Two Minutes To Midnight: The Doomsday Clock

talked about on the news or in popular culture. It's an interesting question because, you know, I look back on it and I remember I think back on threats that were present in the media or in the conversations of adults and how they influenced me. Like I remember, I remember going to church and being in hearing about the becoming battle of Armageddon and how everyone's gonna have to fight on one side or the other. I remember being

concerned about that. I remember picking up on some of the the the Aid's Scare material and thinking like, oh, how does this affect me? How does this affect the people I care about. I don't remember being feeling like the anxiety of nuclear war so much, and maybe I was just you know, part of this. Part of this was a time when I was I was living outside of the US, I was in Canada, we only had the one TV TV channel, so that might have played

a role. Or maybe I was just you know, removed enough from the or distracted enough from the the nightly you know, TV news that it didn't affect me, or maybe it's an I mean, we're about the same age though, so I don't know how to what extent that played into In the past, I've kind of wondered, well, maybe I was just a little too young, Like I didn't to to to use the language of Queen. I didn't quite grow up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

You know. That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, well, and I also, you know, moved around overseas a little bit too, so that could have contributed to it in different ways as well. But I definitely remember the eighties being like scary and then like, you know, maybe it was also just because of my age, but then in the nineties it was like, oh, things are okay now, like that there's not as much

of a threat. We can all breathe easy, We're not going to have to like we don't have to do the whole stop, drop and roll thing in the cross rooms, right. I definitely looking back, I definitely see that trend where there is the nineties, there was this feeling of, yeah, this is not that big of a threat anymore, maybe it's even not a threat. Don't worry about it, just

do your thing. But I've always been a fan of stuff from the eighties in the late seventies, from you know, the fiction, the music, in the literature, and you certainly see nuclear anxiety displayed in in that in various ways. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean we've got, of course Terminator to Judgment Day. I mean, they are of course talking about an artificial intelligence bringing about the apoco Ellipse, but

it's through nuclear warfare. Uh. And then the big one that I always think of is Watchmen, especially when I think of what we're going to talk about today, which is the doomsday clock. Now I don't believe this was featured in the movie version of Watchmen, but in the comic book version, every issue began with the doomsday clock blood dripping down the page further and further, and as you got to the twelfth issue, I think the blood was covering the clock like all the way or something

like that. But the idea was that the reason why these events were happening in the story is because we're inching closer to midnight on the doomsday clock. Yeah. I you know, maybe when I first read Watchman, I wasn't for some reason, I never really put one and two together on the doomsday clock. But yeah, I believe that there's like a kind of synchronicity of the metaphor there

with Dr Manhattan being connected to atomic energy. He's also a watchmaker, and he's obsessed with time and taking apart clocks and putting them back together again, and then the background metaphor of the doomsday clock. Now here's the thing. I didn't know the doomsday clock was a real thing until I was an adult, and actually just recently it

was updated. Now, we shared this on our social media for stuff to blow your mind, and there was a lot of comments about it, uh so much so that we thought this is probably worth digging into because there's a lot of science behind the Doomsday clock and the group that manages it, which is called the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. So we figured, let's do a dive into that, explain what that is and see what's going on there. Yeah, because I feel like there is a lot of confusion,

especially and I don't mean I don't. I don't mean to vilify people who say didn't read the link, it didn't fall with the link and read the article that we shared, because I think we all have to do this. Where it was so many different pieces of media and our streams, you just can't click on everything. I don't understand that. But it's easy without without diving in to it,

it's easy to mistake what the doomsday clock is. On one hand, you might think, oh, well, this is a this is a rigorous scientific like um, you know, FIRMI kind of a contemplation on what the chances of nuclear war are. Or you may think, oh, this is just complete political bs. This is just somebody or some group of people just making some with with political motivation, deciding how dangerous the current climate is. And the answer is

it's somewhere in the middle. Uh. And but it's worth taking a look at because while yes, it so, let's make this very clear right from the top, the doomsday clock is not managed by any kind of like supercomputer or device that's calculating things and figuring out what the exact time on the clock should ye do not confuse it with an actual atomic clock, which is a you know a highly precise um time measurement system. This is and this is something where a human hand is essentially

going to reach up and change time exactly. And it's fairly subjective. But at the same time, the people who are in charge of making that subjective judgment call are experts in their field. And we're gonna go over all of that. We'll talk about it, we'll talk about the group, the journal surrounding this, the doomsday clock itself, and then we're gonna look at some arguments both four and against it.

Uh So, just to back up here in case you missed it, at the beginning of the bulletin of atomic scientists calculated that we're even closer to doomsday and they adjusted the doomsday clock to two point five minutes to midnight. Midnight being doomsday, meaning the human population will be completely wiped out by something usually nuclear annihilation. Uh And by their prediction, we're that much closer to the end of humanity.

