89 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock? A Lot Less Than That

Without doubt imagining that they were acting courageously, seriously and with dignity – they set their famous symbolic Doomsday Clock assessing the dangers of global thermonuclear war from 90 seconds to Midnight — World War III – to 89 seconds to Midnight. They boldly moved it one second closer to Armageddon.

Who the hell cares?

For 70 years, the symbol of the Doomsday Clock has served very usefully as a warning sign of the dangers of nuclear conflict. The clock had been set at 90 seconds to Midnight since January 2023, the closest setting to Midnight – defined as the outbreak of thermonuclear war – it had ever been. 

Writing in these columns on August 29, 2024 – five months ago I stated, “It is now time to reset the Clock. It needs to be turned to Midnight. There is no more Margin. Doomsday is upon us. The destruction of Europe and North America – and the obvious threat to Russia too – could now come at any time.”

Well five months later, the heroic arms chair warriors and pen-pushing academics and hair splitters at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have indeed reset their fabled Clock.  Straight to Midnight? Of course not! They have moved it by one single, pathetic, ludicrous second.

This is a black joke that even the great 1982 satire of the End of the World “Whoops Apocalypse” did not imagine. It was a six-part 1982 television sitcom by Andrew Marshall and David Renwick, made by London Weekend Television for ITV. The British Broadcasting Corporation would never have made and would have buried it alive if they could have.

But, of course, the ludicrous cowardice of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists this week, far from bravely warning of the dangers of imminent nuclear war, shows that like all such cowards they are in fearful denial – a condition Sigmund Freud would have understood well.

For clearly, the editorial board at the BAS do not really believe thermonuclear war is imminent at all. They imagine they will be able to go on doing forever what they have already done for at least three generations. Prance around and lecture everyone else while raising no true warning and never risking their heads to hostile insults or official disapproval at all. Why, God forbid that the New York Times should say impolite things about them!

Therefore, they are all going to die screaming in thermonuclear fire at millions of degrees Celsius when the Russian missiles fly either in a first strike or in retaliation to our own when the last trip wire has been crossed, as Russian leaders for years now have consistently, solemnly and systematically warned.

I recognized that nuclear war was inevitable when the foreign policy of the United States was driven by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan – two appalling jokes straight out of “Whoops Apocalypse.” Sullivan even looks and grimaces exactly like Rowan Atkinson’s comic master-character Mr. Bean. And above them dangled that strange hollow vessel, “President” Joe Biden – the ultimate Nowhere Man (John Lennon knew what he was talking about).

At least Biden’s successor, President Donald Trump has rightly sought to set up a dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin: Something previous presidents such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton all recognized as essential in their day. Such dialogues never meant betraying the national security interests and survival of the American people. It meant protecting them.

However, Trump has already surrounded himself with a coterie of neocons eager to make even Blinken and Sullivan look like paragons of caution and moderation. For they all still subscribe to the fantasy that America is still all-great and all-powerful and that we can lay down Our Law to the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians and everyone else and they will have no choice but to bend and obey. The fact that Russia – and China too – have a decade-long technological lead on us on the deployment and testing of operational use, first strike hypersonic technology is completely lost on them.

However, the true, ultimate reason why thermonuclear war is imminent and almost upon us runs far deeper than four years of Blinken and Sullivan’s catastrophic policies or Trump’s appalling choices to direct the foreign policy diplomacy and military forces of the United States.

That far deeper cause lies in the complacency and mediocrity of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist editors – who will be predictably hailed from the old soft, liberal, worthless useless “left” for their non-existent “courage”.

The true reason thermonuclear war and the destruction of the United States are now inevitable is that no one among the third of a billion people in the United States really believes that thermonuclear judgement is now upon them.

Back in August, American University Professor of History Peter Kuznick wrote on this New Kontinent website: “The truth is that I’m scared shitless about the global situation. To borrow a phrase from George Kennan, we are like lemmings blindly venturing toward the abyss of nuclear war. All the latest indications are increasingly ominous, but no leaders are doing what is necessary to avert this catastrophe. Instead, the lunatics have taken over the asylum.”

Up to now, even the most vivid, responsible, darkest predictions such as that of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock have always offered a margin of grace – a breathing space in which events and policies could still, conceivably be turned around. And even now, the scientists who set the Doomsday Clock cling to their precious remaining entirely fictitious 89 seconds of grace before the Bell of Doom tolls.

But it is too late for that: Far, far too late: Doomsday is upon us now. We have reached Midnight.