For the first time in the 70-year history of the Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board has moved the hands of the iconic clock 30 seconds closer to midnight.
In the 2017 Doomsday Clock Statement, the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board notes that world leaders have failed to come to grips with humanity’s most pressing existential threats: nuclear weapons and climate change. Disturbing comments about the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons made by Donald Trump, as well as the expressed disbelief in the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change by both Trump and several of his cabinet appointees, affected the Board’s decision, as did the emergence of strident nationalism worldwide.
http://thebulletin.org/press-release/board-moves-clock-ahead10433
Oh, so we still have time……
I hope the cockroaches, scorpions, and tardigrades do a better job taking care of the planet.
I keep making this point, and I will make it again: Right now, today, all the world’s nuclear weapons are in the hands of authoritarians except for France — and France looks set to go authoritarian, perhaps even full nazi, in a few months time. As others have pointed out, authoritarians tend to be insecure, distrusting, untrustworthy, and to react to both real and imaginary situations inappropriately, unnecessarily, and in a provocative manner.
Blf, perhaps people will have time to listen when they are dying of radiation poisoning.
This ain’t helping.
I guess we’ll be developing the basement instead of replacing the septic tank with a proper connection to the sewer system this year.
Neat. Those passwords tweeted in your linked article were probably for 1) the nuclear arsenal quicklaunch interface (TM)* and 2) the pre-signed executive order template where you just fill in the “order” bit and e-mail it to the White House receptionist who’ll then pass it on to wherever it is these things go. The only question is where those passwords have to go before the fun starts.
*Immediately initiates a nuclear exchange with the Top 10 nations to have recently slighted the US. Just fill in the captcha, check the box that you have read the terms of service and press “END”.
I remember when this was funny.
komarov@#6:
I don’t know if you know this but during the Reagan administration, the passcode for the “football” was 8 zeroes. No, seriously. And Clinton dodged any of the briefings on nuclear ops -- which was probably good for humanity but would have left us in a bad situation if someone launched a strike.
The sad thing, to me, is that so many of the young people I encounter -- who were born after the cold war -- seem to have forgotten the monsters that lurk in the silos and revetments and under the oceans, always ready to go, always ready to demonstrate that man’s submission to nationalism was a really bad idea.
There are indications that the various nuclear weapons systems may not be as good as they are cracked up to be, which might mean there would be spotty areas of the planet that would not be flensed. “The living will envy the dead” though. The swap from “global warming” to “nuclear winter” would be no comfort at all.
rq@#7:
I remember when this was funny.
It was never funny.
Did you know that during the cold war the monsters in Washington targeted China for wipe-out, too, because if we did an exchange with Russia, they didn’t want the Chinese to be “last man standing.” So, hey, just set fire to it all in the name of jesus, or something.
Doomsday Clock closer to midnight in wake of Trump presidency. Perhaps the most alarming excerpt: “The new ‘time’ means experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists believe the earth is closer to imminent peril than at any point in the last 64 years.” The doomsday clock was created in 1947, 70 years ago. As can be seen at Ye Pfffft! of All Knowledge, the “clock” is at the second-closest approach to midnight EVER (the 64 years ago rating (1953) of 2 minutes was the closest it’s ever been, so this year’s (2017) rating is the second-closest ever).
Marcus:
I’m with you. Maybe that’s just a consequence of age, growing up with the painful throes of the cold war, and the constant threat of nuclear war. I still remember watching The Day After in 1983. It aired on my 26th birthday.
Back in the day, Carl Sagan was on TV a lot, delineating the horrors of nuclear winter, in a desperate bid to get people to fucking understand the consequences. It was a constant, low level fear. Now it’s back.
Indisputably. I remember having a furious argument with some others at University about the claimed accuracy of the USAnnihilate!Annihilate!Annihilate! missiles (particularly the land-based ICBMs); “They” claimed the testing programme all-but-ensured the then-claimed 0,5(?)mile accuracy of the MIRVed warhead. The point I and others where making is that held true-ish only for missiles launched from Vandenberg on a N-to-S trajectory to the landing area(s?) in the Pacific (the only flight testing done, or indeed possible): The missiles are quite sensitive to gravitational anomalies, Coriolis effect, and other natural phenomena, to say nothing of then-Soviet active countermeasures, plus plain old mistakes and mishaps.
Last year the UK had a Trident SLBM test failure, which the British government has been trying to cover up. The story is currently unfolding. (I have no idea what exactly happened or went wrong, but I also have not checked the technical sites / press.) To-date most of the stories in the press has been on the cover-up, which is made more intriguing by, among other things, the failure was not mentioned a few weeks later when Parliament was bamboozled into a massively expensive programme to replace the aging Trident system (at a cost of something like £40bn).
