Doomsday Clock

that too

my comment to you ... No

I don't know if we've moved any closer to Nuclear war. I reckon the recent reductions in nuclear arsenal of Iran would have eased off some fear of that, but then North Korea's H bomb test will be on the minds too.

The world is probably safer than it has ever been, the main threat is probably climate change which requires cooperation.

Sorry, this is definitely not true! Whilst we might not be as close to nuclear disaster as we were in the cold war, we still have more than enough capacity to bring down civilization and on top of that and an ever increasing variety of methods of doing so are becoming available.

As technology advances more ways of killing people and destroying entire nations are obviously going to be developed, but I really do feel humans are advancing socially and diplomatically in a really positive way.


100 years ago, this country was literally in the middle of WW1 where millions of people were killed, before that Europe was constantly going to war with itself, Napoleon, Prussia etc and even before that there was the transatlantic slave trade.

We also have the UN which serves a peacekeeping force in contrast to before when there were various genocides in countries which had broken free from their colonial 'masters'.


I just don't see why angsty people are so negative about the global outlook, aside from climate change (which is a serious thread imo) the world has probably never been more peaceful.

There have been some very worrying developments in this last period of a couple of years. One is that the Chinese military directly threatened nuclear war recently over the disputes with the US and Japan about islands in the S. China Sea - they stated that they are "not afraid of nuclear war with the US". This was in the context of US overflights of those artificial islands they are building in contravention of international law to arbitrarily extend their control of the sea. It isn't clear to what extent this was the full political leadership of China saying it, or just gung-ho generals, but it was a marked escalation and very troubling.

The other big concern is that Russia's Putin oligarchy is busy modernising and expanding nuclear forces and that Russian diplomats have recently made similar threats, for example, against Denmark.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-threatens-denmark-with-nuclear-weapons-if-it-tries-to-join-nato-defence-shield-10125529.html

It's pretty tragic that the deep cuts in nuclear weapons which were previously discussed between Putin and Obama have been replaced with this type of posturing. It's also very troubling that the Russian and Chinese leadership appear to have such a dim understanding of what full nuclear war would mean to them and the world.

We haven't solved this threat to our survival and we need to.

A start would be to signal some disarmaments to the rest of the world and to try to engage them in proper talks about it.

The Chinese have a history of thinking they could survive a nuclear war due to their population size. Who cares if the state exists provided there are a few Chinese peasants left.

One of the biggest worries for me comes from the current slide back towards tactical nuclear weapons. At one point nuclear strategists felt a limited nuclear conflict could be contained to a tactical level and won. Seems American and Russian doctrine is trying to move back that way.

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Russia and ISIS are still credible long term threats, Iran is less of a threat, North Korea probably a little more.

Stays the same.

Tbh, I think the doomsday clock is just plain silly given it has no real objective meaning. Obviously putting it on midnight of the second day clearly means apocalypse is happening, but what does, say, 2300 or 1200 or the other 0000 actually represent?

Is also worth noting that the furthest from midnight it has been is 17 minutes, which when we consider that there are 1440 minutes in a day is still "we're on the brink". Further, looking at reasons for changing the time things often seem like they ought to be retroactively enacted, several times when getting closer to midnight the justification is " nothing is happening "

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