Published on 12, July, 2020
https://thebulletin.org/2018-doomsday-clock-statement
So... Who's prepping? Anyone?
The hands that threaten doom..........!
I don't think anyone, on either side, likes it.
I do not like the confrontation between the West and the East.
Sorry, I often go off-context as my brain seems to prefer taking 'side-streets' rather than sticking to the 'main-road' in conversations.
The idea of a biological mutation to help cope with the effects of climate change was one such example but, reading it back now, I think this idea was amply covered in the movie 'Waterworld'.
Endymion said:Perhaps radioactive fallout would help with that?!
https://youtu.be/jzsmmD52tcU
...I was about to point out that I did not understand this comment...but only as I write this does it occur to me that you may be suggesting the starting of a "Biological Mutations via Radioactivity"-sub-thread...This is how slow I am in getting "jokes" and "puns" off-context, and it is quite annoying to find something amusing after it is too late, and so not knowing if it is appropriate to join in... (!)
A woman in the next village to us had the same experience as your father, in 2004 - lying in bed looking up at the stars when the roof was blown off her house. She had to be rescued in the middle of the night by the local fire service.
This incident was caused by hurricane force winds which are becoming more prevalent due to climate change and I think we have more to fear / prepare ourselves for re. climate change than we do re. the threat of war.
I'm pretty sure my village won't exist at all in another few decades if sea levels rise as predicted so I guess any preparations I do make will mean nothing unless I also manage to develop gills. Perhaps radioactive fallout would help with that?!
Well the first report confirms my statement that the protocols are under constant review but what is actually changed may not be what is reported by the press or even falsely reported for security reasons.
The fact that floppy discs are still used is no surprise and it does mean they cannot be hacked into.
Bye the way I own a DongFeng404 compact tractor. :) Nice basic piece of kit with no electronics/computers aboard except the usual gauges for temp, oil pressure, fuel, RPM etc.
Nothing much to go wrong except mechanical breakdowns which are easily fixed with the right knowledge and technical backup. I like it a lot.
And yes I am still sure:)
Take care, Laddie.
Yes interesting indeed but is there a time lag you are missing with this data? Could be that it takes a year or two for the change to occur after the election?
Here's a chart showing the magnitude and direction of each change to the clock, again coded for the party of the incumbent president. I'm really surprised by this, but the data says that the net change under Democrats was an overall swing of 18 minutes towards midnight , whereas the Republicans saw an overall swing of 11 minutes away from midnight.
If you accept that the party in office actually has any bearing on the global security situation, the data rather implies that right wing US governments make the world a safer place(!) Note however that with so few data points, you could well get the opposite result if you ran the same experiment again - maybe the reality is that, rather like the stock market, no one is really in control at all...
As for what made the scientists alter the clock each time, you can find that information at: https://thebulletin.org/timeline
laddie49 said:I am sure if the Americans are really changing those protocols we would not know anything about it.
Still sure?
Thanks for the tip, I managed to see a bigger version. The pattern does seem to be similar to your first graph but as I said earlier this might just be a coincidence. I guess the only way to know for sure if there is any political connection is to ask the scientists themselves what influenced them to alter the clock.
laddie49 said:Struggling to read
If you click/tap the graph, do you see a bigger version that you can zoom?
Yes, it's the same timeframe. Democrat (blue) / Republican (red) shows the political allegiance of the incumbent president at the time the clock was adjusted.
I'm not totally convinced (yet) that I can see the pattern you mention, so I might try drawing a different picture.
One additional thought is that even if the red dots are all closer to midnight, does this imply a causal relationship, or that a worsening political situation under democrats leads the nation to swing to the right? To put it another way, do the republicans cause the red dots or are they inheriting a democrat mess? Yes, the most recent dots are both red, but the biggest *drops* since 1991 are all Democrat, whilst the vast improvement 1984 - 1991 are all Republican...
Struggling to read the very small print along the bottom (dates) How does this line up with the dates on your previous graph? Is it the same timeframe? The red dots are definitely closer to midnight than the blue dots.
Yes I accept that. Sloppy reading on my part. I saw a 1971 quote on page 1 and never read all the way to the end. Nevertheless there are very strict protocols I am sure to avoid confusion/accidents.
