90 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT (=Doomsday)!

A week ago (on Jan. 23), the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced the setting of what they call the Doomsday Clock. Contrary to my expectation, the clock was set the same as last year: 90 seconds to midnight (with midnight representing “doomsday”).

For 75 years now, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been announcing the setting of the Doomsday Clock. That nonprofit organization was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and former Manhattan Project scientists. They introduced the Doomsday Clock two years later.

The first setting of the Clock was seven minutes to midnight. In 1949, with the explosion of a nuclear device by the Soviet Union and the beginning of the arms race, it was reset to three minutes before midnight.

The testing of the hydrogen bomb in 1952 led to resetting the Clock in the following January to just two minutes before doomsday. Relations between the U.S. and the USSR improved over the next few years, though, and in 1960 the hands on the Clock were moved back to seven minutes.

Over the next decades, the Doomsday Clock kept going up and down, reaching the farthest from midnight, 17 minutes, in 1991. But in 2002 it was back to seven minutes and has never been further since. In 2015 it was back down to three minutes where it started in 1947.

In January last year, the Clock was set at 90 seconds. the closest to midnight it had ever been, and it was kept at that setting last week. I expected it to be set even closer to “doomsday” because of the threat of expanding, and perhaps nuclear, war in the Levant.*

The threat of nuclear war was the main basis for setting the Doomsday Clock for the first 60 years. In 2007, however, climate change was added to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as another portentous threat to humankind, and the hands on the Clock were set at five minutes to midnight.

The announcement regarding this year’s setting of the Clock stated that there were four main considerations for determining that setting: 1) the many dimensions of nuclear threat, 2) an ominous climate change outlook, 3) evolving biological threats, and 4) the dangers of AI.**

How should we respond to the current setting of the Doomsday Clock? This question surely demands our thoughtful attention. Let me suggest three things:

1) Don’t ignore the Doomsday Clock. It would be easy to shrug off the Clock’s warning because of denial, indifference, or the unwillingness to face seriously the present predicament the world is in—or even just due to the pressure of meeting the demands of our everyday lives.

2) Don’t let the Doomsday Clock get you down. Depression, of course, is the result of feeling “down” for whatever reason. Too much attention to the Clock can certainly cause depression. Just as we shouldn’t ignore the clock, neither should we think about it “all the time.”

3) Work actively to elect candidates of the better political party, that is, the party working more consistently to deal with the dire problems besetting the whole world.

On the website linked to in the second footnote, we are told that the threats the world is currently facing “are of such a character and magnitude that no one nation or leader can bring them under control.”

They go on to state that “three of the world’s leading powers—the United States, China, and Russia—should commence serious dialogue about each of the global threats.”

Further, they contend that those three countries “need to take responsibility for the existential danger the world now faces. They have the capacity to pull the world back from the brink of catastrophe. They should do so, with clarity and courage, and without delay.”

I am not at all optimistic, though, that the three countries mentioned will even begin to do most of what is necessary to move the hands on the Doomsday Clock farther from midnight.

But I am quite sure there is much more possibility of that being done under the Democratic Party in the U.S. rather than by the MAGA party, which includes so many xenophobic people who, among other things, are also global warming and pandemic deniers--as well as deniers of the clear results of the 2020 presidential election. 

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  * I previously wrote about the Doomsday Clock in August 2020 (see here) and mentioned it briefly (here) in March 2018. Some things now are much the same, but there are some distinct differences also.

Note too that the Doomsday Clock elicits attention from around the world. See, for example, this Jan. 17 article from the Hindustan Times, an Indian English-language daily newspaper based in Delhi.

** See here for the official “2024 Doomsday Day Clock Statement” and related information. 

The Threat of Nuclear War: 1962 and Now

Tomorrow is the first day of October, and it was in October 1962 that the world came closest to being engulfed in nuclear war. But currently there is threat of nuclear war once again. Let’s consider the similarities and differences between the ominous threat then and now. 

