The Doomsday Clock Is Now Closer to Midnight Than It's Ever Been (thebulletin.org) 242
Long-time Slashdot reader Drakster writes: The Doomsday Clock, run by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has moved forward to only 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been since its launch in 1947. The lack of action on climate change and increasing threats of nuclear war were the primary reasoning for the move.
They cite the weakening of several major arms control treaties in the last year -- and wrote Thursday that the lack of concrete international action on climate change "came during a year when the effects of manmade climate change were manifested by one of the warmest years on record, extensive wildfires, and quicker-than-expected melting of glacial ice...."
But those threats are "compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society's ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode..."
"By undermining cooperative, science- and law-based approaches to managing the most urgent threats to humanity, these leaders have helped to create a situation that will, if unaddressed, lead to catastrophe, sooner rather than later... [B]oard members are explicitly warning leaders and citizens around the world that the international security situation is now more dangerous than it has ever been, even at the height of the Cold War."
They cite the weakening of several major arms control treaties in the last year -- and wrote Thursday that the lack of concrete international action on climate change "came during a year when the effects of manmade climate change were manifested by one of the warmest years on record, extensive wildfires, and quicker-than-expected melting of glacial ice...."
But those threats are "compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society's ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode..."
"By undermining cooperative, science- and law-based approaches to managing the most urgent threats to humanity, these leaders have helped to create a situation that will, if unaddressed, lead to catastrophe, sooner rather than later... [B]oard members are explicitly warning leaders and citizens around the world that the international security situation is now more dangerous than it has ever been, even at the height of the Cold War."
Political (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Political (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. More Doom Porn. It's just that the Harvard professor claiming the new virus was "thermonuclear pandemic level bad" was upstaging them so they had to do something.
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It was actually more stable during the cold war, at least there were agreements in place. Now insane psychopaths run the system, nothing can be done because of corruption and all those insane psychopaths stealing the funding before it can be applied.
All that is happening is corporate main stream media is spreading corporate propaganda about how great the status quo is and the poor and middle class should just shut the fuck up and if they don't more censorship will occur.
We are staring 1.5m of sea level ris
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We are staring 1.5m of sea level rise in the face
Any minute now........ here it comes... oh wait. Just a liiiiitle while longer... you'll see... 1.5m possibly in the next 1000 years. Personally I don't think I will care.
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it wasn't stabler during the cold war man...
are you seriously thinking that today, now, just now, it is closer to midnight than during the cuban missile crisis? because thats what you're saying and thats what the doomsday clock guys are saying.
is it closer now to midnight than when ussr was falling apart and nobody knew wtf they might be doing and we had active genocide incidents going on in europe? of course not.
and nuclear waste! F IT if the bombs are going to drop because of nuclear waste then what the f
Re:Political (Score:4, Insightful)
makes people not give a fuck about the clock?
Most people haven't given a fuck about what these guys have to say about anything since about 1989. They are increasingly irrelevant and they know it. So they're trying to claw that relevance back in any way they can - first they started by including climate change, and now fractional minutes.
It's all a bit "LOOK AT ME!!! YOOOO HOOOOO OVER HERE!!! WE'RE STILL HERE!!!" if you ask me. Just retire your bullshit clock already - nobody cares and your era is over.
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Not very accurate (Score:2)
The Doomsday clock is only accurate one or two times a day.
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In other news, the doomsday clock is now more irrelevant than it's ever been.
When the cold war ended, so did the specter of nuclear war. The next country to use a nuclear weapon in anger will have the entire world turn on them and shun them out of every economic and financial market there is, and be denounced by every legitimate government, and probably most of the illegitimate governments out there.
Nuclear weapons kept the peace for 70 years. Now it's the almighty dollar doing that work, and nobody wants
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Yet the world's debt to GDP ratio is at an all time high and the poor are no wealthier than before, creating a destabilizing wealth inequality gap.
Re:Political (Score:4, Interesting)
From their actual site's FAQ:
"Q: Isn’t the Doomsday Clock just a scare tactic used to advance a political agenda?
