yesterday by the Board of Advisors of the Bulletin began:
We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices.
North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.
Although the world's stockpile of nuclear boms is lower than it was at its peak of 65,000 in 1986, there are still an estimated 27,000 in the world, 26,000 of which are in the hands of the United States and Russia, and another 1,000 or so are held by Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea.
Nor are the weapons now in existence the limit of the problem. Iran, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia have declared their intention to embark on nuclear power programs, and Nigeria, Poland, and Vietnam have expressed interest. Nuclear power plants, of course, generate fuel for bombs. Spent plutonium fuel from reactors is weapons-usable after reprocessing, and just 10 or 12 pounds of highly enriched uranium or slightly more than 2 pounds of plutonium is all that is needed to make a bomb.
As noted in the announcement by the Bulletin, each of the 27,000 warheads now in existence has 8 to 40 times the destructive force that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. In that relatively small explosion, 100,000 people were killed. Just fifty of today’s nuclear weapons could kill 200 million people. Man clearly has the power to destroy all life on the planet.
Society has Armaggedon in its power, but is it possible for it to “adjust its basic attitudes and institutions”? Possible, yes. Anything is possible that does not violate a law of nature. There is no law of nature yet discovered that says intelligent life in the universe must commit suicide.
Therefore, if mankind is in danger of destroying itself, there must be deeply-ingrained attitudes and institutions in society that are wrong. If not, society would not still be in danger of self-extinction more than half a century after the danger of nuclear weapons was so gruesomely demonstrated.
I believe the erroneous belief that has kept the Doomsday Clock set so close to midnight all these years is a belief that the state is an absolute necessity for the functioning of society, and that all individuals must submit to its authority. Yet, the state itself was the mechanism that both developed the weapons of mass destruction, and keeps the world in continous danger of Armageddon. The state.
Will the clock advance to midnight? Will mankind destroy itself? Very possibly. But if, by chance or by luck, it does not, it will be because enough individuals recognized the terminal danger of empowering governments with sovereignty. In a world in which sovereign individuals controlled their own lives and fortunes, there would be no nuclear weapons, and no need for a Doomsday Clock.
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