The Doomsday Clock, We've Never Been So Close To Nuclear Annihilation: David & Goliath

- On Jan. 22, 2021, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will become international law.

'The David and Goliath in Our Time.' We have never been so close to nuclear annihilation, in the opinion of many nuclear weapons experts, as today. Common Dreams, Oct. 31, 2020.

We are living in the year 2020 AD, signifying two thousand twenty years after the birth of Christ. For the writer and atomic bomb survivor, Kyoko Hayashi, however, "the significance of the birth of Christ pales in comparison" with the event that demonstrated "humans had gained the means to destroy their own species, all other species, and the earth." Thus, she invents a new calendar "the A-Bomb calendar" that designates 1945 as year 1.

The fatal act of using and showcasing the unrivaled power of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 launched a Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, an arms race that has culminated today in 9 countries possessing approximately 16,000 nuclear weapons (the U.S. and Russia having most). Moreover the current B83 nuclear weapons of the U.S. arsenal are 80 times more powerful than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities.

Further, under the Obama and subsequent administration, the U.S. government is in the process of modernizing its nuclear arsenal by 2046, carrying an estimated cost of $1.7 trillion in current dollars. And so also are Russia, China, and the other 6 nuclear nations. They are the biblical Goliaths in our midst. We have never been so close to nuclear annihilation, in the opinion of many nuclear weapons experts, as today. The seminal measure of this risk to all life on the planet is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock, an annual gauge of nuclear Armageddon since 1947.

This gauge of risk has ranged from 7 minutes to midnight in 1947, to 2 minutes in 1953, and 17 minutes in 1991, due to the détente with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the agreement with Russia to mutually reduce nuclear weapons.

But by 2020 the Bulletin set the Doomsday Clock at its closest time to midnight ever: 100 seconds..

As we finish 2020, the U.S. is in a "full-blown arms race"—both nuclear and conventional—with Russia and China; and Iran and North Korea are building nuclear programs out of self-protection from U.S. threats. Further, President Donald Trump has withdrawn from nuclear treaties and the 2017 nuclear accord with Iran; and Saudi Arabia may have nuclear ambitions...

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/10/31/david-and-goliath-our-time