Since 2016, I’ve blogged five times about the Doomsday Clock, thus each time it was changed. It has been set at two minutes to Midnight for the past three years. That is the closest to Midnight that the Doomsday Clock has been since it’s inception. Today, it was set at 90 seconds to Midnight, which is now the closest to Midnight it has ever been. What is the Doomsday Clock. It is a symbolic warning of how much the world is in danger of “global catastrophe.” The closer to Midnight, the closer the world is to a global catastrophe.
Following WWII, many major scientists in the world were worried about the future of atomic/nuclear weapons after the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan that brought the war to an end. Some of those scientists had even worked on the Manhattan Project which produced those two atomic bombs. One of those scientists was the great physicist Albert Einstein.
So, in 1947, Einstein became one of the founders of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in conjunction with the University of Chicago, which also was involved in the Manhattan Project. The Bulletin’s Science and Security Board (which now has ten Nobel laureates) then created the Doomsday Clock. Every year thereafter, in January, the Board makes a decision to leave the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock in its present position or to move it one way or the other in accordance with their consensus viewpoint of whether the world is more dangerous or less dangerous than the previous year.
There are several reasons the Bulletin’s Board decided today to move the Doomsday Clock’s minute-hand closer to Midnight than ever before. The main one is the Russian war in Ukraine. It has been going on for eleven months, and it is the biggest war in Europe since WWII. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly talked publicly about Russia possibly using nuclear weapons in this war. But the Board had other reasons, such as the damage the Earth is suffering due to ongoing global warming, which most climate scientists believe is the result of humans burning fossil fuels. And this viewpoint is now accepted by nearly all government leaders in the world.
UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres recently warned that the world is in “a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War,” which existed between the two superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, between about 1950 and 1991 when the latter collapsed and went out of existence.
When that happened, Ukraine then possessed the third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world, thus behind Russia and the U.S. An agreement was entered into in accordance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in which the U.S., UK, and Russia declared to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.” Because of this agreement, Ukraine agreed to relinquish all of its nuclear weapons. Some were destroyed in accordance with the nuclear weapons disarmament movement, and the others were shipped to Russia. Thus, Ukraine, which was a Soviet satellite against its will and an immediate neighbor of Russia, forfeiting its nuclear weapons only because Russia made this declaration.
But in 2014, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin reneged on this Russian promise and invaded peaceful Ukraine for the sole purpose of taking Ukraine territory. It then annexed Ukraine’s prime territory to Russia, which is the Crimean Peninsula. And that is the purpose of Putin’s present invasion–to take more Ukraine territory, if not the entire nation, and annex it to Russia.
Thus, Russia is no more a cooperating signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The only remaining nuclear arms treaty between the U.S. and Russia is the New START, which is set to expire in 2026. Then there will be no inspections of nuclear weapons or their development and testing in Russia by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Plus, several nations in Asia and the Middle East are now considering creating their own nuclear weapons program due to threats by other nations.
As a result of all of this, and if the war in Ukraine continues to enlarge as it has been, next year in January the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board may be moving the Doomsday Clock’s minute-hand ever so closer to Midnight than it now is.
[My next Still Here book on Bible prophecy will have two chapters about world disarmament of not only nuclear weapons but all advanced weapons, rifles, and guns as well. Of course, this presumably will take a long time. The Bible’s Ezekiel 38-39 is a prophecy about the Antichrist (Gog) leading the world’s government leaders and their militaries in a final war at the end of the age to destroy Israel, often referred to as Armageddon, which is a misnomer (see my Warrior from Heaven, pp. 12-15).
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