The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
has used the Doomsday Clock to assess
the world’s risk of annihilation since 1947.
As of January 25, 2018, it's at 2 minutes to midnight,
the closest to doomsday it's ever been.
It fell to 3 minutes in 2016
partly due to the world’s collective inaction on climate change.
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the clock has counted down a full minute,
mostly thanks to escalating tensions between North Korea and the U.S.
Trump and Kim Jong Un now say they'll meet
and experts aren’t sure how it will go.
But let’s remember the stakes:
The impact wouldn't just be mass casualties.
It would also change the planet in some pretty dramatic ways.
A nuclear winter is the post-apocalyptic nightmare
scientists have warned us about since the 1980s.
And the the same people who warned us over 30 years ago?
Their message hasn’t changed.
Here’s one way it could go down:
North Korea fires an intercontinental ballistic missile.
The U.S. retaliates.
But due to a miscalculation, Russia’s hit.
Events snowball, and Russia and the U.S. go to war
deploying the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.
Each side strategically drops bombs killing hundreds of millions of people.
Those who remain will experience a sort of climate change on steroids.
Massive firestorms, up to 1,000 times more powerful
than the bombs that started them, erupt.
D.C. and Moscow and other major cities burn.
There’s so much smoke that it travels across the entire globe
and stays trapped in the stratosphere for at least a decade.
This blocks out the sun, leading to twilight at noon.
Temperatures drop below freezing, even in the summertime.
Rainfall is significantly reduced and crop-growing seasons shorten dramatically.
Once survivors finish off the roughly two and a half-month’s worth
of global food storage, they face starvation.
Ecosystems eventually begin to replace themselves 20 years later.
But, we likely won’t be around to see it.
But back to the Doomsday Clock, that symbol of the rather scary times we’re living in.
Ever wonder why it was made in the first place?
Its creators were actually nuclear scientists who built bombs during World War 2.
Even they wanted to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear war.
The nuclear experts I spoke to scared me pretty badly,
but they also reminded me of something very important.
People power, science, and democracy:
They've all turned back the hands on the Doomsday Clock before.
Sure, there’s no accounting for this guy,
especially with the new trillion-dollar nuclear push.
Things look bleak.
But I believe what the experts have been telling us all along:
if we listen to the scientists and exercise our political power,
we can make sure the clock never strikes midnight.