This is the closest the clock has been to doomsday since nineteen fifty three, after the US tested its first thermonuclear device. Now, why why, why why did they push it forward? Well, certainly, if you've if you've been following the news enough to pick up on the doomsday story, then you've probably been following the news enough to pick

up on all these various other stories. We can basically reduce a lot of it to sort of to saber rattling, to the testing of new regimes, to new regimes, uh, you know, rolling out their stance on the issues of of nuclear armaments, uh, warfare in general, and international relations. Right. Yeah, so you know this is going to get a little bit political here only for the purposes of us describing why they made this decision. So they cited specifically that

the global security landscape darkened. This is a direct quote, as the international community failed to come effectively to grips with humanity's most pressing existential threats, and by that they mean nuclear weapons and climate change. Now, this was announced in an op ed to the New York Times. There are two people, theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss and retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley, And they wrote on behalf of the Bulletin of of Atomic Scientists, and this was

their quote. They said, making matters worse, the United States now has a president who has promised to impede progress on both of those fronts. Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the clock, largely because of the statements of a single person. But when that person is the new President of the United States, his words matter. Now. Specifically, I believe they're referring to some comments that that the

President has made regarding the arms race. I think he said something to the fact of let there be an arms race or you know, will outproduce uh, you know, the competition in terms of nuclear armaments and if the if you've been following the news, you know that the president will say one thing and then he may restate it later. Yeah, but this response was was coming to

some of the spikes in the rhetoric. Yeah. And this is stuff that he said on the campaign trail before he was elected too, So you know, there's a there's a well documented record of his policy or at least stated policies on nuclear armament and on climate change. So these are things that concerned the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Uh. And you know, even since they made this announcement, he's

continued to say things for this effect. Um. Now, I would be remiss if I did not mention the Iron Maidens song two minutes to Midnight, because I believe, looking back at the time, wine two minutes is the is as close as we've come. It is, Yeah, and we are currently two and a half minutes to midnight now. I there was a listener out there who pointed this

out to me. Actually, when we posted the original story, he shared the video for Iron Maidens two Minutes to been Night, and oh of course, And man, this is one of those instances where I wish we could get away with playing music on the show because that song is pretty great and it's perfect as like a as a theme song for this episode. But go check it out if you're unfamiliar with it and you love metal. Uh. And there's all kinds of other popular culture things that

would resonate with this. Uh. One of my favorite songs that isn't necessarily a big one is the SKA band Mephis Scopolise has a song called Doomsday that is about this as well. Oh yeah, I'm not familiar with the Mephis scoff. Uh. They're silly nineteen nineties ska band. Okay, yeah, well, you know I already mentioned that. You know that I'm a big fan of so many things that came out of the late seventies and nineteen eighties, early nineties as well.

But but some of the big ones that of course come to I think come to people's mind in addition to all the post nuke fiction out there. War Games, of course, Yeah, that's the classic example. Well, the only way to win the game is not to play. See this is why I think it was it had such so much impact on me. War Games is the first movie I ever saw on videotape really, yeah, Beta Max. My parents rented a Beta Max machine when I was

a little kid. In the two movies they got for me were War Games and Star Wars, both movies with war in the title. But I think with war games like this probably didn't have that big an impact on me personally, because I don't think I ever I may have never seen it in its entirety. I think it's all of those films that I just later saw parts of on TV and got the general you know, just of it. But but it never had the opportunity to really get its hooks into me like it did for

for other people. Yeah. I mean, as I've said on the show before, I watched a lot of stuff when I was five years old that I probably shouldn't have. This was one of the three that was right when I was five years old, I saw war games. I also watched The Shining when I was five years old. Uh so, you know, well that explains a lot. Well, you know, I think we were games. I think makes

sense for for some younger viewers. But we in a previous episode, the Butter episode, we talked about the Butter Battle Book, Pursus Book and subsequent Turner TV special that deals with the arms race and deals with the idea of mutually sure destruction. So really, no matter what your age was during during this era, there was the potential to be introduced to the larger cultural anxiety regarding this. Yeah, it was a period that was rife with popular culture

surrounded by this. And now that we're inching closer to midnight on the doomsday clock, I kind of wonder if we're going to see more stuff like this again. Uh, time will tell. Now you're probably wondering who are the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists or what is this thing? Well, the Bulletin was actually founded by some of the people who worked on the Manhattan Project. These were people who felt that they could not remain aloof to the consequences

of their work creating atomic weapons. Uh. And they were the people who the atomic bomb, but then they also lobbied for its abolition. Now today it's a nonprofit organization and it has an international board of experts who assess scientific advancements, then the benefits and risks that they give to humanity. Now, their stated goal is to influence public policy. So let's be very clear here, Like they state, and they say very plainly on all their literature, like, yes,

this is our goal is to communicate and to change policy. Uh. They describe the bulletin as such. They say, it's like a doctor making a diagnosis by looking at data, considering symptoms, measurements, and circumstances, and then coming up with a judgment on

how to treat a condition. And I do have to throw in here that I I don't think anyone out there saying in the world is arguing that nuclear war is a desired outcome or you know, even you know, we've mentioned in the comments that the President has made and when pressed on the matter, he has said, oh, well, nuclear weapons are horrible. You know that this is this is you know, bad, not good. That he very specifically