A: Ensuring the survival of our societies and the human species is not a political agenda. Cooperating with other countries to achieve control of extremely dangerous technologies should not involve partisan politics. If scientists involved with the Bulletin are critical of current policies on nuclear weapons and climate change, it is because those policies increase the possibility of self-destruction.
The Bulletin has moved the Clock hand away from midnight almost as often as it has moved it toward midnight, and as often during Republican administrations in the United States as during Democratic ones. It moved the hand farthest away in 1991, when US President George H.W. Bush’s administration signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union."
As to your comment about the world being increasingly sane, that doesn't seem to be the opinion of political editors and columnists when discussing the increasing number of populist leaders in various countries around the world and their anti-science and anti-progress views.
Re: Political (Score:5, Insightful)
Trump bad. Everyone else on my team good.
Re: Political (Score:4, Insightful)
Trump bad. Everyone else on my team good.
Yeah there are many good republicans (not all of them), but that doesn't help when you have a Lunatic in Chief.
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Do you really think Trump is in charge of the US military? Do you honestly think he is? Do you honestly think the Pentagon is going to launch a nuclear strike on Trump's whim? If you do, perhaps you are the one who is mentally ill.
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I'm just going on what the US Constitution says. Do you have some other information available that supercedes the US Constitution?
Re: Political (Score:5, Insightful)
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I reckon drone strike numbers are one date point WRT to the question of pacifist presidents. But even on that question I don't think the data points to the conclusion you seem to come to.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/n... [suntimes.com]
FTA:
"This administration has not only surpassed the previous oneâ(TM)s drone strike volume overseas, it has made the drone wars even more secretive, if thatâ(TM)s possible.
We can cobble together some reporting on the numbers, but finding exact figures on drone strikes in the Trump
Re: Political (Score:2)
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The Constitution says that only Congress can declare war. You know what that's worth, though. I love the Constitution too (in the main part anyway, though the EC is a bit shit) but don't fall into the trap of believing that it's more than a piece of paper. Presidents, the Supremes, and Congress alike have ignored it repeatedly.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The Democrat congress has declared under Obama that the President can declare war for a limited period of time (30 days) and undeclared wars (eg. Libya) were also perfectly fine.
Re:Political (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone with a few working brain cells would know that a nuclear launch is not a "military action" that will be a limited period of time.
There's launching conventional cruise missiles, and then there's burning hundreds of thousands of people to ash and having the entire rest of the world shit on you from a great height. Sure, the UN Security Council might be blocked by the US's permanent veto, but the US overrode that in the General Assembly for Korea in '49, you think that the rest of the world wouldn't take the opportunity to do the same if the US nuked someone in a first strike?
Get fucking serious. This Congress may be mostly derelict of duty when it comes to war powers, but this is the kind of thing that would be a unanimously bipartisan 'FUCK NO' - the use of nuclear weapons without first having one used on the US or it's allies.
Re:Political (Score:5, Insightful)
Wasn't WWII the last time the US declared war? Yup. Wikipedia says 1942.
US presidents have been dodging that little law for the better part of a century.
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership.
It had in it a court that was set up and controlled strictly by multinational corporations. It had the authority to overrule national government decisions. Writing in the Guardian as a UK entity you may not have had to sign a letter that said if there was a disagreement between you and the Guardian you had to go to arbitration where the arbiters are all chosen by the Guardian. If you did then you should understand the fact that you signed away your rights to sue against libelou
It is stupid to think Trump would even use nukes (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike traditional politicians like Clinton, that truly get off on at the graft and power of War, Trump is a business person and real restate developer.
No real estate developer with holdings around the world is EVER going to think about using a nuke, or for that matter even a large scale war.
That is why Trump has been the first president in some time actually reluctant to use the military at scale. There's no Libya, no Iraq under Trump.
Deal with it, Trump haters. War with Iran was never in the cards, we did a measured targeted response and that was the end. Under any of these Democratic chuckleheads they keep trotting out it would be yet another beginning of a large Glorious War to benefit the honor of Dear Leader.
