Why Hasn't the Doomsday Clock Advanced?

According to the wiki (middle of the first paragraph), they update it once per year in January. The war began in February.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

Because the number of seconds to doomsday doesn't mean anything and it was at best an ill-conceived stunt to scare us into action?

We're not x seconds to doomsday. It should have always been a percentage.

https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/

It doesn't look like they update it more than once a year. I guess we'll see where we stand next January (if we make it that long)

Why aren't environmental activists more vocal about the potential for nuclear war? Seems like a very real threat to humanity, as much as global warming seems to be, but I've seen and heard almost nothing from them.

Assassination should always be the first strike in war. Take out the leader before he destroys hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of lives. I'm sick of 18-30 yr olds dying for old men with big ego's.

The Doomsday Clock is just a pointless publicity stunt. 1440 minutes on a clock, and yet it has never been more than 17 minutes from midnight.

It was farther from midnight in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis than in 2007.

"Putting humanity on a permanent, blanket high-alert isn't helpful when it comes to policy or science." -Alex Barasch

According to the US President, the world is at risk of a nuclear “Armageddon”[0].

[0] https://apnews.com/article/biden-nuclear-risk-1d0f1e40cff3a9...

Probably, but predicting anything is different, and getting good at it requires a willingness to examine where you went wrong in the past, and make adjustments. Like anything, it takes practice. Given that we haven't ever (yet?) had a nuclear armageddon, any estimate of how close we are to it is based on very little data and quite a lot of emotion and politics.

They only advance it when the US President is a Republican.

It absolutely should.

I wrote an article about nuclear armageddon under the guise of writing about game theory, and the truth is that it's extremely unlikely something will happen. Taking the liberty to quote myself,

> However, the implications of MAD aren’t what most people expect. Our current interpretation is a mutation of the original premise, as von Neumann examined the situation mathematically and arrived at a two-party version of Nash’s Equilibrium (John Nash generalized it to n-parties).

> More precisely, nuclear annihilation is not an iterated dilemma; therefore, it is completely logical for a first strike to be the best strategic option in this scenario. If State A destroys State B and removes any capacity for State B to strike A, then State A is able to guarantee its future existence and “wins” the game.

> The policy of nuclear retaliation, or a second strike, is an attempt to change the payoff function of this game and add a cost to this form of defection. It adds one more iteration to the game where the player is punished for their defection/first strike. Thereby making sure that the win-state is not attained.

> However, this rationale/version of MAD starts to break down the longer that you look at it. What incentive do the submarine commanders have to launch, given that the homeland that they’ve received their orders from has already been destroyed? It is not a rational policy from the survivor’s standpoint to destroy what is left of the world and end their own existence in the process. Therefore they have an incentive to not carry out the second strike, resurrecting the first-strike problem once again.

> From this perspective, and from the technology that existed in 1950, game theory predicts only one solution — strike first; strike hard. As he famously put it9,

> “If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”

> And yet, we’re still here. Despite many, many, many close calls. Including the times when the US accidentally, almost, nuked the Carolinas. Twice. (that we know of.)

> Why?

---

> All told, there have been 16 “close calls.” That we know of. The world has faced nuclear annihilation 16 times, and all 16 times, multiple people have refused to press the button despite (seeming) orders and procedures to the contrary.

> Their actions are not rational. These outcomes fly against the predictions of game theory. All actors involved understood the dominant strategy and why it was the best strategy, and they chose not to play it. They chose not to end the world.

> Dr. Thomas Schelling calls this “the event that didn’t occur,” and he devoted his Nobel prize lecture to the invalidation of von Neumann’s and game theory’s predictions by our 50+ years of applied experience.

Sources etc are in my essay, https://1517.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-game-theory

---

Essentially, every single time there has been an escalation, people who have to carry out the orders, people in the chain of command have refused to be the ones to end the world.

Tactical nukes are really bad as weapons. Nukes aren't a magic wand that can make an unwinnable war winnable. Freeman Dyson et al pointed this out in their report about the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Vietnam war.

Getting a bigger bomb doesn't actually change the tactical situation on the ground. Sure you can make the thing go boom, but you still won't be able to hold the territory. And now the locals will resist you even harder.

If they could have won us a war, we'd have used them by now. But between the lack of desire to be the one who ends the world and their uselessness as day-to-day weapons. Nukes are, for the most part, a non-factor in modern conflict once it starts. Of course, their presence changes the calculus of whom a state should invade or not invade.

Yes, at least to my eyes, things look more ominous than they did a year ago. Putin said an increasing number of threatening things against Ukraine, but that was just talk... until he invaded. Now he's saying a bunch of threatening things about nukes. But that's just talk... so far.

It's sort of like grade inflation, isn't it?

IMO if the clock isn’t advanced to less than a minute to midnight they will lose legitimacy. We are getting very close I feel the end is within reach if the right sequence of events occur.

Russia is fully dependent on China for even very basic needs, it looks to be very likely Xi warned Putin not to escalate to nukes.

Possibly because the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine is not any likelier, given the inevitable radioactive fallout that would drift east into Russia?

I hate Putin, don’t get me wrong, but if he were to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, this would not immediately trigger WW3 or armageddon.

Redditt tier comment inbound: because The Right Team is in power in most countries