uses the term these are bad things. So I don't think anybody is arguing that that, yeah, let's have a

nuclear war. That sounds like a great idea. The the arguments come into the balance, and then how do you reduce etcetera, and then into the political, uh, situations that increase the likelihood of one of these weapons being used, because really, we've we've we've been very lucky in the in the in the regard that there have only been uh, you know too military uses of nuclear weapons, and of course they were both both deployed by the United States

the close of the Second World War in Japan. Uh. Outside of that, we've had, you know, plenty of tests. We have had some testy situations regarding the are their their positioning, and their potential use, but we have not had to suffer any any subsequent users, and we haven't had to see actual nuclear warfare between or any war

warfare between two nuclear arm nations. Right. Yeah. The idea here being that the build the up of these armaments will be a deterrent to various powers to to either either in the course of their militaristic actions or in their own armament of nuclear weapons. Right, and it's not just the United States and Russia anymore. And we'll get

into that. There's all kinds of factors that come into play. UH. Now The Bulletin is also an award winning journal, and it puts issues and events into context UH and provides fact based debates and assessments about you know that, basically the end of humanity UH. And they have been around for seventy years. There's lots of other reports and analysis on their site. Their site is is pretty fantastic in terms of like layout and all the contents available. UH.

Infographics to their infographics are really good. UM. But there's also a bi monthly magazine. Now today we're talking about in terms of like the people who make the decision about the doomsday clock. We're talking about ten to twenty people who literally sit in a room for a day and do the best they can to communicate disaster to

the rest of us. Now, it's it's either once or twice a year, the board's members get together and they gather for a one day discussion where they review what worried them the following year and what they anticipate as new concerns. They don't use devices or computers to calculate this. This is just experienced, expert adults trying to come to a consensus. There's no algorithm that is deployed here exactly. So you may be wondering, well, who are these people,

what are they so expert at? And that this is you know, maybe going to be a little dry. But I want to go through the list of the current people so you have an idea of who who's making this decision now. The current membership of the board. It is the Science and Security Board for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists UH, and they're said to also consult widely with their colleagues across a wide variety of disciplines before they get together to make decisions about the doomsday clock.

So let's go through these here. Okay, So the first is Lynn Eden, she's one of the co chairs UH and she's a research scholar at Stanford University who studies military and society, science, technology and organizations, as well as nuclear weapons history and policy. Of Next, we have Robert Rosner, co chair, Professor of of of Astronomy, Astrophysics and Physics at the University of Chicago. There's rod Ewing he's a professor of Nuclear Security and Earth Sciences at Stanford University.

Then there's a Steven kartha senior scientist at Stockholm Environmental Institute. Focuses on technological and policy options for addressing climate change. Their herb Lynn uh this is a senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at Stanford University. You're seeing a trend here. There's a lot of people from Stanford there. Next is a Suzette McKinney, former Deputy Commissioner of the Bureau of Public Health Preparedness and Emergency Response at the

Chicago Department of Public Health. She's an expert in emergency preparedness efforts. Steve Miller is the director of the International Security Program at Harvard University. Now, next we have Raymond T. Peter Humbert. This is professor of physics at the University of Oxford. Specializes in how climate works. Rama murte Raja Rahman. He's a professor of physics at Joel Harlal Nehru University.

Next we have Jennifer Sims. She's senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a consultant on intelligence at Homeland security. Susan Solomon is a professor of environmental studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Techno Oology. She's actually one of the pioneers in the work that explains why there's a hole in the Antarctic ozone layer, and she

specifically specializes in climate science. Next, we have Richard Somerville, Professor of oceanography at the University of California, and his focus his climate systems. Sharon Squassani. She's the director of the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Washington d C. She specializes in nuclear

non proliferation, arms control, and security policy. And then we have David Titley, Professor of Meteorology and International Affairs at Pennsylvania State University, a former naval officer with the rank of your admiral who used to work in the Pentagon. Okay, so we've gone through that list. That is clearly a list of people who have a lot of credentials under their belt. Right It's it does not seem like a list of I mean, I think we've got like a

little of her ten people. There's probably twelve or thirteen of them here. They're not just whimsically going to say something like we're two minutes away from the world ending. Right, it seems like, uh, yeah, maybe they have rhetorical agendas, but they are all experts in fields like uh, nuclear non proliferation, military, uh, climate change, and and a growing thing that they're looking at his cyber security. Right. And then yeah, there's not a single celebrity or or you know,

isn't on the doomsday clok committee. Okay, let's take a break and when we get back, let's really dive into what the doomsday clock actually is. All right, we're back. So everyone has probably seen a picture of the doomsday clock thus far, if nothing else, it should be the lead art for this episode on the website Stuff to your Mind dot com. But but beyond that, beyond just what it looks like, what is the doomsday clock? Okay?