Re:It is stupid to think Trump would even use nuke (Score:5, Insightful)
However, Trump isn't going to start a nuclear war. Actually, neither is China. Like the old USSR, they aren't NEARLY as powerful as they appear to be, and they know it.
There are going to be plenty of problems, but the overall outlook for humanity for the next few centuries is fairly positive. I'll put my money on long-term growth and advancement.
Re:It is stupid to think Trump would even use nuke (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean Obama's.
Re:It is stupid to think Trump would even use nuke (Score:5, Informative)
You mean Obama's.
no, he means trump's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
by the way, is it a coincidence that this anonymous drivel has been moderated insightful and bush seems to have completely disappeared from history in this thread?
i don't even know why i bother checking this site once a month anymore. facebook at least has cat pictures mixed in all the manure ...
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Re:It is stupid to think Trump would even use nuke (Score:4, Insightful)
When was the last Democrat to start up a war?
That would be Obama, 2013, Syria.
Before that, Obama again, 2011, Libya.
Before that, Bill Clinton: Kosovo, Bosnia, etc.
Other wars started by Democrats: World War One, World War 2, Korean War, Vietnam War
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I always find it mildly entertaining that Republicans want to have big shiny dick replacement billion dollar weapons and hundreds of thousands of troops to use them, and then not actually use them anywhere (GWB not withstanding), while Democrats usually want to slash defense spending (it probably needs it) and then use those armed forces all up in everyone else's shit where we have no business being.
Yes, this doesn't always hold true. Here comes the whataboutisms and the exceptions list. But in the last 1
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Yep, all started by Democrats. Fucking idiot.
Re:It is stupid to think Trump would even use nuke (Score:5, Insightful)
There is so much stupid in the comment section it's mind-boggling, even for slashdot.
Clinton "started" the war in Bosnia ? Funny, I thought it was the Serbians, who then began murdering civilians and engaging in ethnic cleansing.
Roosevelt "started" WW2 ? Funny, I thought it was the Germans invading Europe and the Japanese bombing pearl harbor. Might I add that we stayed the fuck out of WW2 until it was almost too late.
Truman started the Korean war ? Funny, I thought it was North Korea invading South Korea.
There's a great big fucking difference in _starting_ a war and getting involved in a war.
You can argue whether it was a smart idea to get involved in wars, but that's a different subject.
You know what war we did start ? The invasion of Iraq. That was unprovoked, based on lies and can be laid at the feet of George W Bush without question.
Meanwhile, we've got extra stupid mod points letting people claim Trump is a pacifist after he assassinated an Iranian general. Hint to stupid fucking moderators, pacificists don't assassinate people, even when they are bad people.
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For over four years following the breakup of Yugoslavia and the onset of war, first in Croatia and then in Bosnia, the United States refused to take the lead in trying to end the violence and conflict.
Washingtonâ(TM)s preference was clear. It repeatedly demanded that the U.N. forces either stop the latest Bosnian Serb assault or, at the very least, agree to NATO air strikes to punish the Serb forces and protect the "safe" areas. Most European allies had a different view. Unlike the United States, man
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Re:Political (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you honestly think Trump would launch a nuclear strike on a whim? If so you are by far the crazy one.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Political (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Political (Score:2)
Re:Political (Score:4, Insightful)
It's you that suffers from the Trump Derangement Syndrome, the rest of the world sees the world as safer with all statistics going in the right directions, crime is dropping, wealth is increasing, pollution per capita is going down and pollution overall is down in the US and stabilizing in the rest of the West. Korea and Iran have halted developing nuclear weapons and even Israel is stabilizing its terrorist backyard.
Re:Political (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? Have you any idea about the rest of the world? Seriously?
The rest of the "world" does not see it being safer.