The Cuban missile crisis occurred on October 16~29, 1962. What do you remember about that fateful time? Well, if you are not at least 65 years old, you don’t have any memories of it. But it was a scary time for June and me as we were in our mid-20s then.

In September 1962, I started my doctoral studies at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and our family of four was living some 50 miles away at Ekron, Ky., where I was pastor of the Baptist church in that small town.

At that time, we didn’t have CNN or other 24/7 television news to keep us informed—in fact, we didn’t even have a television set in our home. But we kept up by the daily newspaper and radio.

In the narrow daily spaces of her five-year diary, June mentioned the crisis in Cuba on three days in a row. She wrote, “The U.S. has put a quarantine on Cuba” (10/22); “The Cuba situation is very serious” (10/23); “Our Cuban situation is so bad” (10/Oct. 24).

To cut down on driving time and to give me more time for study, on Tuesday and Thursday nights I stayed in seminary campus housing. On the morning of Thursday, Oct. 25, I went to Louisville as usual—and it was probably that afternoon when I thought seriously about going back home.

If there was going to be a nuclear attack, which seemed to be a distinct possibility, I certainly wanted to be with my family.

Fortunately, both President Kennedy and USSR Premier Khrushchev made domestically unpopular decisions and averted nuclear war. What a tremendous relief that was!*

“My Cuban Missile Crisis” is chapter 12 of Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine (2017). He is seven years older than I, so that notable book was published when he was 86. (His leaked Pentagon Papers was published in 1971, when he was 40.)

Ellsberg finished his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1962, but he was already working for the RAND Corporation and was a consultant to the Defense Department and the White House. As such, he was closely involved in discussions directly related to the Cuban missile crisis.

In “Cuba, The Real Story,” his 13^th chapter, Ellsberg states, “The fact is that on Saturday, October 27, 1962, a chain of events was in motion that might have come close to ending civilization” (p. 194).

The situation in Ukraine now is not nearly as dire as it was in Cuba in 1962, mainly because Russian President Putin has threatened only to use tactical nuclear weapons, not strategic ones such as the ones central to the threat 60 years ago.

(Strategic nuclear weapons are roughly ten times more powerful than tactical ones, and it is only the former that are designed to produce “mutually assured destruction,” with the ironic acronym MAD.)

Yet, way leads on to way and there is no telling what damage might result—in Ukraine, in Europe, and even in the whole world—from even minimal use of tactical nuclear warheads.

Last week during a televised address, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons on Ukraine.

Then on Sunday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that U.S. officials have communicated to the Russians that there will be "catastrophic consequences for Russia if they use nuclear weapons in Ukraine."

A big question now is whether Putin will be willing to lose face the way Khrushchev did in 1963.**

Let’s hope and pray he will.

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* For factual information about the nuclear threat in 1962, I highly recommend “The Cuban Missile Crisis Explained in 20 Minutes,” an informative YouTube video.)

** In an interview with Norman Cousins in 1963, Khrushchev said, “What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?” (cited by Ellsberg on p. 212).

The words at the end are probably those of Danish poet Piet Hein (1905~96), although there are sites on the internet that say they are from his distant ancestor, the Dutch admiral Piet Pieterszoon Hein (1577~1629), which I think is highly unlikely.

Ironies of American History

It has been two weeks now since the historic meeting between DJT and Kim Jong-un in Singapore. You likely heard/saw much about that at the time. What can we say now about that meeting, which is surely one of the ironies of American history? (“Irony” as used here means “a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects.")

The Irony of American History

The noted theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (about whom I wrote in a June 2017 article) gave two lectures at Westminster College in Missouri in May 1949. Those talks became the basis of his book The Irony of American History (1952).

Rather than try to summarize Niebuhr’s book here (which cannot be done briefly), let me just refer to “What You Can Learn from Reinhold Niebuhr,” a review article that appeared in the March 26, 2009, issue of The New York Review of Books.