So it was originally funded by, as I mentioned before, people who were involved with the Manhattan Project, and one of the Bulletin's members was a nuclear physicist named Alexander Langsdorff and his wife, Martl. She was an artist, and when they were coming up with this journal for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, she created a clock symbol, and she said it to eleven fifty three for the cover of the group's magazine. Now, she did this, she said,

because quote, it looked good to her eye. So there was no there was no reasoning behind why it was at eleven fifty three on the very first issue, which just more like, yeah, this, this feels about right exactly in nineteen nine, however, her husband reset it four minutes later. Since then, this group has been around for seventy years and they've used the clock to draw attention to worldwide crises that they believe threatened the survival of the human species.

And their focus is almost entirely on the availability of nuclear weapons and the world powers that are willing to use them. So they kind of they describe it as such as they say, it's a symbol obviously, but it's a symbolic intersection of art and science, and its goal is to get people to talk more about nuclear weapons. Basically, you know, I think I think it's easy to say this now, like especially since like what we were saying with the nineties, it kind of was like, oh, the

Cold War is over. Who I don't have to worry about that? Being a think the clock itself went to something like seventeen minutes. Yeah. Yeah, nineteen one was the most optimistic position it ever was at, and it was seventeen minutes to midnight. Uh. Now the clock itself is wavered between that seventeen minutes and two minutes. Uh. Since its inception in seven The time itself, like we described, as determined by this board of scientists and nuclear experts

who meet regularly. But ultimately, yes, this is a political tool for communication. But here's the thing. It works. The last few times they've announced a change of the clock, it has been not only international news and that it's made, you know, headlines and every major news outlet, but it is also trended on Facebook and Twitter, so people talk about it. It works. It gets people to think about what's going on with nuclear weapons. Now the hand itself

has been reset twenty two times. It used to be that the bulletins editor decided when the hand should be moved. And his name was Eugene Rabinovich and he was a scientist. But when he died in nineteen seventy three, that Science and Security board that Robert and I just went through with you, they took over, and like I said, they meet twice a year to discuss world events relating to the clock, and the last time it was moved before

this most recent one was in uh. Two minutes were taken away to express the bulletin's dissatisfaction with world progress on climate change and nuclear weapons. So they have four criteria that they currently used to determine the status of the clock. The first is obviously the possibility of major conflict between nuclear states. Then there is and this is relatively new, out of control climate change. The third is risks of civilian nuclear powered disaster, especially when it relates

to waste storage. Okay, this this tying in of course to accidents such as that at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Yeah exactly, yeah uh. And then the fourth and final one is they're looking at emerging technologies like genetically modified pandemics or destructive artificial intelligence. So ultimately their focus here is about any kind of species wide catastrophe, no matter

what its origin might be. Now in their site, they have this thing that's called the doomsday dashboard that I have to say, like, I think that there's like a certain amount of cheekiness to this too, write like maybe that's just me, but I like the idea of like the doomsday dashboard. You know, it's just kind of it feels jokey, but at the same time as obviously the

most serious you can be about a possible topic. Right, I mean, they're they're simplifying all of this into this one simple and in doing doing that, there you know, there's the value of some of simplistic and direct communication via symbolism. But in doing so, I mean they are

realizing that they're boiling it down. Yeah. So this dashboard is a little different from the clock and that it accounts for the amount of global nuclear weapons, the security of nuclear materials around the world, the amount of nuclear materials that are stored, the rise in the sea level and the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, as well as the difference in global temperatures in the minimum amount of

Arctic sea ice that we currently have. So it's this big interface that shows you all those things, basically keeping track of all of the modern woes, especially that came out of indoors box, right and kind of and and cared for or at least of, you know, by an organization that it will at least founded by individuals who played and arguably played a role. So the thing here basically is they study events and trends, They tracked numbers

and statistics. They also account for world leaders and citizen efforts to reduce these potential dangers. They also recognize that nuclear energy and climate change are intertwined, so they say, well, yeah, of course some people advocate for nuclear power to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. So they recognize that there's kind of like a given take there, and then you need to pay attention to that. So why are we currently at

two point five minutes to midnight. Well, we gave you their their stated answer, you know, in their op ed piece earlier. But here's a couple of listed items, basically bullet items that are of concern to them and I would imagine to all of us. So the United States in Russia together possess more than nine of the world's nuclear weapons, and we remain at odds in a variety of theaters. Now, obviously the US and Russia aren't facing off one to one, but examples include Syria, the Ukraine,

and the borders of NATO. Uh, there's also you know, both of these countries continuing to modernize their forces with little arms control negotiations. So as of this recording, what was it last week? President Trump announced that there was he was going to increase a massive amount of spending to the defense budget, So you know that that's in line with this. Now North Korea is another factor. They

continue to conduct underground nuclear tests. They're giving indications that it would keep trying to develop a nuclear weapon, one that has delivery capabilities. So we're talking about I C B M S here. I believe Pakistan and India continue to threaten each other with nuclear warfare. Now they're facing off over the line of controlling Kashmir. Now. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists also adds that climate changes outlook looks somewhat less dismal than it used to, but only somewhat.

