[0] https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/
The Bulletin addresses the Russian invasion of Ukraine on March 7, 2022 and explicitly left the clock at 100 seconds to midnight. The Bulletin's website says they meet at least twice a year to discuss the state of things. The last many (20) years have seen an announcement made each year near the end of January, but historical it looks like they've changed the clock in response to specific events throughout the year.
https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/bulletin-science-and-securit...
https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/#footer_menu...
We're not x seconds to doomsday. It should have always been a percentage.
Not a logit?
It doesn't look like they update it more than once a year. I guess we'll see where we stand next January (if we make it that long)
So this isn’t procedural.
Both issues require a change in public opinion.
Nuclear threats are rather abstract at present and basically not preventable in any remotely deterministic way. We could focus on it for a century, only for a hardware failure, software bug, or a simple accident to launch a nuclear missile. That doesn't even take into consideration the power dynamics I mentioned or terrorism. Do we have any clue whatsoever as to how Putin, Jinping, and Trump came to power and stayed in power? Or any clue of terrorism. We don't. If we do in some cases, the cause is not a solvable problem. It's super complex.
So, nuclear threats are abstract, opaque, but yet simultaneously can materialize out of thin air at a moment's notice. However, there are environmental and humanitarian problems that we can start working on and solving today, with actionable solutions.
Environmentalism is a question of balance and sustainability of entire ecosystems and environments. The idea is that by restoring balance, everyone benefits, including humans. How nuclear threats apply to that other than yet another source of environmental pollution or how it’s supposedly on environmentalists is beyond me.
This is in contrast to climate change, which is ongoing and very difficult but not impossible to stop, at least in its worst forms.
In other words, it's a category error. Being worried about climate change doesn't commit one to every way that humanity can extinguish itself (nuclear holocaust, global pandemics, &c.).
Which leads one to believe that many of these activists are not actually motivated to protect humanity from an environmental disaster, but because they want to improve their social standing.
We're left to assume the worst, that you are not actually motivated to protect humanity from an environmental disaster, you just want to improve your social standing by posting here on HN.
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/world-war-i-histo...
Under Article 8(2)(b)(xi) of the 1998 ICC Statute, “[k]illing or wounding treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army” is a war crime in international armed conflicts.
There is a reason why rules of engagement were created, to minimise civilian casualty, and to reduce suffering for all parties involved.
It was farther from midnight in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis than in 2007.
"Putting humanity on a permanent, blanket high-alert isn't helpful when it comes to policy or science." -Alex Barasch
[0] https://apnews.com/article/biden-nuclear-risk-1d0f1e40cff3a9...
There’s another option. The US making another country so fearful of regime change or destruction that they fire first. And the US has repeatedly attempted and accomplished regime change, several times resulting in the death of the former leader of the country.
Also, yes. The US would fire first if it were losing a conventional war, which of course would be unlikely in the next few decades. We’ve already seen that the US did use nukes to avoid losses invading the Japanese mainland.
The idea that the US would use nuclear weapons in response to losing a conventional war is not well founded. One would not necessarily consider Vietnam nor Afghanistan as conventional wars, but they were lost, and nuclear strike did not happen.
I don't really see any likelihood for the US using nuclear weapons in a _deliberate_ first strike outside of parts of the continental US being invaded and occupied.
The US wasn’t being invaded and didn’t need to continue the war to prevent a future invasion in those cases. Whereas Japan would’ve continued the war and brought it back to the US mainland eventually.
This is simply ahistoric.
Japan was on the brink of loss and everyone knew it (including all of Japan's military and political leaders) -- Japan was already suing for peace long before the bombs were dropped. The main sticking point was the conditions of surrender and the Japanese were deluded (partially by the US, intentionally or not) into thinking Russia could get them more favourable surrender conditions. These delays, combined with the use of the bomb being a foregone conclusion in the minds of the US leadership regardless of Japan's stance and what seems to be at least some wish to show America's might, lead to the bombings.
No reputable historian (nor the statements made by several important military figures at the time) could make a credible argument that in 1945, Japan's loss was not already a foregone conclusion irrespective of the bomb, let alone suggesting that Japan would be able to even attempt to invade the US. If the US had explicitly stated they would not try the royal family for war crimes and keep the 帝 (emperor) alive, Japan would've surrendered (this is literally the only important condition they wanted, and it's what the US was planning on doing anyway).
