| Putin Keeps Threatening December 2022
By Bob Weaver 2022
The hands on the Doomsday Clock will likely be moved forward with the "sword rattling" of Nuclear War linked to the Ukraine-Russia War.
The current nuclear clock is set for 1000 seconds to doomsday, likely to be shortened with the next setting.
The human race may not have the capacity to save itself, a current day example being the inability to accept the slow moving consequences of Global Warning. In the USA nearly half of all Americans have been politicized to believe it is a hoax, science be damned.
World history is littered with the death of multi-millions, spurred by grabs for power, money or religious dominance, whole civilizations destroyed. Many of the world's democratic nations are being tumbled, being replace by populist totalitarian-like governments.
Despite the lack of evidence, pop culture President Donald Trump has supporters clinging to a lie, he was cheated as the presidential loser, and the attack on the US Capitol on Jan. 6 are clear warnings that America is on wobbly legs.
Those weak legs are becoming weaker as American politicians miss nary an effort to pass more crumbling culture war bills, creating an ever greater divide.
After Russian President Vladimir Putin put his country's nuclear forces on high alert on February 27, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, "The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility."
Recent statements by government officials and pundits, both in Russia and the United States, have made it clear that while nuclear war should be unthinkable, they are indeed thinking about it.
Putin issued the latest in a series of nuclear threats when he warned of a "lightning-fast" response if any nation intervened in Ukraine.
President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. who brought a temporary pause in the Cold War, said in a joint statement in 1985, that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
When Donald Trump became president, he pulled out of the nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018 (subsequently, Iran has escalated its nuclear arms program). In 2019, the United States also withdrew from the INF Treaty. One year later, Trump did the same with the Open Skies Treaty, which had enabled participants to conduct surveillance flights to foster transparency and reduce the risk of war.
The US and Russia currently have some 3,000 strategic nuclear warheads pointed at each other, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
A 2002 study showed that if only 300 Russian warheads got through to cities in the United States, 77 million to 105 million people would be killed in the first day.
In addition, the economic infrastructure of the United States would be gone. There would be no electric grid, internet, food distribution system, banking or public health system, or transportation network.
In the months following, most of those who survived the initial attack would also die -- from starvation, exposure, disease and radiation poisoning, the same study found. A US attack on Russia would produce the same destruction there, the report said.
And the fires caused by these combined attacks would put millions of tons of soot into the upper atmosphere, blocking out the sun and dropping temperatures across the globe to levels not seen since the last ice age.
Food production would crash, triggering a global famine that would destroy modern civilization, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances.
It is hard to understand by what definition anyone could win such a war.
DOOMSDAY CLOCK - Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletins Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 11 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the worlds vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains. In March 2022, the Science and Security Board released a new warning statement in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
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