They say that's a direct quote, uh so steen warmest year on record, and sixteen of the seventeen warmest years on record have been recorded since two thousand and one, so that's of concern to them. They say climate change is a risk to human health and has adverse effects on our food availability. They also include within all of this the rise of nationalism worldwide, as well as both President Trump and Vladimir Putin's comments about the use and

proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as uh. President Trump's disbelief in the scientific consensus on climate change. In fact, the US is scheduled to spend between one hundred billion and one trillion dollars on retrofitting nuclear weapons for another four decades of service. Uh. I was just watching the Expanse, the show that we've talked about on on Stuff to

blow your mind many times. They fire a bunch of nuclear missiles into outer space at one point, and I believe that it is supposed to represent the if not the entirety, then at least the vast majority of Earth's and nuclear arsenal is launched in that in that scenario. Yeah, it really made me think on this. Okay, So the bulletin also see, you know, Trump's rhetoric as a disregard for scientific expertise, and they say this is a growing problem.

Here's some additional factors as well. They say, the Russian cyber attack on the United States political system, the gene editing tool Crisper. Uh. So we've talked about this on this show and in other How Stuff Works media. Basically, the idea here is that CRISP, Crisper could possibly make it easier to produce biological weapons. And then they also

listed the rise of quote fake news. Now, when they probably released this thing, they weren't as sick of the term fake news as the rest of us, and honestly me personally, I'd prefer to use other terms like disinformation. But yeah, the the term has become muddy, even muddy or since we first talked about it in our episode,

is social media driving me crazy? Because it's kind of been it's it's it's kind of been co opted, so now it is uh, it's um, it's an insult that is leveled at reputable news sources as well as intentionally confusing or inaccurate reports. Yeah, so some of you are probably listening and you're going, wow, this is really heavily waited on the climate change thing. I'm not necessarily a believer in that, or maybe you are, but um, but what does it have to do, you know with nuclear annihilation.

Here's where I kind of fall on this thing, which is that even outside of scientific reason I've always thought about climate change is being similar to Pascal's wager. You know that Robert Pascal's wager um basically on the belief of God and the ideas. You know that as a rational person, I think if climate change does exist and we fight to stop it, well we're going to experience

more gains and less loss. Right. But it's a probability gamble. However, I, as a science communicator, do believe in the science behind climate change. Don't get me wrong, But so to me, it's like it's similar to the belief in God, and that it's it's it's not about science or religion as much as like, you've got to think of it as like a rewards and risks game, right. Uh. And hey, you know what if I take up my recycling and

I'm a little bit better about my carbon footprint. Uh, and it's a it's a little bit of a strain on my lifestyle. Sorry, you know what, I'd rather do that than boil alive. Yeah, and you know, and and just to drive home the important thing here too, there is a scientific consensus that yes, climate it is occurring, and that that humans um are are are the if not if are a major factor, if not the major factor,

uh in its spinning out of control. Uh. Now, I'm sure there's of you out there who have your doubts you. I'm sure you have an expert or two that you whose opinions you turned to. I'm sure you have a list of pre prepared problems with with climate change, but you really can't argue with the fact that this is the scientific consensus. And if you were going to if you're if you're gonna work outside of scientific consensus, then

that is that is ultimately an a logical choice. Yeah, and so look, like the reason why I'm addressing this here is I know that this is contentious. I know that we have some listeners who are probably going to write us in about this and say, I can't believe that you guys sided with this group that believes in climate change, right, And I know for a fact that when this episode goes up on Facebook that there will be dozens of comments, probably about how this is all

a scam. But look, we have to address it. That's what I believe. This is where we are at with scientific consensus. This is a show about how science is used in our world, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is a group of experts. Yeah, I mean, ultimately you have to if you, well, what am I gonna side with if it's not scientific consensus. Am I gonna side with political consensus and I'm not gonna side with religious consensus.

I really haven't seen much in the way of I've seen religious arguments for combating climate change, but I haven't seen much in the way of religious arguments that that that human uh created climate change is not occurring. So I don't really think even have an option in that direction if I chose to go that way. Yeah, yeah, exactly so and and and again. We're gonna get back into this again in a later section because there is a strong argument against the bulletin of atomic scientists that

will will relate to you later. I just wanted to set that up as we were talking about the climate change stuff. Now, historical events have edged us this close to the doomsday midnight before. In fact, in nineteen forty nine, when the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb and the nuclear arms race began, that was one time. Then also in four when American Soviet relations deteriorated and deployed, they both deployed short range missiles around Europe, and that's again

right around prime time for you and me as little kids. Uh. And in nineteen fifty two when they both tested thermonuclear hydrogen bombs. That's the only time it's ever been closer to midnight than right now. So here's some nightmare scenarios that they pitch the Bulletin of atomic scientists that could edge us even further. One is a NATO war with Russia. Yeah, that would be horrible. Two is an American conflict with China. That would be horrible. Three is an erratic launched by

North Korea, meaning they're nuclear missiles. And we got it was like two or three days ago. Wasn't they do this all the time? North Korea like erratically has some missile fly off into the and well, you can, you can say erratic. But but also my understanding is that there are certain military operations that go on every year between with the US and South Korea and this they always do something to sort of speak out and to protest the events, and this is the latest version of this.

