Opinion: Tick, tick, tick ... boom!
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The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its infmaous doomsday clock up two minutes today to five minutes to midnight. The world hasn’t been this close to nuclear war since 1984, according to the Bulletin, when the U.S. and Soviet Union virtually cut off all relations. Iran and North Korea get their due nod for moving the world closer to nuclear war, as does climate change. But the Bulletin’s report puts much of the blame on the nuclear mainstays -- the U.S. and Russia, especially in the following wrath-of-gad warning:
The five NPT-recognized nuclear weapon states have failed in their obligation to make serious strides toward disarmament--most notably, the United States and Russia, which still possess 26,000 of the 27,000 nuclear warheads in the world. By far the greatest potential for calamity lies in the readiness of forces in the United States and Russia to fight an all-out nuclear war. Whether by accident or by unauthorized launch, these two countries are able to initiate major strikes in a matter of minutes. Each warhead has the potential destructive force of 8 to 40 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. In that relatively small nuclear explosion, 100,000 people were killed and a city destroyed; 50 of today’s nuclear weapons could kill 200 million people.
The Bulletin isn’t the only one keeping track of the apocalypse. RaptureReady.com, a Christian doomsday-watch site, puts the world at two minutes to the second coming of Jesus and, consequently, the end of the world. Its signs of the times include the growing European Union, a busy Atlantic hurricane season in 2005 and China’s thirst for Mideast oil.