The Doomsday Clock is about to be reset on January 28. In this unique moment of time between the LA fires, the implementation of the Trump agenda, and the setting of the Doomsday Clock, we invite you to consider moving the agenda from fear to friendship, as Alice Slater proposes below.
Robin Lloyd, editor
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, with the advice of Albert Einstein and other scientists from the Manhattan Project who developed the atomic bomb, established a Doomsday Clock, in 1947, to illustrate the annihilating danger the earth is facing since the creation of the diabolical nuclear bomb. At that time, the clock was set at 7 minutes to midnight, their estimate of how much time we had left before nuclear war would wreak catastrophic devastation on our planet and all living things in existence.
Over the years, the hands of the clock have been reset, forward and backward, as scientists and policy makers estimated how immediate the nuclear danger loomed, based on the perils faced by other countries obtaining nuclear weapons as well as new arms control measures, weapons limitations, and agreements, particularly between the US and Russia for disarmament measures. At its most optimistic, the Doomsday hands were moved to 17 minutes to midnight in 1991when the US and USSR announced the complete cessation of nuclear testing.
Shockingly, despite years of nuclear arms control measures, resulting in arsenals down from a high of 70,000 bombs at the peak of the world’s nuclear insanity, to about 12,000 today, 11,000 of which are in the US and Russia with nearly 4,000 poised and ready to go, with another 1000 held by the six other nuclear weapons states—UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea– the clock has never been set closer to Doomsday than it is today—At 90 seconds to midnight!1
It’s time to transform the clock and change the conversation! Dire warnings about Doomsday have done little to increase our world’s safety these 77 years. It’s time to speak about the many possibilities and missed opportunities to create the new dawning of a Peace Day, changing the clock of doom to a clock that can tick off the many solutions that have been ignored and disregarded We must stop giving our blessing and consent to endless steps to “control” arms that lead to ever more danger as illustrated by the aging Doomsday clock.
Instead, we must demand their abolition, as we move to a nuclear free world at peace unthreatened by catastrophic annihilation. Indeed, scholars writing of the sad story of endless negotiations to control arms but never to abolish them have even coined a new term for the meaningless steps to nowhere–anti-preneurism–where instead of the US proposing abolition, or total and complete disarmament, or elimination of weapons, it is always proposing new meaningless steps towards illusory progress!2
To begin a new conversation for abolition, we must acknowledge the missed opportunities and broken promises since the dawn of the nuclear age. At the very beginning, in 1945, Stalin asked Truman to put the nuclear bomb under international control at the newly established United Nations. The US rejected Russia’s proposal and Russia got the bomb!3
When the wall came down in Germany and Gorbachev dissolved the Warsaw Pact and freed all of occupied Eastern Europe, he proposed to Reagan that the US and Russia eliminate all our nuclear weapons, provided the US would end its “Star Wars” program to dominate and control the military use of space. Reagan turned him down and Gorbachev withdrew Russia’s offer.4
Gorbachev, anxious about the fate of East Germany, urged Reagan not to take a united Germany into NATO. The Russians lost 27 million people to the Naza onslaught of WWII! The US assured him that NATO would not expand “one inch to the east.”5
Despite repeated request to the US from Russian President Putin to honor those US promises made to Gorbachev and again to Yeltsin, the US, driven by visions of Empire steadily expanded Nato eastward. It began with Clinton’s annexation of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999, followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia sand Slovenian in 2004, and Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia between 2009 and 20176. And during the war in Ukraine, Sweden and Finland joined NATO.
The US stations nuclear weapons in 5 states: Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and Turkey. Russia, during the Ukraine war, put nuclear weapons in Belarus.
Clinton led NATO in the bombing of Kosovo in 1999, bypassing Russia’s veto in the Security Council, violating the UN treaty we signed never to commit a war of aggression against another nation unless under imminent threat of attack;
Clinton refused Putin’s offer to each cut our massive nuclear arsenals to 1000 bombs each and call all the others to the table to negotiate for their elimination, provided we stopped developing missile sites in Romania;
Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and Obama put the new missile base in Romania while Trump built another in Poland;
Obama pledged over one trillion dollars for the next 30 years for two new nuclear bomb factories, missiles, submarines, airplanes and warheads which was upped even more by Trump and Biden.7
Despite repeated requests from Russia and China to negotiate treaties to ban weapons in space and cyberwar in UN resolutions and negotiating forums, the US refuses to cooperate.8
We are at a turning point in history. It is time to change the conversation with bold new proposals. Proposals that are guaranteed to bring us a respite from the growing terror. Proposals that will bring a shift in planetary consciousness allowing us to respond cooperatively to the impending cataclysmic climate disaster down the road! Proposals that will usher in a rising dawn and change the Doomsday Clock to a new Peace Day clock. Mother Earth grows impatient with the folly of humankind.
Here are a series of steps that are most likely to lead to peace on earth if the US is ready to mobilize against what has been described as the MICIMATT (Military, Industrial, Congressional, Intelligence, Media, Academic Think Tank complex) and work for peace.
- Take up repeated Russian and Chinese proposals for treaties to ban weapons in space and cyberwar
- Reinstate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia and removes US missiles from Romania and Poland
- Remove US nuclear weapons from five NATO states in a deal for Russia removing its recently placed nuclear weapons in Belarus
- Take all nuclear weapons off high alert and separate the warheads from their delivery systems as China does– the wisdom of the East
- Dismantle NATO and respect and honor the United Nations
There’s little doubt that Russia and China would be willing partners in these initiatives. They have been proposing them to the United States and voting on them in the UN for more than ten years.
1 https://fas.org/initiative/status-world-nuclear-forces/
2 https://www.academia.edu/77004279/Resistance_to_the_emergent_norm_to_advance_progress_towards_the_complete_elimination_of_nuclear_weapons?email_work_card=thumbnail
3 https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/soviet-union-and-baruch-plan/
4 https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/reagan-and-gorbachev-reykjavik-summit/
5 https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early/
6 https://ndisc.nd.edu/news-media/news/the-addition-of-nato-members-over-time-1949-2023/
7 https://fpif.org/president-obamas-twisted-nuclear-weapons-legacy/#!
8 https://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/disarmament-fora/cd/2014/cd-reports/8908-russia-and-china-table-new-draft-treaty-to-prevent-weapons-in-space
