Scientists move Doomsday Clock ahead to 2 minutes to midnight (opens in new tab)

“A statesman is a politician who’s been dead ten or fifteen years.” - Harry S. Truman

This "warmongering" was the rationale for advancing the clock dramatically under Reagan, but Reagan's policies led to the collapse of the soviet union, so two years after Reagan's term, the clock was moved to its safest ever levels (17 minutes to midnight).

https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/the-doomsday-c...

Publicly. I highly doubt either of the two leaders you are thinking about really believe nuclear war is an actual option. Mutual assured destruction is still a thing.

Regarding the saber rattling from current POTUS, stating our nuclear arsenal is the most powerful in the world is a non-statement. It changes nothing other than public perception of his political position. It doesn't reduce or increase the power he wields nor does it reduce or increase the power held by NK.

Maybe that was the conventional wisdom at the time. Later we found out that wasn’t as true as we would hope. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CtUfBc4qQMg The movie this clip is from and the companion book are much more detailed about the realities of the time and the though processes of those world leaders.

CIA says Kim Jong Un is still a rational actor.

Not only that, the metaphor doesn't make sense. If we were at 2 minutes to midnight 1953, either we're dead now or the clock doesn't work like a clock. It should be the doomsday pressure gauge.

There is a saying in English, It takes two to tango. Perhaps the change reflects the arrival of the dance partner.

Also of concern is the new Russian coastal city killer drone submarines and their new generation of hypersonic reentry ICBMs. It is clear evidence that they do not wish to accept a world where the largest military power has anti missile technology capable of diminishing the effectiveness of the Russian offensive nuclear capability.

But that's exactly the situation here. The scientists' authority is not in fields related to international relations, or to arms control theory, or to game theory applied to military escalation.

What makes "scientists" somehow especially qualified to opine on military and national security matters?

For making the actual bombs, yes, you need scientists and engineers, but the use (or likelihood of use) of the bombs is not a scientific issue.

> It only breaks when one uses authority in one field to claim credibility in something else.

Which is exactly what they're doing.

I didn't mean to suggest that it's illogical to listen to qualified authorities.

I don't think that qualified authorities need to be introduced with "scientists <verb>."

surely 'failing to appeal to authority' would be anti-hacker, any elegantly hacked solution would appeal to authority while simultaneously undertaking pro-hacker activity in order to legitimise and make maximum impact with your actions, I would rather consider these scientists who have taken their time to bring something important to our attention as media hackers, and the fact we are discussing them tells me their fu is prime.

It was always little more than a political statement made by scientists using their scientific respect in non-scientific contexts, a major negative. But they had some justification; the Cold War threat was that the two major superpowers would fling thousands upon thousands of highly-destructive warheads at each other, and anything that might conceivably be valuable in one of their proxies, which meant every major city in the world, quite a chunk of the merely medium-sized ones, and a whole whackload of "militarily-valuable targets" all over the place.

Let's be frank; if North Korea simply goes insane and launches everything it could conceivably have 5 years from now, it wouldn't even remotely resemble that outcome. At a civilizational scale, the millions of deaths, the square miles of uninhabitable land, the major disruption to international trade and unknowable potential changes in the international political landscape would still be a civilizational inconvenience, not the end of civilization. Even if it literally precipitated World War Three somehow, it would very likely still not even remotely reach the outcome that the doomsday clock was originally created to warn against. The Cold War legitimately threatened civilization as a whole, with a distinct possibility of human extinction.

To advance the clock in 2018 "because North Korea" is, in a sort of ironic backfiring way, an admission of just how far we have in fact come since the clock was started, because back in the 60s or 70s, the thought of advancing the clock because of this level of sabre rattling wouldn't have even crossed anyone's mind. This would just be Tuesday in the Cold War world.

(Similarly, advancing the clock because of "climate change" is another admission that the world has gotten much safer since the Cold War. "In 50-100 years, things might get civilizationally-inconvenient" is not the same threat as "Tomorrow, the human race may be on an irreversible course to extinction.")

Yep, reading the HN comments on this one is surreal. I'd like to believe people are posturing and trying to convince themselves there's nothing to worry about, but I'm afraid that they're actually not worried. Reminds me of a comment [1] that I read the other day:

My generation has not grown to fear the bombs as the previous generation did. When someone of my generation is behind the buttons, I wonder if somewhere in the back of their minds there isn't a part of them that says 'perhaps in this and this situation it'd be okay to press the big red button?'.

I think the horror that war/these weapons cause will slowly drift from collective memory in mainstream western society. The warnings of the previous generation will be an endorsement of the destructive power of these weapons, instead of a deterrent of their usage.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16206823

Yeah I know (thanks for the link). I mean using a clock as the way to communicate how likely nuclear war is happens to be a terrible way of communicating to a public that knows clocks only, and naturally, move forward. Having seen a clock and reading this news, it would be reasonable for children to expect us to reach nuclear war very soon, which is not at all accurate.

It still sounds as though they accuse the public for this, though. I can't abide that.

Sorry - It was ignorance.

The thing is, there isn't going to be any large scale nuclear exchange. For one, North Koreans don't have that many bombs. On the other side, it wouldn't take that many bombs to glass the entire country of North Korea.

During the Cold War, by contrast, the Soviet Union had approximately ~48,000 warheads.