This article is about two events that have happened since Niebuhr’s book was published. It is, however, partly about two countries that have embraced Communism, the focus of Niebuhr’s reflections.

Nixon’s Visit to China

Richard Nixon, the only POTUS to resign, is primarily known for two things: the Watergate affair that led to his resignation and his visit to China leading to the normalizing of relations between the U.S. and that country.

Nixon’s strategic visit to China was twenty years after Niebuhr’s book was published, but that visit is surely one of the ironies of American history. Nixon was chosen to run as Eisenhower’s Vice-President partly because of his strong anti-Communism stance.

Nixon, though, became the first U.S. President to visit the People’s Republic of China, and that visit ended 25 years of no diplomatic ties between the two counties.

For several reasons, Nixon can be seen as one of the worst Presidents in U. S. history. But his visit to China was a highly important strategic and diplomatic achievement—and part of the irony is that if Humphrey had been elected in 1968, he likely would not have been able to pull off that feat.

It is also ironic that that successful political action occurred just four months before the Watergate break-in, which, of course, led to Nixon’s resignation.

The Trump-Kim Meeting

So, what about the historic meeting of the current POTUS and Kim Jong-un, the Supreme Leader of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea?

One ironic aspect of that June 11/12 meeting comes from the saber-rattling rhetoric and derogatory language used by both leaders against each other just a few months earlier.

Trump publicly called Kim “Little Rocket Man” and in private with his aides referred to Kim as “a crazy guy.” Kim, in turn, has called Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” At the Singapore Summit, however, Trump and Kim appeared to be bosom buddies. 

As was widely reported, Trump “gushed with praise” of the North Korean dictator. But that was not highly regarded by some Americans, including David A. Graham who wrote a June 12 article for The Atlantic titled “Trump’s Effusive, Unsettling Flattery of Kim Jong Un”.

But others lauded DJT. On June 14, Deroy Murdock wrote in the National Review (here), “President Trump’s extraordinary Tuesday-morning Singapore summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was an encounter that eluded every American president from Eisenhower to Obama.”

Who’d have thought that the President who last year threatened “fire and fury” and early this year bragged to Kim, “My nuclear button is bigger than yours,” would be the one to meet with the Supreme Leader of North Korea and come away claiming that there is no longer any threat of nuclear confrontation?

Ironic indeed!

The Best of Times, or the Worst of Times?

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times....” So began Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the historical novel set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. That was then, but what about now?

Pinker’s Rosy Picture

Steven Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard University. His latest book was released last month under the title “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.”

Pinker, born in Canada in 1954, is also the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011). In that book as well as in his new one, Pinker writes how despite all the “doom and gloom” talk that surrounds us, the world is getting better in almost every way.

“A perfect future,” a review of Pinker’s new book, was published in the Feb. 24 issue of The Economist. It concluded, “Mr Pinker’s broad point is surely right. Things are not falling apart. And barring a cataclysmic asteroid strike or nuclear war, it is likely that they will continue to get better.”

The chances of an asteroid strike are completely unknown, but nuclear warfare is seemingly a distinct possibility in the near future—and that certainly would obliterate Pinker’s rosy picture of the present state of the world.

Picturing a Nuclear Arms Race

“Making America Nuclear Again” was the title of the cover story of the Feb. 12 issue of Time magazine. The lead article, posted online on Feb. 1, is “Donald Trump Is Playing a Dangerous Game of Nuclear Poker.”  

Author W.J. Hennigan contends that the Trump Administration “is convinced that the best way to limit the spreading nuclear danger is to expand and advertise its ability to annihilate its enemies.” In addition, DJT “has signed off on a $1.2 trillion plan to overhaul the entire nuclear-weapons complex.”

Citing the Trump Administration’s “Nuclear Posture Review” as one of its reasons, in January the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced the movement of the Doomsday Clock hands 30 seconds closer to midnight—the closest to ”doomsday” it has been since 1953. (See this article.)

