Forget global warming... THIS is why the Doomsday clock is ticking

By MAX HASTINGS

Last updated at 12:35 17 January 2007

For 60 years, the board of directors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in Chicago has maintained a device which they call the Doomsday Clock. Its purpose is to focus the attention of mankind on the proximity of nuclear disaster.

It was started in 1947, set at seven minutes to midnight. Ever since, the minute hand has been moved at intervals, in accordance with the judgment of scientists and strategists about the state of the world.

For instance, it was pushed forward four minutes in 1949 when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb; back seven minutes in 1963 when the two superpowers signed a Partial Test Ban Treaty; forward again in 1974 when India tested a nuclear device — and so on.

Today, in a very deliberate attempt to gain our attention, the clock's hand is being advanced for the first time in four years, from its current seven minutes before midnight to a time to be disclosed later today, significantly closer to Armageddon.

The scientists say they are doing this because the world has entered its most perilous nuclear phase since Hiroshima.

If you are tempted to read this and return to your muesli without your heartbeat even flickering, you should not. Many perils which we are told beset us — world hunger, collapse of energy resources and such like — are indeed overstated, because they are susceptible to remedy by human ingenuity.

By contrast, almost every thoughtful scientist, strategist and general accepts a likelihood that, somewhere in the world, some time in the next generation, somebody will let off a nuclear device. And once that threshold has been crossed, repetition becomes horribly plausible.

Here, for instance, is Professor Colin Gray, a very sensible as well as clever British academic, in his recent crystal-gazing book Another Bloody Century.

'Future warfare,' he says flatly, 'will see the use of weapons of mass destruction, including those of a nuclear variety.' He speaks of 'the suggestive strength of statistical probability' to support his case. Almost the entire defence community shares his gloom.

Huge diplomatic efforts are being made to limit nuclear proliferation. A notable success was achieved a few years ago when President Gaddafi renounced Libya's atomic programme.

Gaddafi decided that he cared more about keeping himself in power than promoting international terror, or indeed the cause of Islam. He therefore struck a bargain with the West, never explicitly admitted, but nonetheless real.

In return for his abandoning Libya's attempts to build a bomb, Washington and its allies would stop bothering about how many of his own people he tortures or imprisons, and leave him in his tent. If this was a dirty deal, it was probably a good one for everyone other than the Libyan people.

Unfortunately, however, many other parties around the world are not susceptible to such trade-offs.

First, there are India and Pakistan, which hate each other passionately, and which possess about 40 nuclear warheads apiece. No inducements would persuade them to give these up. India possesses overwhelmingly superior conventional forces.

In an armed showdown between the two nations, rather than face absolute defeat, Pakistan would probably use nuclear weapons. India would retaliate. Many intelligence agencies think the subcontinent the most likely region to witness a nuclear exchange.

Some of the same forces are at work in the Middle East.

Israel can defeat any combination of enemies in a conventional war. The Arabs know this. Only nuclear weapons might shift the balance. It is overwhelmingly probable that Iran will acquire such devices, partly because it wants to be a regional superpower, partly to deter the U. S. from attack.

Unfortunately, everybody can see that nuclear weapons work, in two senses. First, as Kim Jong Il of North Korea can tell you, they deter foes from interfering with your regime, however unpleasant. Second, they are technically reliable.

If you attack an enemy with conventional bombs, even with biological or chemical weapons, devastating effect is difficult to achieve and uncertain.

It is harder than some people suppose for evil people to acquire Uranium 235 or Plutonium 239 and then build an atomic bomb. A lot of nonsense is sometimes talked about the danger of an Al Qaeda group creating a nuclear device in a cellar in Handsworth or Hounslow. In truth, only people with access to a sovereign nation's wealth and scientific resources are likely to be able to produce a serious bomb.

Once such resources are available, however, and a bomb has been built — even a small and primitive one with a yield equivalent to, say, 100 tons of TNT, in contrast to the Hiroshima bomb which produced the effect of around 20,000 tons — it will do what it is intended to.

It offers a gold standard of reliable horror. Any society against which it is used will suffer a shock infinitely more devastating than mere physical destruction and casualties.

The big change in the world is that there are now people out there eager to detonate nuclear weapons.

During the Cold War, both sides were dominated by what an American strategist called the principle of 'purposeful non-use'. Although the U.S. and the Soviet Union possessed huge arsenals, only a few mad generals, whose fingers were kept well away from any buttons, actually wanted to risk mutual annihilation.

Today, by contrast, there are many people, most of them Islamic extremists, who believe nuclear weapons offer them the prospect of overcoming the West's overwhelming conventional military dominance.

They believe exploding a nuclear device in London or New York could strike a blow which would set at naught all the wealth and power of the U.S. and its allies, and disable and impoverish societies which they hate and resent far beyond reason.

We cannot negotiate with or appease them, and it is very hard credibly to threaten them with retaliation.

You want more bad news? The 2003 fiasco over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction showed how fallible are the West's intelligence services. Four years ago, they thought Saddam Hussein had them when he did not.

It is just as plausible that somebody will soon have a nuclear device — maybe a former Soviet weapon acquired on the black market, or one built with Pakistani or North Korean help — which nobody knows about.

The Western powers will continue to strive to prevent further nuclear proliferation but in the long run they will fail.

There is a crumb of hope: back in the Cold War, a nuclear exchange promised the extinction of the civilised world as we know it. Today, the threat is less absolute. Only a small minority of us will die from the explosion of a nuclear device of the size our enemies are likely to acquire.

Yet the economic and psychological consequences of even a small bomb in, say, the City of London, are almost too appalling to contemplate. This is why most of us prefer not to do so. But governments, intelligence chiefs, soldiers and diplomats must live with the unthinkable, which is why so many are troubled men and women.

The Chicago scientists who move the hand of the Doomsday Clock today know that they will be fortunate to perceive any reason to push it back again, in the course of our frighteningly unstable new century.