20, 30 million tops
by digby
I grew up during the cold war. When I was a little kid we did duck and cover drills in elementary school. I knew people who had bomb shelters in their back yards.
But even I am too young to have experienced the doomsday clock at a greater level of danger than it is today:
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced Thursday that the Doomsday Clock now stands at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, suggesting that existential threats now pose a greater danger to humanity than they have at any time since the height of the Cold War.
The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic warning about how close the world stands to “midnight,” that is, nuclear or existential catastrophe. Since 1947, the Bulletin’s scientists and security experts have updated it annually. Many of the world’s most acclaimed scientists—including Stephen Hawking, Susan Solomon, Lisa Randall, and Freeman Dyson—sponsor, oversee, or consult with the Bulletin.
“This is the closest to midnight the Doomsday Clock has ever been in the lifetime of almost everyone in this room. It’s been 64 years since it was closer,” said Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University and the chair of the Bulletin’s board of sponsors.
I think we know what’s caused this change, don’t you? Having an orange, unbalanced imbecile running the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world is the problem. The second problem is that it encourages other unbalanced imbeciles to take risks and makes sane countries believe it’s necessary to become nuclear powers in self-defense.
This is a very grave situation.
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