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Ask HN: Why Hasn't the Doomsday Clock Advanced?

52 points by soheil 4y ago

Since January 2022 the Doomsday clock has not advanced [0]. That is before the start of the war. Over the past few months the war has escalated and threats of use of nuclear weapons have been made. Shouldn't the Doomsday Clock reflect that a nuclear conflict is now more imminent? [0] https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/

elizabethes 4y ago
[dead]
p1esk 4y ago
It absolutely should.
jimmygrapes 4y ago
Redditt tier comment inbound: because The Right Team is in power in most countries
vnchr 4y ago
According to the US President, the world is at risk of a nuclear “Armageddon”[0]. [0] https://apnews.com/article/biden-nuclear-risk-1d0f1e40cff3a92c662c57f274ce0e25 https://apnews.com/article/biden-nuclear-risk-1d0f1e40cff3a9...
- kube-system 4y ago
  That’s been the case since the beginning of the Cold War.
  - froggertoaster 4y ago
    Exactly. The president can say that, but it doesn't mean that it means anything.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  Kind of ironic coming from the person who would be personally creating the armageddon. How about just don't do it and it won't happen?
  - sidlls 4y ago
    Kinda relies on the other parties also not doing it.
  - irrational 4y ago
    Do you really think the US President would shoot first? Or, are you saying that if someone else launches first, we should just take it and not retaliate?
    - epicureanideal 4y ago
      > Do you really think the US President would shoot first? There’s another option. The US making another country so fearful of regime change or destruction that they fire first. And the US has repeatedly attempted and accomplished regime change, several times resulting in the death of the former leader of the country. Also, yes. The US would fire first if it were losing a conventional war, which of course would be unlikely in the next few decades. We’ve already seen that the US did use nukes to avoid losses invading the Japanese mainland.
      - denkmoon 4y ago
        The US has accomplished regime change in weak (politically unstable) non-nuclear countries. The only threat of regime change Russia faces is internal. The idea that the US would use nuclear weapons in response to losing a conventional war is not well founded. One would not necessarily consider Vietnam nor Afghanistan as conventional wars, but they were lost, and nuclear strike did not happen. I don't really see any likelihood for the US using nuclear weapons in a _deliberate_ first strike outside of parts of the continental US being invaded and occupied.
        epicureanideal 4y ago
        > One would not necessarily consider Vietnam nor Afghanistan as conventional wars, but they were lost, and nuclear strike did not happen. The US wasn’t being invaded and didn’t need to continue the war to prevent a future invasion in those cases. Whereas Japan would’ve continued the war and brought it back to the US mainland eventually.
bm3719 4y ago
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.
- nullc 4y ago
  > a percentage. Not a logit?
- baxtr 4y ago
  Actually… A probabilistic event should be given as a combination of percentage and timeframe, e.g. 1% for the coming year, which means 1 such event in 100 years.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    "on average"
  - valyagolev 4y ago
    we need Doomsday Bayesian Update
  - soheil 4y ago
    So it should measure in half-life?
- dylan604 4y ago
  What "clock" doesn't tell a time? Even a broken one is right...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- soheil 4y ago
  If we're not supposed to be scared into action about the most existential threat facing humanity right now when is being scared justified?
- 4y ago
ianhawes 4y ago
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.
- defrost 4y ago
  In military thinking there's a whole class of bombs that can be "airburst" above cities and destroy everything with the shockwave while (perhaps paradoxically) having near zero fallout due to the core blast not intersecting the ground and irradiating soils etc. Bear in mind some 2,000 nuclear weapons have been detonated in tests with over 500 of those as atmospheric blasts. The most fallout generated in tests has been from ground level (or rather reef level) detonations that uplifted and irradiated vast amounts of material.
  - hollerith 4y ago
    Any nuke can be fuzed to detonate at any altitude: there is no separate class of nukes that produce air bursts. But I agree with you that fallout from an air burst is minimal.
marcusverus 4y ago
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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
- tiff_seattle 4y ago
  thread over
  - dannylandau 4y ago
    That comment put a smile on my face.
  - soheil 4y ago
    Or it did happen, but no one's there to talk about it.
- cperciva 4y ago
  And for the same reason, the Cuban Missile Crisis passed without any change to the clock -- by the time they met to discuss changing the time, the crisis was over.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- aimor 4y ago
  I think Wikipedia is being misleading here. The Bulletin addresses the Russian invasion of Ukraine on March 7, 2022 and explicitly left the clock at 100 seconds to midnight. The Bulletin's website says they meet at least twice a year to discuss the state of things. The last many (20) years have seen an announcement made each year near the end of January, but historical it looks like they've changed the clock in response to specific events throughout the year. https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/bulletin-science-and-security-board-condemns-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-doomsday-clock-stays-at-100-seconds-to-midnight https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/bulletin-science-and-securit... https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/#footer_menu_itm https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/#footer_menu...
golemotron 4y ago
It's sort of like grade inflation, isn't it?
- marcusverus 4y ago
  Look at the timeline on the wiki. It’s supposedly closer to midnight now than ever before—-far closer than during the Cold War! It’s hard to take it seriously.
  - golemotron 4y ago
    That's my point. Eventually everyone gets an 'A' and there's no place to go.
    - marcusverus 4y ago
      And I agree with you!