Marcus:
No. No, I did not know that. Although I should think that if you get to the point where [Unathorised Intruder!!!] is jabbing at the nuclear football trying to guess the code, way too much has gone wrong already.
Okay, sincere question: what advantage would the US have if they could retaliate with nukes, after the fact? How would their situation be worse if the US president, in his last moments, fumbles the riposte?* Isn’t the idea of a nuclear first strike to annihilate the target nation pretty much completely anyway? Other than bloody vengeance there doesn’t seem to be much ‘gain’ from firing back. People like to say that nukes are a deterrent and at this point the time to deter the enemy has passed.
Whenever this comes up I’m reminded of a short story by Arthur C. Clarke.** The reader finds themselves listening to a pre-recorded message from a government official as it is being played on a space station, a fortress in high Earth Orbit. The recording explains that the unthinkable must have happened: a nuclear attack. The recording is the response to a dead man’s switch, a signal that is no longer being broadcast to the station saying ‘all is well’. The recording goes on to give the final orders from home: deploy the station’s nukes … but launch them into deep space. Let the attackers know that there will be no futile counter-strike, that civilisation, such as still remains, may continue. Being written when it was, the presumably ‘unexpected twist’ was right at the end when the speaker signs off -- from Moscow.
Still, I am among those who pretty much missed the cold war. I further admit I was barely aware of the doomsday clock, except as a reference to something that surely wasn’t a ‘thing’ anymore. Thinking about it now, it occurs to me that while the nukes are here the clock has to stay, too. Any easing of tensions over the past few decades wouldn’t change that in any way. Nukes didn’t seem to be so much of an issue anymore after the big superpowers a) fell apart, b) promised disarmament (hah!) c) found other no less tragic outlets for their need to display superiority. Recent events have changed that perception though.
*It might be the last and only good deed of the current president.
**No idea what the title was…
the failure was not mentioned a few weeks later when Parliament was bamboozled into a massively expensive programme to replace the aging Trident system (at a cost of something like £40bn
It’s OK -- it’s being played up over here to justify the $1t nuclear refresh the pentagon wants.
MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction): “full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender”. This was the defining hypothesis of the so-called “cold war”, and there is extensive literature on it.
To ensure each of the various sides were committed to MAD is the reason the USAian and then-Soviet arsenals are massively over-sized (broadly, around ten thousand warheads each (from memory, not checked)). Plus more-then-enough missiles, bombers, and so on: The attacker cannot stop a MAD retaliation by wiping out the warheads and / or delivery systems, there’s too many launched too rapidly for that to be possible…
(This comment does not mean I endorse or agree-with the hypothesis, it is simply a(? the?) answer to the question — as I read it — that was asked.)
Komarov:
My main thought when putting this post together was “how many people even know about the doomsday clock?” That damn thing loomed large over much of my life. In the 1990s, it was near bliss as the clock was pushed back to 15 or 17 minutes before midnight. People who were young then wouldn’t have the slightest idea, and they’ve never had to deal with the same shit as us old cranky people. Unfortunately, that’s going to change.
It’s not about advantage, it’s about retaliation, that’s the point. Mutually assured destruction -- you kill me, I kill you.
I’m not up-to-date with the nuclear weaponry criticisms anymore, but I vaguely thought the so-called “nuclear refresh” was mostly(? entirely?) about the warheads. As such, the failure of an unarmed missile which, apparently, veered significantly off-course (and was possibly then deliberately destroyed in-flight, well before any “warhead bus release”) is simply not-relevant. The damn thing would have been launching sandbags or something.
I resemble that remark!
Hell, I had courses which included a detailed analysis of then-current MAD and then-related Internal affairs…
(The Doomsday Clock was pushed back to 17 minutes to midnight in 1991, which is as far from disaster as it’s ever “measured”.)
The eight-zeros launch code was way more scary than being the “football” code. It was the code for the Permissive Action Links on the warheads themselves. President Kennedy ordered such codes put in place to insure the missiles could only be launched with presidential authorization, but the generals in the silos wanted to be able to launch even if the presidential code didn’t come through for whatever reason, so they reset the codes to all zeros.