The middle east is aflame with Russia, Iran, Israel and Turkey fighting for position and influence. North and West Africa is being torn apart by large established terrorist organisations such as ISIS. There is an actual shooting war in Europe involving Russia and Ukraine. India and Pakistan are glaring at and threatening each other with Nukes because India has brought in laws promoting bigotry and has annexed Kashmir. Shots fired.
China is ramping up operations in the surrounding sea territories threatening in no particular order: Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam. All of those nations are ramping up militarily and actively pushing back. The Horn of Africa is in a massive hellish war that could spread into a much greater conflict.
As for pollution. See India.
Iran and N Korea giving up nuclear weapons????????? Iran has started enriching again having seen that N Korea gets a better deal because it already has them. North Korea are enhancing their delivery mechanisms and still making warheads. Iran demonstrated that they can hit a target as small as a building with a ballistic missile. There is no reason to believe Iran and N Korea aren't swapping ideas and technical data.
Myanmar is causing tensions with Thailand and Bangladesh. The Chinese are infuriating the Islamic world by their actions in the west.
Russia is actively interfering in Western politics using so called "soft power". Their ability to plant subversives into western democracies is staggering. (Check out who was the Russian heading up the NRA and founder of the Alt Right group "The Base". If you still think the last was American then check out his current address.)
Wealth isn't increasing. The US is financing a local boom by printing money and borrowing at crazy levels. For some reason there are people that think that borrowing crazily without a plan to pay it back is sound economics. "Hey we got a tax cut on the credit card" is going to bite and bite hard.
The staggering migrations under way around the planet are not due to "climate change". They are due to desperation and poverty. If you think that poverty is due to climate change great for you. Lack of investment in nation building and production are the real problems.
The US Administration is actively working to break up world trade which has a huge run on effect across the world in ways that apparently aren't immediately obvious for some reason.
Tri and Multi-lateral can create even greater wealth than bi-lateral trade. Simple example using very rough figures:
China spends $500B in US but sells $1Tr. It looks so one-sided if it is just bilateral. However, Australia spends $50B in US but sells just $5B. China spends $150B in Australia but sells just $100B. If China economy stagnates it doesn't spend that 150 in Australia on raw materials. Australia then can't buy the 50 worth of US stuff. US loses sales of massive high value exports and the manufacturers aren't allowed to sell to China (because they are our enemy or something). It is way more complex than FOX's simpleton view.
Expand the concept out to 20 countries and you can extrapolate that the US will lose more and more exports because the countries that buy all that expensive stuff don't have the money anymore. It is all salvageable (probably) unless something like a war or the black plague takes down the remainder of free international commerce.
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Russia is actively interfering in Western politics using so called "soft power". Their ability to plant subversives into western democracies is staggering. (Check out who was the Russian heading up the NRA and founder of the Alt Right group "The Base". If you still think the last was American then check out his current address.)
They really called it "The Base" and it didn't ring any bells? For real?
Re:Political (Score:5, Insightful)
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Cool quote about a man who's there for the people, ... and not some moron who looks to the sky while declaring "I am the chosen one".
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Regional nuclear war
Can there even be such a thing? Even if it involves relatively minor nuclear powers, global wind patterns and ocean currents will ensure the love gets spread around the whole world...
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Can there even be such a thing? Even if it involves relatively minor nuclear powers, global wind patterns and ocean currents will ensure the love gets spread around the whole world...
We had Chernobyl that sent a pretty big cloud of radioactive material over parts of Europe but the rest of the world barely noticed, so it would be fairly localized. If however there was a large scale nuclear war the amount of dust whirled up into the atmosphere would cause a global drop in temperature - nuclear winter - that would fuck badly with food supplies everywhere.
Bioweapons, not nuclear weapons (Score:3)
I've never believed that nuclear weapons pose an extinction-level threat to homo sapiens. Horrible yes, and the survivors might wish they were dead, but there would be survivors. Probably not much civilization, but we'd still be around.
