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Doomsday Clock To Advance
Dik Zak writes "Many news sites are reporting that the magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists intends to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock on Wednesday 17 January. The clock was started at seven minutes to midnight during the Cold War and has been moved forward or back at intervals, depending on the state of the world and the prospects for nuclear war. Midnight represents destruction by nuclear war. It is not revealed in which direction the hands of the clock will be moved, but it should be safe to assume that they will move closer to midnight: the magazine cites 'worsening nuclear [and] climate threats.' The clock stood at two minutes to midnight when both the United States and the Soviet Union tested nuclear weapons in 1953. The farthest away from midnight it ever got was 17 minutes, in 1991 when both superpowers signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. It currently stands at seven minutes to midnight."
It's a metaphore to illustrate the danger posed by nuclear weapons. It is not supposed to be a "threat level"-o-meter, but basically an indicator of what changes are worth, that we're never gotten further than 17 minutes on the scale of 12 hours of shades of nuclear weapon danger since the clock was built.
It's kind of like illustrating the age of the planet as 12 hours and the appearence of humanity and civilization as the last minute/second whatever...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Dangerous Dick indeed, as he has very little brain...20K troops isn't enought to do anything, it's really just more to stablize the Baghdad area and maybe do some border patrol. Plus it is mostly reservists and National Guard which are NOT the top troops to use in any "invasion". There is just as much crap coming in from Syria as Iraq but no one ever mentions "invading" them. Anything that is being done now by the US in Iran is likely a black operation run by the CIA and you'll never hear about until 20 yrs later. Iran is NOT a nuclear power..they DO NOT have "The Bomb". If Israel has anything to say about it they never will.
The reason the clock is moved forward now is most likely the USA, not "the Russians". In today's world, America is the Soviet Union.
Iran is not a nuclear power. It does not even have nuclear power stations. The threat to the world derives from US politicians presenting such countries as a menace in order to be able to launch aggressive wars.
Can't control things in Iraq and Afganistan so start a new war? Somebody shut Kissenger up or stop people listening to that corrupt old idiot - this didn't work last time either.
I hope the new winds of change don't just turn into a draft.
But let's be glad we don't face annihilation today like we did during the cold war. Think about it, at the time there was a real risk of humanity being set back a thousand years, or according to some theories even disappearing.
Two words for you, sir: Vassily Arkhipov.
This man, a commissioned officer in the soviet navy, was aboard a soviet submarine making it's way to the naval blockade imposed upon Cuba by the United States in October of 1963. Unknown to the Kennedy government, the Kremlin had authorized soviet submarines to fire nuclear weapons at will, as long as the three main officers concurred unanimously.
For a period of aproximately 24 hours, this particular soviet submarine was subjected to a barrage of depth charges. The level of tension was beyond the breaking point, they were running out of oxygen and the temperature was running at about 125 degrees farenheit, so the captain basically said "fuck it, we're at war, we have to launch". The other officer concurred, but Vassily Arkhipov, under incredible pressure, put his foot down and said NO. We can only imagine the amount of pressure Mr Arkhipov was subjected to (a Hollywood representation would be the film 'Crimson Tide'), but he held his ground, and when the submarine finally emerged to the surface, the world was not at war, so that they would have precipitated nuclear war if they had launched.
Now consider this: the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy, Robert MacNamara, has been quoted as saying that he went to bed that night not knowing if there would be a world to wake up to next morning (I doubt he got much sleep), even as he did not know that the Kremlin had delegated authority to their submarine officers to launch nuclear weapons, MacNamara found out a quarter of a century later, in the late eighties.
How's that for a close call nobody knew about?
With that said, I have a question: why aren't there monuments to Vassily Arkhipov being erected all over the place?
I hope you'll be happy to know that Mr Arkhipov died peacefully of old age in the late nineties. Bless you, Mr Arkhipov, I truly hope that your wife made the best borscht with oxtail in the world and that you slowly enjoyed every time you dipped it with your freshly baked bread, for years and years and years. Yum.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
If I travel 1 meter in 1 second I travel at 1m/s, if I used a second to get to this speed I accelerated at 1m/s^2. If I weigh 1kg, then this required a force of 1N. If this force 1N work over a distance of 1m, it does 1J of work. If that was done in 1s then the power was 1W. If this was provided by electricity, then that is for example 1V and 1A. 1A means 1C electrons pro 1s flows trough the conductor. Now you do that, using only imperial units. :-) How many hogheads *are* there to a fluid-oz anyway ?
If I travel 1 foot in 1 second I travel at 1 foot/s, if I used a second to get to this speed I accelerated at 1 foot/s^2. If I weigh 1lb, then this required a force of 1 pound-force. If this force 1lbf works over a distance of 1', it does one foot-pound force (ftlbf) of work. If that was done in 1s then the power was 1 ftlbfs^-1.
I can't do any more from memory - we only used metric terms when discussing electricity, whereas we used imperial and metric with anything else, but I'm sure they exist. My point is that the 1:1:1 ratio isn't a feature of the metric system, it's a feature of measurement systems in general.