Hey, everyone!
Well, alright, no more Youtube drama,
I got the hint.
So, today we're going to talk about
the Doomsday Clock.
I was going to talk about the Mueller thing,
but I really feel like, as the time I'm recording this,
which is on Friday,
the other shoe is yet to drop on that,
so, maybe next week,
depending upon how crazy that gets.
So, yesterday, the new atomic Doomsday Clock
has been moved to two minutes to midnight.
The closest it has ever been,
and the only time it's ever been
this close before was in 1953.
But, what is the Doomsday Clock?
Who makes it?
And what does it really mean?
Well, let's start with the makers
of the Doomsday Clock.
It's a group called the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,
they're actually the creators of
a non-technical journal that covers issues
with global security, nuclear weapons,
environmental destruction, those kinds of things.
Like, threats to the world,
but written by scientists.
It was started by a group of scientists
called the Chicago Atomic Scientists,
who were veterans of the Manhattan Project.
After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
they kind of had some sort of moral obligation
that came out of the fact
that they created weapons of mass destruction.
So, the Bulletin began as a way
to try and deal with all of the horror
that they were seeing in the world,
and the incresing global tension
that seemed to be a sign
of the world sleepwalking into Armageddon.
And so they debuted
something called the Doomsday Clock.
It was originally designed to be a clock that,
as the minute hand gets closer to midnight,
it's a symbol for the world's closer proximity
to complete thermonuclear war and destruction.
In 1953, the last time that the clock
was moved at two minutes to midnight,
was when the first hydrogen bombs were being used,
which are a lot more powerful version
of the atomic bomb.
So, why is it at two minutes to midnight now?
Let's talk about nuclear weapons,
and what has been happening
recently with nuclear weapons.
So, if you guys don't know,
I do streams pretty much every Thursday
in the hour leading up to the new Step Back video,
and I've gotten a lot of comments
asking about what I think is going to happen
in the Korean Peninsula
when it comes to the nuclear ambitions
of North Korea.
I don't think it's called nuclear ambitions anymore,
because they pretty much are
a nuclear armed country.
And I get questions about
this all the time,
and I do think that there are
things to be worried about.
Not only is North Korea
a now nuclear armed country
but the United States is now led by a leader
who seems more cavalier about
the threat of nuclear weapons
than any President.
I guess that might not be true,
JFK literally didn't build bomb shelters
because he thought that
Americans being perfectly open and willing
to cause the apocalypse
was somehow a way
to stick it to the Soviets.
It was a way of them saying that
they're gonna be the first strikers
not the recipients.
But yeah, there's a sort of
geopolitical angle to nuclear weapons
like, I know North Korea
is developing them so they can't be invaded
by the United States
and the United States has had a habit
of invading people over the years.
North Korea was on the War on Terror
axis of evil at one point,
so, I kinda get it.
That being said, nuclear weapons,
even when they aren't intended to be used,
could be set off by accident.
If you read a book called "Command and Control"
by Eric Schlosser,
there's a lot of stuff to show
that there's a few times
actually, more times than is comfortable,
where accidents, and things not working correctly,
almost caused nuclear devastation.
So, when it comes to weapons of this calibre
having more of them causes risks
even if there aren't uses,
because of accidents.
There's also been a move
towards developing smaller,
more tactical thermonuclear devices,
and that is really dangerous.
There's this idea that
if we can just make small enough nukes,
that, somehow, it'll be acceptable.
If you make a nuclear weapon small enough
that it won't destroy an entire city
and cause apocalyptic damage,
all of a sudden you're gonna have
this escalating acceptance of
the use of nuclear weapons.
So, yeah, less nuclear weapons would
be a safer world.
And the fact that we
are moving away from that direction,
it's pretty worrying.
I really just wish that
nobody had nuclear weapons.
The second thing to talk about
is how ineffectual the world
has been in responding
to climate change.
And, since 2017, things have been
moving in a bunch of directions.
I do think that, in this case,
the Bulletin is being a little too Amerocentric,
because, while America is doing its best
to de-develop itself back to the Stone Age,
the rest of the world has been doing
a lot of work to increase
its response to Climate Change.
China has been doing a ton of work
to increase its Climate Change response,
Germany plans to be
basically clean by 2020,
France just announced
that by 2021 they're not
going to use coal power anymore.
Justin Trudeau has promised
to do a bunch of stuff
and then decided not to do any of them.