I think our major species-level extermination threat is genetic engineering. Most likely from a madman with a CRISPR kit, but it could be an accident, too. Not to be confused with the latest possible pandemic from Wuhan. So far that seems like an accident of the natural sort
Re: Political (Score:5, Informative)
There were a whole lot of bombs tested in the 1950s and 1960s, many of them much larger (and dirtier) than anything in current arsenals. Yet the middle of North America isn't a fallout-covered wasteland from a whole lot of them being blown off in Nevada, and the Pacific isn't a radioactive waste pit (though apparently there is an actual radioactive waste pit with a shitty leaking concrete dome cover on one of those atolls...)
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Look at where the tests happened, deserts, tundra, middle of the ocean. They weren't over cities full of flammable materials that would be convected up into the stratosphere. That's where the predictions of Nuclear Winter come from, half a dozen destroyed cities burning with an intensity only experienced twice in recorded history. Our modern civilization requires 'Just In Time' delivery of foodstuffs, we have very, very little stockpiles compared to just a couple of decades ago and almost no flexibility.
Re: Political (Score:5, Interesting)
Thousands of nukes have been set off. A bunch of those were the nasty surface level ones that suck up dirt, make it radioactive and spread it around the world too. And pure fission devices. Modern nukes are cleaner.
The real question is, is it possible to have a couple of little nuclear powers go at each other without the big boys getting involved.
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One of the little nuclear powers most likely to get into a hot war, India, has four times the population of the US, and their adversary Pakistan has about 2/3 of the US population. In terms of death toll, a nuclear war between the two could be worse than one between cold war era US and the Soviet Union would have been. And the subsequent refugee crisis would utterly overwhelm the rest of the world.
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Check out Steven Pinker's "The better angels of our nature" which lays out the case that this is the best time ever using statistics to prove his point including overall violence, deaths, poverty rates, etc. There's your reference and proof if you are not to ignore it.
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Pinker makes the case that the biggest predictor of stability between nations is the strength of their political and economic relationships. The world has recently been stepping back from its peak integration. Most worryingly, the US has been working hard to isolate China.
"Atomic Scientists" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Atomic Scientists" (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a very anti-nuclear organization.
Any organization that is opposed to nuclear power, like Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is opposed to nuclear power, is an organization that is opposed to solving the problem of CO2 emissions and the global warming that results from it.
To lower CO2 emissions from human activity, and not destroy the economy, will require energy sources that have a high energy return on energy investment (EROEI), low requirements for raw materials and land, is a technology that exists in the here and now, is safe and affordable, and of course produces little CO2 compared to the energy produced.
If we are going to replace coal and oil then the replacement should have an EROEI equal to or higher than coal and oil, which is about 30. At a minimum these energy sources would need to have an EROEI high enough to maintain our economy, which is estimated to be about 7. These energy sources are onshore windmills, hydroelectric dams, geothermal power, and nuclear fission reactors. Not on this list are solar PV cells, solar thermal power, and biomass fuels.
Anyone advocating for solar power, offshore windmills, and ethanol or other biomass fuels, are not serious about solving the problem of global warming. Anyone that dismisses nuclear power as part of the solution to lower CO2 emissions is not serious either. Serious people will have taken the time to educate themselves on the solutions and be advocates for them.
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is not a serious organization, and they should not be taken seriously. If this was an organization of people trained in nuclear science and engineering then they'd be discussing the means on how to solve the problems of nuclear weapons proliferation, radioactive waste from nuclear power and other sources, safety of nuclear power, and the expense of nuclear power, as opposed to what they are doing now which is to claim these problems cannot be solved.
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Don't tell Adrian about this (Score:2)
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Please do anyway. It'll be great!
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Yeah not so great after all. Oh well. Keep trying!
They should push it after midnight. (Score:5, Funny)
Just to make clear they are SERIOUS.
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Hmmm.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ten years from now, the headline will read, "The Doomsday Clock Has Just Reached 100 Microseconds Before Midnight!"
