Rutgers professor explains Doomsday Clock

The world is 100 seconds away from Doomsday, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ recent announcement. 

The Doomsday Clock and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists were created by the people who invented the atomic bomb out of fear of what the weapon could be used for, said Dr. Alan Robock, a distinguished professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences. He said the goal is to try and explain to people how close we really are to a “doomsday” when our world would be destroyed.

Every year, a committee decides how to set the Doomsday Clock based on the threat of nuclear destruction, Robock said. Factors considered include topics such as arms control, how close countries are to starting a nuclear war and climate change.

A couple of weeks ago, the clock was at two minutes to midnight, or doomsday, Robock said. Now, it is as close as it’s ever been to the end of the world.

This year, the committee assessed the lack of effort against climate change and the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, as well as a threat of nuclear war along the border between India and Pakistan, Robock said.

The U.S., he said, is also moving to make the world more dangerous by avoiding the extension of an arms treaty with Russia as well as spending up to a trillion dollars to modernize weapons.

While the Doomsday Clock announcement gets a lot of publicity, Robock said, it doesn’t always motivate people to make decisions.

“So far, it’s making money and power is more important to people than saving the world. Fossil fuel companies want to sell as much oil and coal as they can before they’re forced to stop. Nuclear arms manufacturers and weapons manufacturers want to sell as many weapons as they can, not worry about how they might be used. That’s where we are,” he said.

Robock said science has worked in the past. The Doomsday Clock was moved further away from midnight in the 1980s, thanks in part to research on the climate effects of nuclear war.

“Both Reagan and Gorbachev accepted that there might be a nuclear winter if nuclear weapons were used,” Robock said. “Then the nuclear arms race ended, and the number of weapons started going down and that’s when the Doomsday Clock moved farther away from midnight.”

Robock said the best way to prevent nuclear war is a United Nations treaty. In 2017, the U.N. Chair Assembly made progress on a treaty for the prohibition of nuclear weapons. Out of the 50 countries needed to ratify the treaty, 35 have ratified it.

“The other weapons of mass destruction already have treaties. There’s a treaty on biological weapons, a treaty on chemical weapons, a treaty on landmines,” Robock said. “When they were first passed, many countries tried to ignore them. But eventually they listened to the demands of the rest of the world and these treaties became much more effective. I think that’s what’s happening with this one.”

While some countries argue that nuclear weapons act as a deterrent to attacks from other countries, Robock said that there are other weapons like cruise missiles that could be used for the same purpose. If people think violence is a way to solve problems, he said, nuclear weapons are irrational.

“How many weapons can you use to attack another country without killing yourself? The answer is a very small number because you’ll start so many fires and so much smoke that it will come back to cover the world and you’ll all starve to death. Threatening to use nuclear weapons as a deterrent is the action of suicide bomber - it’s completely irrational, it’s crazy,” he said.

Robock and his students study the climate effects of nuclear war. If smoke from the fires gets into the atmosphere, he said, it would be blown around the world for years and temperatures would drop below freezing in the summer, killing agriculture.

Despite the consequences, he said that it can be hard getting worried about nuclear war because it seems very unlikely.

“There hasn’t been a nuclear war for 75 years, and it’ll be 75 years to solve this when the U.S. dropped the entire global arsenal on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So people think it hasn’t happened in my lifetime, in my parents’ lifetime, it’s not going to happen again. But the weapons still exist,” he said.

Robock said students can ask their politicians what their position is on nuclear weapons and what they are doing to stop the funding of nuclear weapons. He said he thinks the money would be better spent on green energy, healthcare or infrastructure.

While some universities do nuclear weapons research and have contracts with companies in the field, Rutgers is not one of them, Robock said. 

“It’s good to have goals in life like saving the world from nuclear war,” he said. “We actually did make a difference in the 1980s so we’re still trying to do it now.”