In fact, I think I read this morning on my way into work something about you know, China basically said like, hey, North Korea, cool your jets. United States and South Korea, can you kind of slow your role with the military operations. You know, they're trying to be the logical ones in this well, at least on the face of it, all right, And another horrible scenario they predict as a war between India and Pakistan. And the final one would be if

ISIS was somehow nuclear enabled. So all of these are things that they see as complete nightmare scenarios that could you know, push us even closer to midnight. The Bulletin themselves also called upon Trump and Putin to use their quote friendly relationship to reduce nuclear weapons stocks. So I think that was kind of funny. Actually, I mean, given all this, you know, we joke about it. S n LSO is doing some kind of gag one way or

the other about Trump and Putin. But you know, yeah, I mean, to take a step back from all of it, it is a bit ridiculous that that we're in this scenario where there's so much talk about these two uh, these two uh governmental heads being in collusion with each other, and yet the the arms race rhetoric has has increased ramping. You think you think that we that we'd at least get the side effect of of of calm, calmer nuclear relations, but we can only hope. Thus this is the world

we live in. Okay, let's take another break, and when we get back, we're going to introduce these arguments about whether or not we should believe in the doomsday clock or not. Alright, we're back. So you're you're scrolling through your Facebook feed and you you you make out the you know, the unmistakable symbol of the of the doomsday clock. Should you click on it? Should you not click on it? Should you give it a thumbs up or a smiley? Should you give it the frowny face, the angry face,

or just the sad face? How should we react to it? So we've already presented to you how they come about their their decision making of of where the hands on this clock reside, right, Uh. And you can, you know, judge for yourself whether or not you think that's logical. But there is an argument against it presented by a

guy named Tom Nichols. Uh. He is a professor of National security affairs at the U. S. Naval War College, and he says that, yes, the bulletin was right to remind us of the problems with nuclear weapons during the Cold War. He says, actually says, look, this is a great and venerable journal. Even though I don't necessarily agree with their politics, but he argues that the world today is much safer, and so he dismisses the addition of climate change to the doomsday clock, and he calls it notional.

He says that scientists involved in this are catering to a liberal audience and that they have concerns such as quote being mean to each other, so he says the clock itself means nothing. He compares where the clock was set to historical events and he argues that we're safer now than we were in and that's when the clock was set at its best. So this is his argument.

He also says the clock is quote simply theater, uh, and that it's designed to create a sense of urgent worry about these things that the scientists think we need to worry about. On this, I'm not going to argue

with him that. I'm sure the Bolton would too, and they are pretty clear about saying like, yes, this is a communication proping and a tool for us to get people to start talking about these problems, and it's it's also yeah Worth pointing out that even even when when the clock was at its best, you still have nuclear states and there's a perceivable path to a potential nuclear conflict or nuclear detonation that's always there just by virtue

of having armed states. UH. This would be content for a later episode, but I was I was reading recently about UH computing errors that have occurred here and there regarding the systems that manage uh the nuclear armaments on

on both sides, and that is terrifying. Yeah. Yeah, I I left some of those notes out, but that's absolutely true that that there have been computing errors that basically said, oh, somebody just launched a bunch of missiles at US, and it was only because there was a human being there who who was able to recognize that there was a

malfunction and say, no, that's not actually happening. Do not retaliate. Yeah, at all points, the technology is fallible and the humans involved are fallible, and you just gotta hope and pray that that they're not not both fallible at the same time, because that's when when when the clock starts moving again. But nichols argument is that scientists since the end of World War two have been trying to figure out how to translate their intelligence in things like chemistry and physics

and earth sciences into political powers. So he's basically saying that they're trying things like the doomsday clock are an attempted as a power grab by science. Uh. He argues that there are good reasons for leaders to reject scientific advice. And this is his direct quote. It's easy to be a fan of scientists running things as long as your own guys doing the sciencing. But scientists can be wrong about politics in all kinds of ways. Uh. And then

it all comes down to this. He has a particular bone to pick with Leon Cooper, who is a person that's involved with the bulletin. I think he used to be on the security UH membership team, and the two of them apparently had a nasty debate with each other at Brown University. So he wants the bulletin to change the clock back to being only about nuclear danger, and that they should take out climate change, artificial intelligence, and you know, genetic modification. Either that or he says they

should just retire it in general. UM. Now, I would like to point something out here. The article in which he wrote this was published in January, and within it even then he said, God help us if Donald Trump is elected and controls our nuclear trigger, so he may you know, we don't have Nickels here in the room

with us. But he may have a little bit of a different answer today because of you know, how they've adjusted the clock, and he whether or not climate changes on the board certainly were we've edged a little bit closer and turns of nuclear armament. So this is my counter argument on this, because he says things like, oh, well,