The Despondent Mind (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Despondent Mind (Score:5, Insightful)
That is an interesting article. I have noticed the same thing, particularly in the last 25 years or so. The world is *a vastly safer, healthier, and wealthier" place for almost everyone, compared to when I was growing up. I have always been known as a pessimist, and even I have to admit things are, in general, much better. I think a lot of the doom and gloom is that people have lost perspective on what "bad" used to mean. Many people have never lived in any significant danger of anything bad happening to them, so they have to concoct disaster scenarios in their minds.
Re:The Despondent Mind (Score:4, Interesting)
The past was a time of plenty, things might have been shitty but the road to progress was obvious. People never needed any cornupian crutches, they simply saw enough of everything as long as they raised their productivity to take it.
Now it's becoming a world of making do. Technical analysis and cornupian crutches such as substitution just aren't as hope inspiring as a wide open world for the taking.
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I am not sure what you are talking about. By almost any measure, there is *vastly* more available to everyone, for almost no effort expended, than there was in, say, the 60's. To the point that there is hardly any good reason to make more. People live in incredible luxury and safety, even the "poor", at least in any modern civilzation. The biggest problem the western world has in the
'Doomsday Clock' is to nuclear risks (Score:5, Insightful)
as PETA is to animal rescue. It's more about the media sluts than about the underlying problem.
Having lived through a lot of the Cold War, it's just not credible to me that we're closer to nuclear annihilation than, for example, when that Soviet officer saw indications of an American nuclear launch, or the US guy hung an exercise tape on the operational/real world tape drive and Cheyenne Mountain reported a massive Soviet strike. It's not even clear to me who besides the US could even launch a significant nuclear strike/counter-strike. I suspect the Russian strategic rocket forces are in pretty poor shape.
Re:'Doomsday Clock' is to nuclear risks (Score:5, Insightful)
THIS.
Absolutely. THIS.
I grew up in the 70's and 80's and I couldn't agree with you more. The risks back then were far more real than they are today. As prosperous as the world is right now there is just really no chance that someone is going to push the button.
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THIS.
Absolutely. THIS.
I grew up in the 70's and 80's and I couldn't agree with you more. The risks back then were far more real than they are today. As prosperous as the world is right now there is just really no chance that someone is going to push the button.
Anyone with younger kids? Do they still train them to "Duck and Cover"? Or is it all about school shooters now?
Re: 'Doomsday Clock' is to nuclear risks (Score:2, Interesting)
Some child's stu
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They still duck and cover, it's just now it has an actual chance of helping.
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Duck and Cover hasn't been a thing in a long time - I was going through school in the heyday of Ronnie Reagan when everyone thought he was going to burn us to ash, and we didn't even do that shit then, because everyone knew it was stupid.
Megaton-class weapons don't give a fuck if you're hiding behind a shitty little wood school desk, and neither does the school that just collapsed on you in the overpressure wave. Duck and Cover was simply to give people something to do so they would feel better about "bein
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Re: 'Doomsday Clock' is to nuclear risks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: 'Doomsday Clock' is to nuclear risks (Score:2)
How so?
Re: 'Doomsday Clock' is to nuclear risks (Score:2)
Re: 'Doomsday Clock' is to nuclear risks (Score:2)
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I would happy to entertain even anecdotal evidence disproving even a single one of my claims.
Really, you wouldn't. Don't lie, in politics you cheer for your team.
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Well, in my Army MOS, we studied nuclear targeting/nuclear effects. So I'll take the "boomer" label (even though a real "boomer" is an SSBN.)
Oh Come on! The sky is falling... (Score:2)
It's not a political infrastructure problem (Score:2)
It's a breakdown of the status quo problem.
Countries in the Russian sphere of influence trying to align themselves with EU/Nato (with a little "NG"O help pushing them this way or that). China wanting to make some mineral-raum grabs in the ocean and get the political/technological/military power to finally take Taiwan. Population pressure destabilizing the Middle East and Africa.
Talking will not resolve these things. Lets hope we fluke through this, not optimistic.
Dicks (Score:5, Insightful)
Way to make it completely irrelevant by combining two unrelated things into one value.
Re: Dicks (Score:2)
I guess you have never done that. The other day I bought bananas and lightbulbs. The minumum wage cashier seemed to have no problem calculating a single number for those unrelated items.
