January 28, 2018

On January 25, 2018 the Science and Security Board Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 2 minutes to midnight, something that had not happened since 1953, at the height of the cold war.

There is no need to repeat the reasons for this assessment. However, the litany is so overwhelming and dismaying that we believe their appraisal is actually extraordinarily optimistic. Consider this: by today’s standards the weapons of mass destruction available in 1953 were primitive. All-out nuclear war in our time would transform our wonderful blue marble, our only home, into a radioactive lifeless wasteland.

In our view, the root cause of our predicament lies in the spiritual component of our existence. Characteristics such as good/evil, love/hate, greed/magnanimity, rebelliousness/obedience, and pride/humbleness, said to dwell somewhere in our brains, are directly responsible for everything from the abysmal gap in the distribution of wealth and income to climate change. Accordingly, we are called upon to suddenly, somehow, achieve a level of collective enlightenment on par with our recently perfected ability to self-destruct, a daunting task to say the least. We are on the brink, as President Kennedy feared, of failing to abolish nuclear weapons. Instead, like the Sword of Damocles, a few more swings and they will surely abolish us, the elite included.