The Return of the Doomsday Machine?Please don't count on me to save the world again.

Remarks from the Fray:

During the 50s, 60s and 70s, the clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reminded us of how close we were to a holocaust. The clock got as close as 2 minutes to midnight, after the H-bomb was developed, and has never been set earlier than 11:43 (in 1991, at the end of the Cold War).

Today, it sits at 11:55. This partly is because the Bulletin now considers other threats, including global warming, but most of the changes since 1991 have come because of proliferation and the threat of a nuclear terrorist attack. Even when the clock was set at 11:43, though, it recognized a substantial danger of catastrophe because of a mistake.

The real point of the clock is to remind us of the fragility and instability of our current world. Before the 1950s, it was inconceivable that people could do anything that would, in essence, end the world. Nuclear weapons made us realize that it was possible, perhaps even probable. And, oddly, that realization, along with works like Silent Spring, may have made it possible for us to understand longer-term threats, like global warming.

Of course, people react in different ways to the uncertainty of the modern world. Vladimir Putin and, I fear, some of our leaders, may think that security lies in making it dangerous for others to threaten you, rather than in making it more difficult to threaten others in the first place. These things seem to run in cycles, though, so perhaps cooler heads will prevail. I just hope it happens before the clock strikes twelve.

--randy-khan

(To reply, click here.)

I'm a little over thirty years old, which is old enough to remember going to sleep at night genuinely, legitimately worried that you might not wake up... because of that five-megaton airburst above a known target ten miles up the road.

When the Iron Curtain rusted apart, we celebrated, but not because we really gave much of a damn if the Czechs could elect a poet or the Germans could run Oktoberfest without that pesky wall through the middle. We cheered because we knew that something resembling a democratic government in Russia was much less likely to engage in global military chest-thumping which might trigger nuclear escalation. We could go to bed at night, not half-expecting the nuclear alarm-clock to wake us up.

Today I am... not really worried in the same way I was in my youth, but I can see the possibilities out there. If Russia under Yeltsin resembled a democratic government, Russia under Putin these days resembles a Soviet-style government-by-bureaucracy pretending (very badly) to resemble a democracy. It's not quite alarming yet, and if Putin really steps down as his second term ends there's a chance that the next leader will have the wisdom to step back, to build something better than the kleptocracy that Russia has become... and maybe Dubya will withdraw from Iraq before his second term ends.

Yeah, right.

Even a non-democratic Russia need not be our enemy, but it could become one in a real hurry, and my fear is that the utter inefficiencies in their joke of an economy will leave them permanently poor and resentful...and sitting on a legacy of nuclear weapons from the "glory years" of the previous era. The one positive is at least they lack the conventional military power to project enough force to make direct confrontation an inevitability. Soviet conventional strategy always emphasized quantity, but back in the day they were seldom more than a decade behind in technological terms. The Russian military today is a joke with a lot of badly-trained manpower and no credible way it can attack anyone (except with its nukes) who's not a next-door neighbor.

If we're not shooting at them or their immediate proxies, the Russians will never have adequate reason to push the button. Even the proverbial gung-ho military commander under the mountain with all of Russia's nuclear might at his fingertip will not be inclined to punish the US if it was the Chechens who did Moscow.

--ked

(To reply, click here.)

Do Aeschylus some justice: Cassandra's curse for failing to bear Apollo a child was to tell the truth but never to be believed. She foretells in gruesome detail the murder of Agamemnon, as she had foretold the fall of Troy, but she was not believed in either case.

In the Agamemnon, Cassandra gives her prophecy to the chorus, which can be understood to represent the common people of a nation. Had they believed her, or had they been more decisive, the murder of the king may have been prevented--but she was not, and they were not, and Agamemnon was axe-murdered in his bath by his not-so-loving wife. This is significant because it shows just how out-of-touch Mr. Rosenbaum's comparison is here: apart from being unfair to Cassandra, perpetrating her curse in the form of a shallow stereotype, he suggests that Blair is not a prophet telling truths to deaf ears, which runs counter to the rest of this piece.

--Joe M.

(To reply, click here.)

(9/2)

• Robinson: A Little Worried About the Meltdown
• Khaled Hosseini: Sen. McCain, Am I a Pariah?
• Ombudsman: A Puff Piece About the Obamas?
• King: The Anatomy of an Assault