This went on for 20 years.
me@17: then-related Internal affairs → then-related International affairs
Kengi@#19:
It’s OK though because nuclear artillery is too small to have PALs and relies for their security on the unit commander being sane. Missile subs, mostly likewise -- no PAL but there are (in principle) other controls. It’s much harder for a missile silo or sub commander to unilaterally order a launch. A friend who was an MLRS battery commander in GWI told me that he had complete release control over the munitions in the “special weapons van” and he was only ranked US Army Major. Subs and silos: someone’s gotta control bringing the sub to depth and level, etc -- you need most of the boat’s command staff in agreement to do a launch; in a silo someone’s gotta make sure the doors are back and so forth.
If you are interested in this, there’s a book called “the button” that is pretty good but terrifying. The command/control stuff is really a mess. And if you really want to get scared read “the dead hand” If you’ve ever seen “Dr Strangelove” it turns out Kubrick accidentally was right -- the USSR really did build a doomsday system, called PERIMETR.
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser is another interesting book on the subject.
I also visited Ellsworth Air Force Base in the early aughts and went on the tour into a Minuteman training silo. Interesting stuff as well. I should probably dig out the photos and put them on Flickr someday.
No matter who starts it, retaliatory weapons will be deployed before the originals hit.
That’s why it’s mutually assured.
@kengi -- if you want to send me some to post, I’ve wanted to go to the titan museum for ages but never gotten down to it. Now i feel like a slacker.
Schlosser’s book is good. Maybe I should do some posts about what I have managed to glean about nukes and references for it.
If you want a good companion for Schlosser consider “the limits of safety” that one kept me wide eyed for days.
“The Day After” was a picnic compared the BBC’s effort, “Threads”, aired in (I think) 1984. I was in my mid teens. It was fucking terrifying. The more so because being 1984, there were only four TV channels… so everyone saw it. Even worse was the film the BBC cooked up in 1965, “The War Game”. They spent a whole bunch of money making it, then didn’t broadcast it for twenty years because it was “too horrifying”.
I went on a tour of a decommissioned government nuclear bunker in the early 2000s (roadsign nearby: “Secret Bunker 2miles —>”). It was only then that I realised how fucked up my (and everyone else’s) childhood had been by the factthat we’d all just taken as normal that none of us were going to live to, say, forty, because it was basically inevitable that for one reason or another we were all going to be killed in a nuclear war before that. People made pop videos about it, for Bod’s sake. I think remembering having lived through that may be what’s giving me a jaundiced view of alarmism over Trump. I figure that since nuclear war specifically isn’t going to be good for his bottom line, it’s wildly unlikely, and that climate change is how he’ll end the world and make a buck.
Looked up “The War Game”, the wikipedia article referenced this poem by Stephen Vincent Benét:
So.
@Marcus Ranum -- Thanks for the other book recommendations. I’ve added them to my wishlist.
I’ll poke around some for my South Dakota pictures. I have a partial set of them in low-res, but the originals didn’t get onto my backups for some reason. I’ll have to go through some old hard drives and hope to find them.
Yes, I’ve heard about MAD before but it’s pointlessness is sort of my point: you’ve already been nuked* so, given the stakes, now might be a good time to decide that it was a bluff after all. You kill me, I’ll… ah, sod it, just close up the coffin and make sure it’s properly lined with lead. MAD is only ‘sensible’ while nobody does anything.
Well, as I’ve said elsewhere, a world where I’m the sane and thoughtful one can’t possibly be real. And it looks like my general reluctance to annihilate cities out of spite disqualifies me as a political or military leader.
Instinctively I’d turn left.
*Or, as chigau reminds us, are going to be in a few minutes. But it’s done either way.
komarov@29, You seem to be missing a critical point: If the nukes fly, then MAD has failed. MAD is not an offensive or defensive strategy, it is a avoidance strategy, namely, an approach based on zero-sum games so both sides avoid being nuked.
I had an internet friend (he passed away about ten years ago) who was a nuclear B-52 pilot. if you’re familiar with the movie BlackBox, you know what I’m talking about.
He said it was a very, very stressful job, and they only did it for a couple years, but it haunted him for the rest of his life, even though he (obviously) never had to actually launch/drop bombs.
Marcus, if you ever decide to visit the titan missile museum here in S. Az. Ping me, I live about an hour from there.
@13. Komarov :**No idea what the title was…
I think the short story you’re talking about there was titled The Last Command thew wikipage certainly matche syour description :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Command_(short_story)
I’ll add to the book recommendations here with Carl Sagan & Richard Turco’s non-fiction tome A Path No Man Thought (Random House,1990) :
https://www.enotes.com/topics/path-where-no-man-thought
By some of the scientists who discovered the “Nuclear Winter” scenario incl, yes, that Carl Sagan.
Also this young adult SF novel Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence (real name Elizabeth Holden) :
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1030207.Children_of_the_Dust
which had a powerful impact on me as a kid.