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Look at the timeline on the wiki. It’s supposedly closer to midnight now than ever before—-far closer than during the Cold War! One, we’ve been in the second Cold War since the late 1990s. Two, yeah, duh. This is like the first Cold War, without the stabilizing patterns of interaction, and with a major direct vs. proxy superpower conflict like Vietnam or Afghanistan, but much closer to the heart of the directy-involved superpower and the heart of the other superpower’s alliance and chewing through the directly involved superpowers forces much faster (about equal to US Vietnam casualties for the whole war—or four times the USSR’s Afghanistan casualties—in less than a year rather than a decade or more.)
    - marcusverus 4y ago
      You're attempting to use a war that started in March 2022 to justify the position of the clock... which was set in January 2022.
  - mickdeek86 4y ago
TakeBlaster16 4y ago
https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/ 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)
- pyuser583 4y ago
  They issued an update in March 2022. They said “this is what 100 seconds to midnight looks like.” So this isn’t procedural.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
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.
rossdavidh 4y ago
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.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  For what it's worth, people have tried to use the minimal data we have to make a reasonable estimate of the probability of a nuclear war. > Keep in mind that the following are annualized probabilities. For a child born today (say 75 year life expectancy) these probabilities (.0117) suggest that the chance of a nuclear war in their lifetime is nearly 60%, (1-(1-.0117)^75). At an annualized probability of .009 which is the probability from accident analysis it’s approximately 50%. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/07/what-is-the-probability-of-a-nuclear-war.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/07/wh...
areoform 4y ago
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 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.
nprz 4y ago
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.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Because it's not environmental problem. Secondly, environmental problems are immediately actionable and surprisingly some of the easiest things to address. The threat of nuclear war lies in the domain of human power dynamics and organization, areas that are not understood in the slightest. Despite this, we still don't address the environmental problems or do so at a glacial pace. There's no hope for power dynamics.
  - nprz 4y ago
    Aren't environmentalists ultimately motivated by their interest in preventing some sort humanitarian catastrophe? We don't want to make the earth uninhabitable as it would result in the death and suffering of millions of people. Nuclear war would also result in death and suffering. There seems to be some common ground here. Both issues require a change in public opinion.
    - bmitc 4y ago
      Environmentalism and humanitarianism are two different things. I consider myself an environmentalist, and I wouldn't say the focus is so human-centric as you mention or even human-centric at all aside from understanding humans are nearly the sole source of problems in the environment. Environmentalism, to me at least, is to gain empathy for the environment and all its inhabitants and to take a holistic approach. Also to me, humanitarianism is about addressing solvable problems to end immediate suffering of humans. Nuclear threats are rather abstract at present and basically not preventable in any remotely deterministic way. We could focus on it for a century, only for a hardware failure, software bug, or a simple accident to launch a nuclear missile. That doesn't even take into consideration the power dynamics I mentioned or terrorism. Do we have any clue whatsoever as to how Putin, Jinping, and Trump came to power and stayed in power? Or any clue of terrorism. We don't. If we do in some cases, the cause is not a solvable problem. It's super complex. So, nuclear threats are abstract, opaque, but yet simultaneously can materialize out of thin air at a moment's notice. However, there are environmental and humanitarian problems that we can start working on and solving today, with actionable solutions.
justanotherguy6 4y ago
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.
- janef0421 4y ago
  No government is centralised to that degree.
- hedora 4y ago
  Better yet, restore the tradition where the attacking ruler leads the charge.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  Assassination to prevent a world war? I can only assume this is satire. https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/world-war-i-history https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/world-war-i-histo...
  - soheil 4y ago
    Those who forget history are Doomed to repeat it and the Clock restarts.
- King-Aaron 4y ago
  Aside from the glaring irony in this comment, one also has to wonder whether or not the Russians have any kind of nuclear dead mans switch in the event that someone drops an IED on putin.
  - mickdeek86 4y ago
    Supposedly, they've had one since the 80's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand Which raises the question, did the politburo crib nuclear strategy from Kubrick?
- soheil 4y ago
qaq 4y ago
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.
- hollerith 4y ago
  Can you explain what these basic needs are? Russia is self-sufficient in energy, food and fertilizer. In contrast, if China became unable to import these things, half of its population would be dead within a year.
  - qaq 4y ago
    Russia is not even making nails themselves. Most manufacturing equipment and components were sourced from west and China. Now it's pretty much only China.
    - hollerith 4y ago
      My guess is that Russia is still buying a lot of tech from the West (and Japan, Korea and Taiwan), it is just being routed through third countries.
xwdv 4y ago
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.
axiolite 4y ago
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
- soheil 4y ago
  Apparently it didn't move forward in time. I'm hoping this time it will.
darksofa 4y ago
They only advance it when the US President is a Republican.

