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“These scientists say the world is closer than ever to ‘doomsday,’” blared the Washington Post. “Atomic scientists set ‘Doomsday Clock’ closer to midnight than ever,” fussed Reuters. “Doomsday Clock hits record, nears midnight. What it means for Alabama,” the Montgomery Advertiser advertised.
Every year, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (who are not atomic scientists and don’t have a bulletin) announce that the world is closer to destruction than ever as long as Trump is here.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bulletin (which back then at least had both a ‘bulletin’ and ‘atomic scientists’) set the ‘Doomsday Clock’ at 12 minutes to midnight. By 2020, the clock of doom had run out of minutes and was down to seconds. Last year the fake clock ticked down to 89 seconds, and now it’s down to 85. When it finally hits zero, Ed McMahon will return from the dead to tell us we’ve all won the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes award.
That joke is not exactly a tangent because the official statement of doom was issued by the editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists John Mecklin. Mecklin’s branch of ‘atomic science’ is ‘journalism’ and he was the editor for such prestigious nuclear publications as Key West Magazine, High Country News where he authored such radioactive items as “Have Bee, Will Travel” and “Schooling, Fish.”
At the top, the Bulletin cites Albert Einstein and Soviet spy J. Robert Oppenheimer as its founders, but it’s being written by a guy whose contribution to deeply insightful scientific reporting was stuff like “in Hollywood science fiction, genetic modification leads to monsters with extensible jaws and rampaging epidemics that threaten mankind’s existence.”
Not exactly ‘an Einstein’.
But as the publication admits, well down below in the fine print, “at our core, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a media organization.” But the ‘Bulletin of the Media Hacks’ doesn’t impress people as much as the ‘Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ and so the doomsday show must go on. And the media helpfully doesn’t report any of these minor details so as not to disillusion those members of the public who still believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Clock.
“Leaders of the United States, Russia, and China greatly vary in their autocratic leanings, but they all have approaches to international relations that favor grandiosity and competition over diplomacy and cooperation,” the former Key West Magazine/Atomic Scientist magazine editor complains.
China harvests organs from political prisoners, Russia invaded Ukraine and, according to the leading nuclear expert in Key West Magazine, “the Trump administration has essentially declared war on renewable energy and sensible climate policies, relentlessly gutting national efforts to combat climate change.” Who can tell the difference between gutting political prisoners and ‘gutting’ useless wind turbines to fight global warming.
The actual Doomsday Clock (or perhaps DOOMSDAY CLOCK to better emphasize its doomed qualities) is supposed to be set by the Bulletin’s ‘Science and Security Board’ whose executive chair is prominent nuclear scientist Gov. Jerry Brown. While the former governor, who inherited the job from his crooked dad, doesn’t have a background in nuclear science, he did more damage to California than any nuclear bomb could have. But if that’s the criteria for serving on the Science Board of the Atomic Scientists, Gov. Gavin Newsom should be the executive chair for having exceeded Brown in ‘nuking’ California’s communities in every respect.
Then there’s Alexandra Bell, the president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and if you guessed that ‘Sandy’ is as much of a nuclear scientist as you and me (perhaps you’re a nuclear scientist, if you’re a nuclear scientist, please disregard this, if you’re not a nuclear scientist, please consider going to work for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists), then you’re remarkably insightful or perhaps you just read the preceding nine paragraphs where that same point was made with the subtlety of a little boy meeting a Japanese city in the summer of ’45.
Alexandra Bell has a degree in ‘International Affairs’ from the New School which is an old leftist school, and passed through various leftist groups like the Center for American Progress and the Ploughshares Fund, a group lobbying for Iran to be able to get nukes, before being adopted by the Obama administration as an expert on nuclear weapons, and by the Biden administration during its brief tenure of senile appeasement, and then got a spot running the Bulletin.
According to her bio, Sandy has been “quoted or published in The Washington Post, The New York Times” as well as Vox, Politico, both the Raleigh News and Observer, as well as Time, and Bustle and the Huffington Post. (Bustle is a women’ s magazine that offers “beauty tips”, “celebrity gossip” and politics.) So you know she knows a lot about nuclear doomsday.
“The Doomsday Clock’s message cannot be clearer. Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline, and we are running out of time,” Alexandra Bell warned while invoking the doomed clock. “Every time we’ve been able to turn back the hands of the clock, it’s been because we have scientists and experts working to find solutions.”
Or, you know, because it’s a fake clock and anyone with access to it can set its hands to anything they want. Alexandra Bell and John Mecklin are living proof of that. You don’t need scientists or experts. Give me 90 seconds with the clock and I can set it to 3 in the morning.
(Doomsday note: this would require flipping the clock as it’s broken and does not have a 3 A.M. or really any hours before 9 P.M. and really isn’t good for anything except press releases.)
But speaking of broken things, other members of the science board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists who were former Obama and Biden officials include Jon B. Wolfsthal, who worked as an arms control director for Obama, Jill Hruby, Biden’s Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security, and Steve Fetter, who had a few postings in the Obama White House.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has become the Bulletin of Disgruntled Obama Officials.
Still the Doomsday Clock has ticked as Jon Wolfsthal, who has a BA in political science and a position as the ‘director of global risk’ at the Federation of American Scientists (which is rapidly becoming as ‘scientific’ as the Bulletin), Steve Fetter, who at least has a PhD, and Asha George, a “public health security expert who spent four years a congressional staff member with the House Committee on Homeland Security”, revealed the current position of the clock.
They all wore somber expressions. Asha wore a whole lot of jewelry and Steve didn’t even bother putting on a tie. Perhaps Bustle should have been brought in to consult on fashion.
The good news though is that we’re 85 seconds to midnight depending on your time zone. Since the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists never once correctly predicted a major threat (it stopped even bothering to set the clock before 9/11, and set the clock well ahead just before the Gulf of Tonkin Incident), we can be confident that we’re safer the further the clock ticks.
But if the Bulletin ever sets back the clock to 9:30 PM, then it’s time to be very afraid.