Since then, just last Thursday President Putin of Russia claimed that Russia was developing new nuclear weapons that could overcome any U.S. missile defenses. This Washington Post article pictures what clearly seems to be a new nuclear arms race.

Picturing a Nuclear-Free World

Do you remember ICAN? It seems not to be widely known, but it is the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons—and it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2017.

Perhaps it can be said that ICAN is seeking to use “reason, science, humanism, and progress,” which Pinker emphasizes in his new book, to picture a world much different than the one now developing because of the belligerence—and fear—of the political leaders of North Korea, Russia, and the United States.

Partly as a result of ICAN’s advocacy, in July 2016 the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was approved by the United Nations with affirmative votes by 122 (out of 193) member nations (with 71 not voting). (Here is a link to the treaty’s full text.)

When, or if, the TPNW is ratified by fifty UN members, it will become international law—with nuclear weapons being outlawed just as chemical and biological weapons have been in the past.

To date, only five nations (Cuba, Guyana, the Holy See, Mexico, and Thailand) have ratified the TPNW, but 56 have signed it.

So which is it? Is this the best of times or the worst of times? With ratification of the TPNW perhaps it could be the former.

One War Ended 72 Years Ago; Is Another War about to Start?

It was 72 years ago today (on Aug. 15, 1945) that the Japanese Emperor made the announcement that brought World War II to an end. Two years ago (see this link) I wrote about that (and a few other matters) in an article titled “The Significance of August 15.” But now the looming question is this: is another war in East Asia about to begin?

The President’s Frightening Statement

Just a week ago (on Aug. 8) DJT publicly declared that if North Korea makes any more threats to the United States, “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

And then as if once wasn’t enough, he reiterated, “He [Kim Jong-un] has been very threatening beyond a normal state, and as I said, they will be met with fire and fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

The next day, NoKo (as some people are now calling North Korea) announced that (non-nuclear) missiles may be fired to within 18 to 25 miles from Guam by this week (mid-August).

Then on Aug. 10 DJT told reporters, “If anything, maybe that statement [about "fire and fury"] wasn’t tough enough."

Frightening words from the head of the nation with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal!

The President’s fear-provoking statement was made two days after Hiroshima Day and the day before Nagasaki Day, the somber days on which the death and destruction caused by the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 is remembered.

So what does DJT possibly mean by threatening “fire and fury . . . the likes of which this world has never seen before”?

Even before DJT’s Aug. 8 statement, the Aug. 5-11 issue of The Economist had this provocative image on its cover: 

The Religious Support for War

On August 8, the same day DJT made his inflammatory statement, Robert Jeffress, pastor of the First Baptist Church, Dallas, made this supportive statement to the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN).

Jeffress said (in part): “In the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong-Un.”

This prominent pastor went on to assert, “When President Trump draws a red line, he will not erase it, move it, or back away from it. Thank God for a President who is serious about protecting our country.”

 (Click here for the full statement Jeffress made to CBN’s “The Brody File.”)

It can be safely assumed that a large percentage of the evangelical Christians who voted for DJT agree with Jeffress—although, thankfully, some do not (for example, see here).

The Religious Opposition to War

In stark contrast, the World Council of Churches (WCC; see the third paragraph of this 8/9 statement) along with many other moderate/liberal church groups and individual Christians came out in strong opposition to the President’s statement.

While Jeffress based his support of DJT’s bellicosity on Romans 13, the WCC (in another statement) stressed Romans 14:10: “Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding.”

Then two days ago Fox News published “North Korea nuclear acceleration prompts church intervention,” an article largely about the Catholic Church's opposition to war with North Korea.

Individual Christian leaders have also made strong statements in opposition to the Jeffress’s reckless rhetoric. Here is just one example, an Aug. 8 tweet by UCC minister and university chaplain Chuck Currie:

You promote a dangerous theology of war that goes against Prince of Peace who preached just peace. I see nothing Christian in your remarks.

Truly, on this commemorative day marking the end of WWII, let us staunchly oppose war and war talk, actively pursuing what makes for peace.