they're concerned about things like being mean to each other. Well, you know, Joe and I just did this two part episode where we talked about animal intelligence and we compared it to humanity, and I'm far more concerned right now about humanity's recent lack of empathy and how that's going to contribute to our moral decision making progress. You tie that into technologies of death like nuclear weapons or genetic modification or artificial intelligence, all these things that the bulletin

lists above. I'm not so dismissive of those things. Yeah, I mean, I would agree all of these these aspects

of humanity are interconnected. Our technology, the way we view each other, the way we treat each other, the politics, the science, and I think it it Uh, yeah, it's it's counterproductive to want to just say, like you to to fall back on some of the arguments here presented by Nichols, the idea that we should only look at at this in a political sphere only, yeah, or or that the scientists are saying they only want to run things from a scientific perspective. These are all interconnected. There's

there's there's no avoiding that. Yeah. And the Bulletin themselves address this by saying, uh, you know, sometimes they're asked. They even have this on their f a Q page, what's worse nuclear energy or climate change? And their quote is, at the end of the day, trying to answer the question is like standing around in a burning house arguing about whether it's better to die of smoke inhalation or

from a falling timber. And that kind of gets back to my Pascal's wager thing, is that it's like, well, you know, it's a it's a cost benefit rewards risks thing. So now the Bulletin themselves, they don't as far as I could find, they didn't, you know, counter argue Nickels. But they do have an argument in favor of why climate change is included in the Doomsday Clock, and this is written by Don Stover and it's available on their site.

She says John Cook, who's a research fellow on climate communication at the University of Queensland's Global Change Institute, said, quote, our planet has been building up heat at the rate of about four Hiroshima bombs every second. Consider that going

continuously for several decades. Then this was reformulated by a climate scientist, James Hansen, who is a member of the Science and Security Board, and in Hansen said that climate change, its excess energy build up in the Earth's ocean and other heat reservoirs, was equivalent to exploding four hundred thousand Hiroshima atomic bombs per day three hundred and sixty five

days per year. Now that sounds crazy, right, Like we all go con now like this just the even like I can go all right, maybe I see where Nichols is at with like thinking that this is purely rhetorical. But Don Stover does a really good job in this article of breaking down why these are important arguments, Because yeah, on on the surface of things, I hear those stats and I think, well, you're talking about like global heat increases versus the very localized um heat output of a

of a nuclear detonation. It's kind of disingenuous to compare those two things. Yeah, exactly, But Stover says, okay, is this comparison accurate. Well, she says Hanson, comparing the explosive yield and not instant maths of death of a bomb yield, Well, that's measured in keylow tons of T and T. You can take that and you can convert it into an equivalent number of calories for direct comparison with the Earth's

rising heat content. The problem that Hanson argues is that greenhouse gases reduce the amount of Earth's heat radiation that's going out into space, So there's a temporary energy imbalance here on the planet. And they've done the math figuring out that that totals two point six watts per square meter of Earth's surface. Now, Anthony Watts dismissed this excess energy. This is another person who argued against this and said, look, that's hardly a blip. It only has the power of

one one of a sixty what lightbulb. And that's true. But then Stover points out the numbers are still right when you consider the cumulative imbalance over time. So their example is if you lived in a house and it had a point six what per square meter of heat energy that never left the building. It would raise the heat by four point five degrees per day, eventually boiling you to death and under a month. That's a pretty big twinkie. Yes, it is, Dr Bankman. Uh Now, Stover says,

is the comparison effective well. Cook argues that his pronouncement was effective since it made headlines around the world, meaning again, look, this is a communications device. Uh. Since misinformation about climate change, or what he calls sticky ideas, Cook wanted to fight them with stickier ideas rather than speaking in complex, abstract, dry language. He wanted to advocate for simple, concrete and

basically emotional rhetoric. But that was also credible, So math's there, But he also wanted to sort of condense it into something that was I guess, as we say with in terms of social media, would go viral. Yeah. So the yeah, the idea of being here that if you have anti climate change statements that have to invoke Stephen Colbert's terminology truthiness to them, like they they they feel like they're

they're accurate, and therefore people cling to them. He's trying to create things that that both feel truthy and our truth exactly. Yeah, I think that's his goal here. And then finally Stover says, well, is the comparison itself appropriate? And she argues, yes, it is. Climate change is a manmade phenomenon that is also catastrophic, and she says the atom bomb is a manmade phenomenon that is catastrophic. The goal of the bulletin is to spur people to action,

and it seems to be working. Also, she says climate change does cause mass death by increasing the frequency of extreme weather events like heat waves and floods, while creating conditions that make it easier for disease to thrive and crops to fail. Uh. In fact, it is already estimated that climate change kills four hundred thousand people annually in

that respect. So I didn't see how she broke those numbers down, but I'm guessing what she means is that heat, you know, accumulatively, heat waves, floods, increases in disease and uh uh, I would imagine starve ation due to crop failure amounts to that many deaths per year. So all right, we're Robert and I are going to leave it up to you audience. We're not gonna tell you one way what to think or the other about the doomsday clock.

