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."

Comments

Re:One Bomb is Not "Doomsday"

[niktemadur]

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.