I am sure if the Americans are really changing those protocols we would not know anything about it.
Maybe some "fake news"????
laddie49 said:This is a very old fact sheet
Er... the date on that doc says 2015. I know that 3 years on the internet is an eternity, but come on!
So, your comment about the leanings of the government got me thinking, and I felt we needed some data:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwasong-15
"The end" is not necessarily near, but these are dangerous times.
Arguably NK already has the range.
Trump has threatened that Kim won't be around much longer. Some in the American government have been threatening a preemptive strike on NK. China has warned that if it thinks the US is attempting regime change, it will intervene to prevent it; the Chinese don't want US troops right up against their border. China's DF-5 yields somewhere between 3 and 5 megatons. If China gets sucked into a fight, we can all forget about surviving anyway.
Putin is probably just out for himself, but they too share a border with NK.
There are many ways this could go spectacularly wrong.
I guess you are hinting that right wing governments ramp up the rhetoric to keep the electorate looking for bogeymen whilst they are getting fleeced?
Perhaps.
One of my takes on the graph is that the clock was not all that bad during the (sudden) Cuban missile crisis or indeed when the American early warning radar interpreted the rising moon as a vast Soviet attack coming over the pole.
Documented historical facts show that there have been repeated "near misses" with these weapons, even when scientists thought our proximity to war was more distant. So these ongoing hiccups are effectively someone rolling a die: something will go wrong from time to time, because people aren't perfect.
If the political view is more relaxed, it's less likely that someone will misconstrue an errant warning as a real attack.
When the rhetoric ramps up, there is an increased risk of miscalculation, resulting in escalation.
If the so-called leader of the free world is level headed, critical decisions which must be made in a matter of minutes are more likely to be made with due regard to the potential downsides if the incoming information is wrong, even if the situation is tense.
At the height of the Cold War, both sides knew full well that a real attack would begin with a torrential first strike, or a tit-for-tat escalation of an existing conventional conflict. Therefore if the warning systems suggested a single or small handful of incoming warheads, people got suspicious because it didn't fit the expected pattern they'd trained for.
Unfortunately, Kim is likely to limit an initial attack to less than 5 missiles, because he'll be trying to make the US stop and think again. He knows he has no chance in an all-out war.
The US and the DPRK have both been needling one another and point-scoring. Both have leaders that would most likely quickly approve a launch if they thought they were under attack.
The American and South Korean forces seem to be increasingly attempting to goad North Korea into doing something dumb. I do believe that at least some in the American government intend to make good on their assertion that Kim be removed, as long as the folk dying as a result are far away, don't have the same colour skin, and don't have relations that might decide the next US election. This is the same aggressive behaviour that ordered U2 flights over sensitive soviet military sites at the height of the Cuban missile crisis - they tried to goad the soviets so that they would get the pretext they wanted for "defending the American Way"(!)
Similarly, the next logical step for Kim is an atmospheric test of a thermonuclear device, somewhere in the Pacific. The Americans are likely to view such a test as an unacceptable provocation, even though this is "do as we say, not as we did".
NK has repeatedly surprised with its advancing capabilities, so another area to keep an eye on is SLBM, which would render any debates about effective range somewhat moot.
To cap it all, folk that were around during the last war are pretty much gone now. People have forgotten what nuclear weapons really do. Trump has supposedly asked his generals, "but why can't we use them?". Everything today is just a big video game.
In summary, the clock is not a guarantee of war. It is of course just a bunch of scientists trying to say, "Hey, politicians! We're worried!".
War may well not come at all, nothing is certain. But all the pieces are in the right places on the chess board for something to go abysmally wrong here.
I'll leave you with this:
www.youtube.com/watch
An interesting view. What do you base that assertion on?
US nuke tech is based on very old systems that largely work, and are more secure than newer stuff precisely because the antiquated systems haven't been linked to anything else. Most of the stuff in the linked paper relates to people being stupid with some quite dangerous toys.
Oversimplifying, the Americans are now talking of updating, perhaps so that the president can launch their minuteman missiles from his iPad. The problem is that'll open the door to the possibility of someone getting in over the wires...