But we've broken it down for you. Now you know what the doomsday clock is, you know who the people are behind it, you know how they calculate what it is. Are we two and a half minutes to midnight? How's Iron maide In song sounding to us? Now? I mean, in the end here, regardless of how you think about it, the the clock is achieving its purpose, getting people to discuss it, to tease apart the issue, ask themselves, do are that is what's going on in the world today

making us safer? Do we feel safer? Um? And how concerns should we be about nuclear weapons? About climate change and about some of these emerging threats that we discussed some of the you know, ways more science sci fi threats, but but as but the threats that are still part of this, uh, this human invention, things that we've introduced into the world by opening the technological Pandora's box, if you will. Yeah, speaking of sci fi threats, I saw this shirt when I was on the airplane on the

way to Seattle last week. That made me think of all of this and and I did not realize it, but it is a quote from Aliens Uh, so I went and looked it up. This guy on the airplane that I was on, he was wearing a T shirt that said no maste piece through superior firepower, and the image was something like a somebody meditating in a lotus position, but the person was made up of two machine guns pointing upward. And so you know, apparently this is a slogan that one of the soldiers I believe it's Frost

in Aliens has emblazoned on their uniform. Would Frost You're gonna have to think Frost is uh? Is Frost? The other guy with the giant machine gun? That's not Vasquez? Okay, okay, that one alright, a like gatling gun thing. Maybe I'm wrong. Aliens fans out there are probably screaming at us through the through the podcast headphones, but um, anyways, so it

came from that. But then you know, this is a shirt that this guy was wearing basically saying advocating for the same you know, nuclear proliferation idea here that it's a deterrence. If we have superior firepower, then that will create peace because no one will want to attack us. Right, I don't know if I agree with that. Uh, and

I'm an Aliens fan. Well, you know that that shirt design reminds me of the cover art for a p jo Or Rourke book that came out in called Give War a Chance, And the cover art was the peace symbol, but the center of the peace symbol was a B fifty two bomber. Uh yeah, it's ah, I feel like. But in both both of these cases, the symbol that the simplification of the message, which winds up with the

symbolic simplification of the the doomsday clock. I mean, these raised questions about how are we to think about about nuclear arms? How are you think about about limiting and decreasing the number of nuclear weapons out there? Because it everything is interconnected. It's a it's it's a it's a

it's a jinga game of a humanity survival. And yeah, you can say nuclear weapons are bad, but you can't just you know, you can't just pull out the jinga block for one nation's weapons and expect that to it all be a reasonable response unless everybody else is uh is is coordinating, coordinating their movements as well. Uh. It's and that's why we're treking scenario similar build ups in other countries, right, like, first it was the US and Russia,

then it was India and Pakistan. Now it's North Korea and South Korea. Like we're going to keep seeing this kind of build up all around the world, If that's going to be the logic that we use for trying keep peace. Yeah, I mean, because ultimately there is a there, there's a special table you get to sit at. If you have access to these weapons, it gives you. It gives you a certain amount of power and in a

certain voice that you didn't have previously. Um. And my argument would be, even if I did believe in peace through superior firepower, based on what we were talking about earlier, if there's either human miscalculation or technological miscalculation, having that much firepower possibly go wrong, it's not worth it to me. Yeah, And in aliens it goes, It goes pretty wrong. It does, indeed, Yeah, it does. Indeed, although I guess we have to blame the engineers for that or we'll find out an alien

covenant in the UM. So, if you're concerned about this, if you've heard this episode and you're you've got the doomsday clock fear, the bulletin says there's three things that you can do. The first is you can learn as much as you can about the powerful technology that can destroy our way of life. Yeah, that sounds like a fun homework assignment. Uh. Then you can share what you've learned, either tell people in real life or put it on

social media or something. Uh. And then they say the third thing is tell your government representatives what your concerns are. So that's the doomsday clock, that's the bulletin of atomic scientists. Let us know. Do you believe this whole climate change is as bad as nuclear war things? Should climate change be included in the doomsday clock's calculations? And are we really two point five minutes close to midnight? Or where

would you estimate us on the clock? Yeah? I'd also love to hear from listeners both younger and older than us, uh with with their personal take on what it was like to grow up in the shadow of the mushroom class. Some of our older audience members uh may have memories even from from before the advent of nuclear weapons, like and and our younger listen. We have listeners out there who came out of the nineties um or or even even later. Uh. Terrifyingly enough, uh so so I'd be

interested to hear what how, what have you grown up in? What? What is what is the environment? Then what is the media been telling you? What have you been picking up from? Uh, from adults in your life as well as all of the various media you consume regarding the these threats to our way of life? Yeah, should we be panicked? All the ways you can get in touch with us. Then, there's so many social media channels these days were on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,

and Instagram. And you should visit stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Man, that is a good website. Ah, yeah, I'm partial to it. That's where because that's where you find all the episodes of this podcast, as well as blog post videos and links hotell those social media accounts that we mentioned earlier. And then if you just want to write us directly, you can always find us at blow the Mind at how stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it

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