It is now 100 seconds to midnight
thebulletin.org
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The "measurement" aspect feels especially wrong. Might as well say "this year things are very bad", or "terrible", or "very really extremely bad".
Edit: so much wrong with the clock metaphor to begin with. A clock is only supposed to move forward, so they're either using it wrong, or the concept itself is extremely biased towards OMG DOOM! If you want a less silly analogy, use a thermometer. Also it was started at 7 minutes to midnight [0], and the farthest it's ever been is 17 minutes, so the domain of the "function" is also heavily biased towards OMG DOOM!
1. These scientists know that a good headline is necessary in today's world to become part of popular discourse.
2. Regardless of the headline, the actual post IMO is a very good and thoughtful overview of how huge resources put towards technological propaganda are undermining societal institutions around the world and raising the risk that "cooler heads" will not prevail.
So you're saying the nukes are gone, the arms limitation treaties are rock solid and working, and no new threats are emerging.....
Oh wait, none of that is true.
Oh wait, I didn't.
Thermonuclear war is and always will be a possible event in time, not some random value of temperature on the celsius scale.
It gave Americans (and the rest of the world) an answer to the question, "How close are we to nuclear war?" The nuclear scientists could say "The midnight clock is set to 7 minutes." And people could understand what it meant if it moved forwards or backwards.
It was never about measurement. It was always a symbol.
You miss my point. A thermometer would be a better analogy than a clock, because a thermometer measures something that can go up and down, whereas a clock is expected to move inexorably towards midnight. And the temperature of a nuclear war is as arbitrary as using midnight as the time of a nuclear war.
> [...] an answer to the question, "How close are we to nuclear war?" The nuclear scientists could say "The midnight clock is set to 7 minutes."
...which is entirely meaningless, so it doesn't answer the question at all.
> people could understand what it meant if it moved forwards or backwards.
Clocks don't normally move backwards. Hence, thermometer.
> It was never about measurement. It was always a symbol.
I get that. I'm just saying is a really poorly thought out symbol.
Why do you assume that? Is it possible I completely understood your point and just challenged your thinking on it?
I always find it funny on here that some people prefer to be absolutely technically correct on something, rather than just letting a symbol be a symbol, imperfect as all symbols are.
As someone who grew up in the 1980's, anytime the clock moved, it made the nightly news.
PS: we do move the clock back and forth for Daylight Savings Time, or to adjust the it when it's off -- A clock is afterall a human construct.
> US-Russia cooperation on arms control and disarmament is all but nonexistent
Moving the clock is justified.
Russia is developing new hypersonic missiles and missiles with multiple warheads designed specifically to evade missile defense systems. The U.S. is deploying more of our (potentially now ineffective) missile defense systems in places where we had promised not to do so.
The Iran deal is dead. Nationalism is on the rise everywhere, and nuclear states like Pakistan, India, and China are not immune.
The world is at greater risk now than at any point since the Cold War.
I feel like I'm missing out on doing something silly that I can periodically change, call a press conference for and get some attention.
More amusing than the clock itself is the reasoning behind it. I would recommend researching on the depths of their claims
I'm not saying they update it _just_ to get press but I'm sure they highly enjoy the press they get every-time they touch the thing.
Nuclear weapons are a 70 y/o technology, and I don't like my taxpayer dollars going to innovation in WMDs.
Changing to something else would result in additional spend by military-industrial complex for systems that might not be as ready or safe, faster promotions by career types (vs. career death when you get shunted into nuclear weapons work), and reinventing the wheel in terms of diplomatic protocol, public understanding of risk/reward, and potential international crisis.
I just don't think it's worth getting rid of nukes before changing the fundamental properties of human nature. Until that happens, I'd rather keep the nukes rusting away in their silos to keep the saber-rattlers happy and headaches away.
1. No countries should own WMD.
2. Some countries can and others can't.
3. All countries should own WMD.
Only agreement 1 can be guaranteed to save humanity. The next best choice is surely 3 - not 2!
Thoughts?
From his conclusion: "Those who dread a world with more nuclear states do little more than assert that more is worse and claim without substantiation that new nuclear states will be less responsible and less capable of self-control than the old ones have been. They express fears that many felt when they imagined how a nuclear China would behave. Such fears have proved un-rounded as nuclear weapons have slowly spread. I have found many reasons for believing that with more nuclear states the world will have a promising future."
The benefit of option 2 over option 3 is that in the case where just enough countries have WMDs so that if anyone drops a WMD someone will respond but no other countries do you also minimize the number of surfaces for mistakes/abuses.
a. have stable and rational governments, now and in perpetuity
b. do a perfect job of securing the weapons
c. can't covertly provide weapons to terrorists willing to use them
I don't think anyone thinks it's a good idea to give say, Somalia (to pick one example), nuclear weapons.
Humanity embarks on a top-down superoptimization campaign to perfect technology to the point that this question can be answered with ever-increasingly-higher levels of detail.
Follow-on: the question of whether the ensuing yak shaving causes us to realize the WMDs are unnecessary, or whether military-driven paperclip maximization accidentally wipes out humanity.
That doesn't work either—some country will defect and develop WMDs in secret and then take over the world. Of the choices you present, the only reasonable option is ubiquitous access to WMDs (option 3), with the understanding that anyone found using them for any purpose other than a proportional response to a existential threat will be ruthlessly annihilated by everyone else.
I don't understand how this outcome results in anything other than the extinction of human life on this planet.
Who says that's everyone's goal? There are plenty of people in the world, and even in this forum, who only care about saving "some" of humanity. And in topics about the environment or population, you'll find people (even on this forum) who aren't interested in saving any of it.
> Can game theory not be of use here?
Probably, but only if you understand the actual rules people are playing.
Should we test option 3, and how do we roll back if it doesn't work out and turns out to be the worst option ?
It’s kind of a cool thought. The current nation state map seems arbitrary for such gravitas.
Which is why we need national action. Criminals in Chicago buy firearms in neighboring Indiana, criminals in New York City buy firearms in neighboring Connecticut.
The parallel to atomic weapons is similar. If many nations own atomic weapons, it's easier for an unstable/untrustworthy state to acquire them.
So this should be a big problem in nations with strict firearm laws, correct?
>Mr Plotecki said that while there was no evidence the homemade guns had been used by local extremists, it was a concern for the future.
The second article is about the seizure of four firearms.
Truly a menace.
There is no real science behind the doomsday clock. It's literally an argument from authority, and I think it should be challenged.
Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1990 are pretty much the benchmark for marking nuclear peace in the world. Given what I said above, you really want to hold onto your opinion that we're the furthest from nuclear war we've ever been in a long time?
And apparently in war gaming out conflicts with Russia and China, well... we suck lately.
https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/us-gets-its-ass-handed-t...
They get to stave it off forever now, invoking Zeno's paradox, going to fractions of seconds next.
Does that mean we're safe?
This is a big sign that it has outlived its usefulness and the organization is trying to reinvent itself.
We're one shooting war away from a major conflict. We were lucky we didn't get into one with Iran.
There is so much ignorance in this piece. Almost nobody in the real world abides by these arms controls. Russia ignored them. So did Iran. So will the next country. Why would the US abide by a treaty that’s being overtly flouted?
Also, how does recognizing this reality make things more dangerous like the article suggests?
Maybe a thermometer would be more optimistic, as that can rise and fall.
In my opinion the major issue is, that most people don't understand what is happening.
When do they pass out the kool-aid?
What could go wrong?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/15/technology/de...