The world is definitely going to end one day.
All of this will be gone and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
Everything is temporary and we’re all going to die.
I’m going to talk to some experts, share some history, and find out the truth about what’s finally going to do us all in.
How long we have until it happens…and if there’s anything we can do to slow it down.
In 1945, just two nuclear weapons were used to kill almost a quarter of a million people.
Today, there are over 10,000 nuclear weapons worldwide and they can be launched at any time.
Now, North Korea’s testing missiles that could reach the United States.
"They will be met with fire and fury"
Imagine, a handful of nuclear weapons in the hands of a megalomaniac-man-child, what could go wrong?
In the summer of 2017, the U.N. formally adopted a first ever treaty to ban nuclear weapons.
But some countries, you know, the ones with nuclear weapons, boycotted the negotiations.
The United States, France, Israel, China, Pakistan, India, Britain, and Russia.
"Russia!"
It’s pretty scary stuff and I wanted a more optimistic outlook, so I went to go talk to Joe Cirincione.
A preeminent expert on nuclear policy.
Everyday that you are living, there is threat that nuclear weapons could end human civilization on this planet.
How many times over to just destroy everything?
There are about 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world—if you took a thousand of those, so one fifteenth of the stock pile, you could destroy every major city, over a hundred thousand people on earth.
That is certainly enough to destroy civilization.
Just over and over and over again, multiple times.
Yeah, we have overkill capacity. Scientists now calculate that if as few as a hundred weapons are used in South Asia, if as few as a hundred weapons detonate in these dense, urban, mostly wooden cores of these cities, it would put enough smoke and particulates into the atmosphere to cover the earth in a cloud for two or three years.
Dropping global temperatures two or three degrees. Sort of anti-global warming. But, that would kill half of all the food crops in the world.
That leads to mass starvation, a billion person famine.
That’s chaos, destabilization, collapse of global economies, a threat to human civilization itself. All for something you don’t actually feel.
It happens far, far away in South Asia.
But it threatens you, it threatens the globe.
What is it about human nature that made that happen?
Human beings make irrational decisions all the time.
Every Saturday night is a good example of it.
You know, and people make very bad decisions in war.
Does this decision to start a nuclear strike just come from the head of state in the United States? Is this really President Trump’s sole decision like it is in the movies?
Most people don’t understand that the nuclear weapons are the president’s weapons. The president and the president alone has the authority to launch these weapons.
And once he gives the order, no one can countermand him…You should understand this.
At every moment of the president’s life, there is a military officer that has to be within one minute of where he is.
When president Trump sleeps at the White House, the officers is outside.
When he goes on a golf course, the officer’s in a cart right behind him.
The president at any time for any reason can tell that officer to open the suitcase.
He can launch one missile. He can launch a thousand missiles.
He doesn’t need the joint chiefs to agree with him.
There’s no vote in congress, there’s no appeal to the supreme court.
Four minutes after the president gives the order, those missiles start flying.
Four minutes. Think about it.
If President Trump had decided to launch a missile when you started watching this video, the world would already be changed forever.
Unfortunately, there’s a push now by some of these contractors supported by very bright people in our think tanks to build a new generation of smaller more usable nuclear weapons.
That our current nuclear weapons are too big, they say.
We're self-deterred from using them.
Our current bombs will blow up a city, all we want to do is blow up a couple of blocks.
So we want them smaller, more usable, so that we can use them, so that we can use them first in a conventional battle.
This is nuts.
Most people aren’t aware of it.
So if nuclear war is inevitable, what’s it gonna be like?
Obviously it’ll suck, but just how bad?
Every year some super smart people get together to figure out how close we are to the apocalypse.
They put it on a clock with midnight representing doomsday.
It’s called: "The Doomsday Clock"
It’s put together by the bulletin of atomic scientists.
After president Trump’s inauguration, the clock moved from three minutes to midnight, to two minutes thirty seconds.
I'm gonna go talk to the woman in charge to find out why.
What are the risks that we could die in a nuclear war at this moment?
The risks are really significant, and in fact they’ve gotten more dangerous, or the world’s gotten more risky in the most recent number of years.
The United States and Russia maintain 90%—over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons.
We need strong communications and good relations between the two. That is absolutely not happening.
The U.S. is about to invest a trillion dollars over 30 years in what looks to be an entirely new nuclear arsenal.
And a third thing that we’ve focused on most recently is a recklessness around nuclear rhetoric and setting aside of expertise—a belittling of expertise.
Over Christmas, the Pakistani foreign minister tweeted something based on a fake news story.
The fake news story was that the Israelis were threatening Pakistan.
In response, without checking, the foreign minister of Pakistan sent out a tweet saying that the Israelis should remember that Pakistan is a nuclear weapons state.
Basically a nuclear threat over twitter.
From foreign minister, based on fake news.
And I think like a lot of Americans have this kind of false belief that we're just fine. How false of a sense of security is that? Like how untrue is it that we’re just perfectly safe all the time?
The United States is testing its efforts to shoot down a missile, an incoming nuclear missile.
It has failed as much as it has succeeded.
It is very difficult to shoot down a quote unquote bullet with a bullet which is what we’re trying to do.
Our safety and security has rested on mutually assured destruction.
No body hits us because they know that we can hit them back and it has worked.
There are things happening now to suggest that might not hold up in the future.
And that’s what is so scary.
Is that it’s as dangerous as ever and we’ve been distracted on other issues because we think somebody else has been taking care of the situation.
So if the situation is so dire, what can we as a society do to turn things around?
Donald Trump could be the man that makes the next big cut in nuclear weapons.
He says he wants to have good relations between Russia.
No matter what you think about the rest of the politics, Donald Trump, a conservative president could make the deal with Russia.
Could make the deal with North Korea, that makes the world a safer place.
We know since the end of the Cold War there’s been a significant reduction in the number of weapons.
There was a time we had about 70,000 nuclear weapons across the globe, and now we’re down to much less.
So between the United States and Russia we have a little bit more than 10,000 weapons each.
That’s a significant reduction.
And then we're bringing it down to—recent agreements are as low as 1,500.
There’s goals to get to a thousand.
But that only covers if war happens on purpose. What if someone just goofs up?
In 1962, at the height of the cold war, a trespassing bear almost destroyed the world.
A bear tried to climb over an air force base fence which prompted a guard to set off the sabotage alarm.
But the sabotage alarm was accidentally linked up to the “start nuclear war" alarm.
Seriously.
Pilots ran to their jets to look for soviet bombers over the North Pole when they finally realized it was a false alarm.
It took us 25 years to figure out that it was just a bear.
What if we don’t annihilate the earth through one single moment of bad decision making?
What if we’ve been annihilating it through bad decision making all along?
Find out next time.