On the morning of January 28 — at 10 a.m. EST — on Youtube we witnessed the alarming adjustment of the Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight. What does this mean?
Experts and government leaders from around the world are alerting us to take action to persuade our governments to turn toward diplomacy to resolve disputes, and re-start talks to achieve verifiable agreements to eliminate nuclear weapons.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists magazine Issue #1 in 1947 had on its cover the first “Doomsday Clock” to alert the America public about the destructive consequences of the new atomic bomb technology. The artist created a clock to suggest that we didn’t have much time to get nuclear weapons under control. During the Cold War, we remember living with the fear of a nuclear exchange, but with the end of that era, peoples’ attention turned away to other conflicts.
The Doomsday Clock reminds us that humanity is closer than ever to setting off a nuclear weapons exchange by accident or design. Scientists agree that the exchange of just two nuclear weapons would kill millions, and set off a “nuclear winter” that would lead to many more deaths through the loss of crops and famine. For example, in 2015 the clock was set at three minutes to midnight, but by 2023 is was 90 seconds to midnight.
This re-setting of the Doomsday clock raises a metaphorical alarm that needs to be heard around the world, and especially in the halls of government in the United States, Russia, and China —three nations with the most nuclear weapons, three nations already in a nuclear arms race, and exchanging threats and close military confrontations in Ukraine and the South China Sea.
We can confront this existential threat to humanity by contacting our elected representatives in Congress, and our President, to urge them to support all diplomatic talks to slow down and end the costly nuclear arms race that threatens all peoples, nations, and the planet.
Ann Froines lives in Hamden.