Did anybody read the statement[0]? After the first section about Putin/Ukraine, they go on to mention Iran (no longer beholden to the non-proliferation deal), North Korea (continually improving their capabilities), a large Chinese expansion of missile silos, massive generational US overhaul of our arsenal, US/Russia/China all developing anti-satellite weaponry (Russia launched one that stalked a US government satelitte[1]) and hypersonic (cruise?) missiles, and the fact that Mike Pence had a 'nuclear football' somewhere near him in the (at the time being overrun by a crazed mob) Capitol on Jan 6. Notably the biggest rollback of the clock during the Cold War was in Jan 1963, shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which Kennedy and Kruschev demonstrated that cooler heads could prevail during a nuclear standoff between the only nuclear powers with world-destroying arsenals at the time. No doubt this stayed in their minds for the next couple decades. For the past couple of decades the clock has also considered: climate change (on which insufficient progress has been made or even really attempted); biohazard (a global inability to cooperatively contain or mitigate, along with the non-trivial possibility that Covid was actively bred in a biolab in an emerging country clearly incapable of handling biohazards safely, and rapid advancement in research techniques eg CRISPR, all whilst the Biological Weapons and Toxin Convention has yet to develop an effective enforcement regime); antibiotics resistance; the social media mass-brainf*ck with attendant negligence or impotence from the companies themselves; and cybersecurity (they mention the Colonial pipeline ransomware incident as a threat to infrastructure itself). They didn't even mention the overly-brittle global supply chain. Sure, we can survive on last year's iPhone for a little longer but what about when we can't get replacement PLC or I/O cards to run our power plants or food processing facilities? If this sounds like a breathless run-on sentence, that's because it is. The doomsday clock assesses existential threats to the human race, and there's a lot more of them - in a lot more player's hands - now than during the Cold War. [0] https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/ https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/ [1] https://www.space.com/russian-spacecraft-stalking-us-spy-satellite-space-force.html https://www.space.com/russian-spacecraft-stalking-us-spy-sat...

King-Aaron 4y ago
I personally think that this level of academic posturing on the subject is thrown out the window when the people in control of Russia (and by extension Belarus etc) are wholly unpredictable at the moment. I still think that the chances of Putin using a bomb are low, most academic circles also thought the chance of all out war in Ukraine were also low. A lot of this conflict isn't so much strategic logic as it is ego stroking.
- zzleeper 4y ago
  For starters, the game theory discussion you are replying to seems deeply simplistic. Even if you win, you end up with a ruined planet (how many nukes would you need to neuter Russia?), are likely to end up in jail in your own country for doing so, and worst case scenario you fail to wipe out some nukes and then you are even more screwed. Now, about your point... given on the info he had, Putin thought he was able to rush Ukraine, obtain a fait accompli, and then the sanctions will stop. He didn't knew his army was so bad (dictator's bias and all that), and he cared about his image for posterity, not about the wellbeing of Russia itself. In that case, war was anything but unlikely. But about the bombs? What does Putin gain with a tactical nuke? a) It somehow fails during the flight, or fails to detonate = Humiliation b) Soldiers refuse to pull the trigger, he gets a rebellion. c) It explodes, he manages to wipe out 1-2 battalions at most, so it doesn't change the outcome of the war. OTOH, Russia becomes a pariah state and gets blockaded hard (potentially even by China/India), Ukraine gets every weapon they need, and they risk actual NATO intervention. None of the options improves his own outcomes, so I don't think nukes are as likely as news/reddit posts make it look like.
- 6510 4y ago
  I would define unpredictable as ideology with unknowable goals. Those in control of Russia seem to me extremely simple folk by comparison. They are of the infantile type who want to enrich themselves at the expense of others. We have these too, ours just haven't been able to implement the thought police formula. When one has that there is very little to do besides looking out for nr 1.
hedora 4y ago
Ahh, but you're forgetting the most ludicrous idea from Dr Strangelove: The secret automatically retaliating doomsday machine. In the movie, the Russians kept it secret in order to improve its effectiveness as a deterrent. Of course, the USSR must have watched the film, because they secretly deployed exactly such a device!
boppo1 4y ago
What's your favorite intro-to-game-theory book?
- areoform 4y ago
  Dr. Martin Osborne’s, “An Introduction to Game Theory" You can read the first few chapters here, https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne/igt/ https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne/igt/ And the full solutions manual is here, https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne/igt/igtSolutions.pdf https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne/igt/igtSolutions.p...
pmayrgundter 4y ago
Excellent essay. Bravo