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Re: Dicks (Score:2)
So riots caused by banana prices going up 400% is a non-event? Please hand in your scout badges for elementary math, simple logic, and basic cognitive function.
Amen, brother (Score:2)
Including "climate change" renders the clock pointless because it'll ALWAYS be next to midnight. What a waste.
Why a clock? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
By what measure? (Score:2)
This is politics, not science
Bad Incentives (Score:2)
The trouble with the doomsday clock is that it's only when it moves closer to midnight than we are familiar with that it draws interest and eyeballs.
Ok, so if you're in charge of the clock you're probably there because you're deeply concerned about risks facing the world. But the only way it seems like one has any influence at all is by advancing the hands ever closer to midnight.
I mean would any of us have seen the story: Doomsday clock moves from 11:50 to 11:52? So it's inevitable that it doesn't accur
I can't take them seriously... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've found it difficult to take these people seriously, especially now that they added global warming into their calculations on the Doomsday Clock. They can't simply admit that the threat of nuclear war is next to nothing. Since that threat has disappeared they had to think of something to stay relevant. What did they come up with for that? Global warming.
What's the best means to lower CO2 emissions that have lead to global warming? Nuclear power. For "atomic scientists" this should be clear on how nuclear power can lower our dependence on coal and oil for energy. But they can't admit to this after 50 years of talking about how nuclear anything is bad.
In any hospital of a certain size in the world there will be a department called "nuclear medicine" or something similar. We rely on nuclear medicine for the treatment and diagnosis of a number of medical conditions. The material for this comes from nuclear reactors. Also from these nuclear reactors comes isotopes vital for scientific discovery. There would not be a space program right now without nuclear technology. These people, these overly educated idiots, think we can just walk away from nuclear power. It's because of nuclear power that we have affordable energy, and so many consumer products from lighted watch faces to smoke detectors. Nuclear technology is how we reached the abundance, wealth, and safety we enjoy today. We simply cannot go back.
If these "atomic scientists" are to be taken seriously on anything, especially on global warming, then they need to embrace nuclear power and all that we can gain from it. We will not be able to sustain our economy without nuclear power. These "atomic scientists" should be fully aware of this.
I'll believe that global warming is an existential crisis when politicians and "atomic scientists" start acting like it. That means cutting the bullshit and building nuclear power plants. That is not a claim that global warming is a hoax, it is a claim that it is not an immediate threat to human civilization. Again, if this were an immediate threat then the politicians would be acting like it.
Everyone needs to calm down. The seas are not going to boil next Tuesday. We are not going to burst into flames and then drown in the rising seas. We are going to come to realize that we need nuclear power, and we are going to build more nuclear power plants. After that we will see our CO2 emissions begin to fall.
We got this.
Re: I can't take them seriously... (Score:2)
While I agree that nuclear power is needed to reduce co2, your faith in politicians can only be described as denial.
Arbitrary clock arbitrarily moved (Score:2)
Whatever guys. I'm going back to bed.
Not really a clock. (Score:2)
Time, or at least history is roughly linear. With Trump, doomsday is a quantum function.
Time to re-read... (Score:2)
The Doomsday Clock is in the news again. (Yawn.)
Been a while since I re-read The Watchmen [wikimedia.org].
Peak Doom and Gloom (Score:4, Informative)
The Doomsday clock faded when the American Cold War ended and children ceased to be taught how to hide under their desks. The Soviet Union never was so stupid about it.
Now the clock is so overshadowed by the Climate Change Autistic Preachers of Doom and Gloom, that it has lost all relevance.
Repent, Repent, The End is Nigh!!!
Damn! (Score:3)
And here I thought it was almost lunch time.
Dooms Day Clock! (Score:4, Informative)
It is truly unfortunate that history is no longer valued or taught. Because that means we need to make all the old mistakes again. Fight and win the old battles/wars again. Socialism
Just my 2 cents
Re: Wow, (Score:3)