If you'd like to watch a very long video explaining the events leading up to the bombings with a very detailed timeline: https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go
And yet many senior political figures in the US repeatedly call for regime change, coup, uprising, and worse. Why do those things?
... to happen in the US, and nobody nukes them either.
Clinton made that type of proclamation when he was in office, and the conservatives went nuts about it. It's really the only way to not escalate to total global devastation.
nukes <> conventional weapons> Keep in mind that the following are annualized probabilities. For a child born today (say 75 year life expectancy) these probabilities (.0117) suggest that the chance of a nuclear war in their lifetime is nearly 60%, (1-(1-.0117)^75). At an annualized probability of .009 which is the probability from accident analysis it’s approximately 50%.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/07/wh...
> However, the implications of MAD aren’t what most people expect. Our current interpretation is a mutation of the original premise, as von Neumann examined the situation mathematically and arrived at a two-party version of Nash’s Equilibrium (John Nash generalized it to n-parties).
> More precisely, nuclear annihilation is not an iterated dilemma; therefore, it is completely logical for a first strike to be the best strategic option in this scenario. If State A destroys State B and removes any capacity for State B to strike A, then State A is able to guarantee its future existence and “wins” the game.
> The policy of nuclear retaliation, or a second strike, is an attempt to change the payoff function of this game and add a cost to this form of defection. It adds one more iteration to the game where the player is punished for their defection/first strike. Thereby making sure that the win-state is not attained.
> However, this rationale/version of MAD starts to break down the longer that you look at it. What incentive do the submarine commanders have to launch, given that the homeland that they’ve received their orders from has already been destroyed? It is not a rational policy from the survivor’s standpoint to destroy what is left of the world and end their own existence in the process. Therefore they have an incentive to not carry out the second strike, resurrecting the first-strike problem once again.
> From this perspective, and from the technology that existed in 1950, game theory predicts only one solution — strike first; strike hard. As he famously put it9,
> “If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”
> And yet, we’re still here. Despite many, many, many close calls. Including the times when the US accidentally, almost, nuked the Carolinas. Twice. (that we know of.)
> Why?
---
> All told, there have been 16 “close calls.” That we know of. The world has faced nuclear annihilation 16 times, and all 16 times, multiple people have refused to press the button despite (seeming) orders and procedures to the contrary.
> Their actions are not rational. These outcomes fly against the predictions of game theory. All actors involved understood the dominant strategy and why it was the best strategy, and they chose not to play it. They chose not to end the world.
> Dr. Thomas Schelling calls this “the event that didn’t occur,” and he devoted his Nobel prize lecture to the invalidation of von Neumann’s and game theory’s predictions by our 50+ years of applied experience.
Sources etc are in my essay, https://1517.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-game-theory
---
Essentially, every single time there has been an escalation, people who have to carry out the orders, people in the chain of command have refused to be the ones to end the world.
Tactical nukes are really bad as weapons. Nukes aren't a magic wand that can make an unwinnable war winnable. Freeman Dyson et al pointed this out in their report about the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Vietnam war.
Getting a bigger bomb doesn't actually change the tactical situation on the ground. Sure you can make the thing go boom, but you still won't be able to hold the territory. And now the locals will resist you even harder.
If they could have won us a war, we'd have used them by now. But between the lack of desire to be the one who ends the world and their uselessness as day-to-day weapons. Nukes are, for the most part, a non-factor in modern conflict once it starts. Of course, their presence changes the calculus of whom a state should invade or not invade.
I still think that the chances of Putin using a bomb are low, most academic circles also thought the chance of all out war in Ukraine were also low. A lot of this conflict isn't so much strategic logic as it is ego stroking.
Now, about your point... given on the info he had, Putin thought he was able to rush Ukraine, obtain a fait accompli, and then the sanctions will stop. He didn't knew his army was so bad (dictator's bias and all that), and he cared about his image for posterity, not about the wellbeing of Russia itself. In that case, war was anything but unlikely.
But about the bombs? What does Putin gain with a tactical nuke?
a) It somehow fails during the flight, or fails to detonate = Humiliation b) Soldiers refuse to pull the trigger, he gets a rebellion. c) It explodes, he manages to wipe out 1-2 battalions at most, so it doesn't change the outcome of the war. OTOH, Russia becomes a pariah state and gets blockaded hard (potentially even by China/India), Ukraine gets every weapon they need, and they risk actual NATO intervention.