Meanwhile, the exact same time,
the United States is basically
ignoring and really moving back
a lot of their protections on Climate Change.
The United States is doing
a lot of harm and a lot of damage
to the world right now,
and setting back the project
to save our planet...
immeasurably.
Because, as some people seem to think it's a joke,
the President actually believes
that Climate Change is a hoax
created by the Chinese.
Just to give you some perspective,
for those who are sceptical of Climate Change,
I don't know if you realise this,
but a lot of the people who are being
hired to fund that scepticism of Climate Change
are the same people who tried to fund
the scepticism that cigarettes cause cancer.
Then again, the Vice President of the United States
has been on record saying
that he's sceptical about
the link between smoking and cancer.
Lovely.
The next statement they make is about
the emerging technologies,
especially about social media
and the spreading of fake news
and a lack of concept or belief
in scientific legitimacy.
This part is worrying.
Science literally seems to be in dire straits,
and this is very, very concerning.
And the Bulletin has a set of reccomentations
that are things that the world could do
to try and respond to
how close we are to midnight,
because it seems to be that
a lot of people think that
because the Cold War's over
we've dodged the threat of nuclear annihilation.
But we're as close as we've ever been.
So, one of the first things they reccomend
is, they literally call out Donald Trump
to stop tweeting about North Korea.
The use more flowery language than that
to stop the provocative and violent rhetoric to North Korea,
because you should recognise that
it's impossible to predict how North Korea's going
to react to these things.
They also reccomend opening military-to-military communications
between North Korea and the United States,
which wouldn't be a bad idea.
They also reccomend the global community
work to stop North Korea's ballistic missile program.
North Korea's the first country
in 20 years to violate the norms
surrounding nuclear testing,
and we shouldn't be letting that slide.
Basically, they reccomend that the United States
tried to get North Korea to sign
the test ban treaty by the United Nations.
They also recommend, to stop nuclear proliferation,
for the United States to honour its agreement with Iran;
which was a set of lightening economic sanctions on Iran
in exchange for them no longer
pursuing their nuclear weapons program,
or at least putting it on ice for a number of years.
Because the United States is not complying with the agreement
Iran is now no longer really
on the hook to do it either.
They also say that Russia and NATO should be talking
because there's been a lot
of friction between NATO and Russian forces,
and this is something that definitely
should be worked out
because Russia has more nuclear weapons
than any other country.
The Bulletin also says that
the United States and Russia
should work together
to reduce nuclear weapons;
which was happening for quite a while,
but has since ceased.
They then have a reccomendation
that members of the United States,
citizens of the United States,
should demand their Government to do something
serious about the very real,
and very dangerous Climate Change catastrophe
that is already here, actually.
In fact, their more general thing
is our Government should just
redouble their efforts to attack
the reduction of greenhouse gases,
and stop ourselves from turning into
a boiling, apocalyptic world.
They also call for a program
to penalise, and somehow stem,
the misuse of information technology
to spread falsities and propaganda,
especially the undermining of the trust in science,
the media, and objective reality itself.
Hear that, Newt Gingrich?
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
has had some mixed results in their predictions for the world,
but these are pretty reasonable things
that we really should be getting on board with.
And, so, when you hear about the Doomsday Clock moving closer to midnight,
you should take it as a rallying call,
not a cry of despair.
There are things that we can do
to make this situation better,
and the clock has moved back before.
So, when these stories come up
now you know the context behind why they're made,
who's making them,
and what we can do about it.
Beore I go I also want to thank
Baron J. Fellington esq.
who's actually the Step Back subscriber
who gave me the name for Quick Step.
I wanna thank him a lot.
And he gave me that advice in the community tab
which is always worth checking out.
I also want to give a shoutout
to my Wednesday night D&D campaign,
so, every Wednesday night
I play a Dungeons and Dragons campaign,
it's on Twitch, on a channel called Dungeon_Dwellers,
and I play a Dwarf Monk.
It's super fun, you should check it out,
it's at twitch.tv/dungeon_dwellers.
It starts at 18:30 EST,
and I hope to see a lot of you guys there
because that show needs a lot of love
and it's really fun, and it's been really great,
and it's been another way for me to do
something that's not just me being a historian all the time.
Of course, liking, sharing, subscribing,
all of those wonderful Youtube things.
You guys have a great week,
do something to move the clock back.
Peace, and I really mean it.