None of the options improves his own outcomes, so I don't think nukes are as likely as news/reddit posts make it look like.
The secret automatically retaliating doomsday machine. In the movie, the Russians kept it secret in order to improve its effectiveness as a deterrent.
Of course, the USSR must have watched the film, because they secretly deployed exactly such a device!
"It was to be announced at the Party congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises."
You don't want to announce that you are building the machine before it comes online, because that gives the adversary an incentive to strike before it is finished; you want to bring it online and then make the announcement shortly after.
> Lacking cooperation from the Pentagon in the making of the film, the set designers reconstructed the aircraft cockpit to the best of their ability by comparing the cockpit of a B-29 Superfortress and a single photograph of the cockpit of a B-52 and relating this to the geometry of the B-52's fuselage. The B-52 was state-of-the-art in the 1960s, and its cockpit was off-limits to the film crew. When some United States Air Force personnel were invited to view the reconstructed B-52 cockpit, they said that "it was absolutely correct, even to the little black box which was the CRM."[17] It was so accurate that Kubrick was concerned about whether Adam's team had carried out all its research legally.[17]
The Soviet doomsday device was actually made known to the US too, just like the movie, it was the Dead Hand, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
From the designer,
> It was designed to lie semi-dormant until switched on by a high official in a crisis. Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions. Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil. If it seemed that one had, the system would check to see if any communication links to the war room of the Soviet General Staff remained. If they did, and if some amount of time—likely ranging from 15 minutes to an hour—passed without further indications of attack, the machine would assume officials were still living who could order the counterattack and shut down. But if the line to the General Staff went dead, then Perimeter would infer that apocalypse had arrived. It would immediately transfer launch authority to whoever was manning the system at that moment deep inside a protected bunker—bypassing layers and layers of normal command authority.[12]
You can read the first few chapters here, https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne/igt/
And the full solutions manual is here, https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne/igt/igtSolutions.p...
It’s hard to take it seriously.
One, we’ve been in the second Cold War since the late 1990s.
Two, yeah, duh.
This is like the first Cold War, without the stabilizing patterns of interaction, and with a major direct vs. proxy superpower conflict like Vietnam or Afghanistan, but much closer to the heart of the directy-involved superpower and the heart of the other superpower’s alliance and chewing through the directly involved superpowers forces much faster (about equal to US Vietnam casualties for the whole war—or four times the USSR’s Afghanistan casualties—in less than a year rather than a decade or more.)
Notably the biggest rollback of the clock during the Cold War was in Jan 1963, shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which Kennedy and Kruschev demonstrated that cooler heads could prevail during a nuclear standoff between the only nuclear powers with world-destroying arsenals at the time. No doubt this stayed in their minds for the next couple decades.
For the past couple of decades the clock has also considered: climate change (on which insufficient progress has been made or even really attempted); biohazard (a global inability to cooperatively contain or mitigate, along with the non-trivial possibility that Covid was actively bred in a biolab in an emerging country clearly incapable of handling biohazards safely, and rapid advancement in research techniques eg CRISPR, all whilst the Biological Weapons and Toxin Convention has yet to develop an effective enforcement regime); antibiotics resistance; the social media mass-brainf*ck with attendant negligence or impotence from the companies themselves; and cybersecurity (they mention the Colonial pipeline ransomware incident as a threat to infrastructure itself).
They didn't even mention the overly-brittle global supply chain. Sure, we can survive on last year's iPhone for a little longer but what about when we can't get replacement PLC or I/O cards to run our power plants or food processing facilities?
If this sounds like a breathless run-on sentence, that's because it is. The doomsday clock assesses existential threats to the human race, and there's a lot more of them - in a lot more player's hands - now than during the Cold War.
[0] https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/ [1] https://www.space.com/russian-spacecraft-stalking-us-spy-sat...
Russia is self-sufficient in energy, food and fertilizer.
In contrast, if China became unable to import these things, half of its population would be dead within a year.
I hate Putin, don’t get me wrong, but if he were to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, this would not immediately trigger WW3 or armageddon.
Bear in mind some 2,000 nuclear weapons have been detonated in tests with over 500 of those as atmospheric blasts.
The most fallout generated in tests has been from ground level (or rather reef level) detonations that uplifted and irradiated vast amounts of material.
But I agree with you that fallout from an air burst is minimal.