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Credit to Author: Garrett M. Graff| Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2018 15:22:38 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n The accidental missile <\/span>alert in Hawaii earlier this month<\/a> made real for 38 terrifying minutes the vague, low-level dread that permeates American life today: Nuclear war seems closer and more real than it has in a generation. Even the pope\u2014not exactly a fear-monger\u2014said last week that the world now stood at \u201cthe very limit.\u201d<\/p>\n That existential fear was affirmed today by the organization of nuclear scientists who have spent seven decades trying to turn humanity away from nuclear weapons: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its \u201cDoomsday Clock\u201d 30 seconds closer to \u201cmidnight,\u201d an unofficial barometer of how close the world stands to a man-made catastrophe. It now stands two minutes away.<\/p>\n "To call the situation dire is to understate the danger," said Rachel Bronson, the head of the Bulletin, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, Thursday, announcing the clock's new setting.<\/p>\n The clock dates back to 1947, when the scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project wanted to create a mechanism to warn of escalating global tensions and the danger of global Armageddon. The iconic stylized timepiece has since become the global arbiter of dread\u2014or hope. It aims to answer two questions: Is the future of civilization safer or at greater risk than it was last year? And how does today's risk compare to the risks we've experienced over the last 71 years?<\/p>\n The graphical clock started at seven minutes to midnight, its two-dozen changes since marking the shifting tensions of the Cold War. Its \u201cpeacetime\u201d rating peaked in 1991 at 17 minutes to midnight, as the Soviet Union broke apart. It has gradually ticked darker ever since, first as nuclear weapons proliferated to countries like India and Pakistan, and then as it began to factor in other global threats, like climate change.<\/p>\n Last year, for the first time, it ticked forward a half-minute, reflecting the rise of nationalism and the threat to the post-war international order, as well as President Donald Trump\u2019s troubling supportive comments<\/a> about the appeal of nuclear weapons, and his climate change skepticism.<\/p>\n At the time, he\u2019d been president only a few days; there was little track record to measure his actions versus his campaign rhetoric. But as Bronson told me last month, \u201cMany of our fears played themselves out in 2017\u2026 A lot of our concerns were really borne out.\u201d<\/p>\n Today\u2019s movement of the Doomsday Clock\u2014announced live in a webcast\u2014was yet another sign that the world stands on a precipice perhaps unparalleled in the modern era. It hasn\u2019t sat this close to midnight since 1953, a few months after the United States and Russia tested their first thermonuclear bombs.<\/p>\n Last week, as <\/span>he started a trip to South America, Pope Francis handed out to reporters aboard his Alitalia plane a photo from 1945 that depicted a Japanese boy carrying his dead brother in the hours after the US bombing of Nagasaki, a nuclear weapon roughly equivalent to what US intelligence believes North Korea possesses<\/a>. The Pope cautioned his travel companions, \u201cI am really afraid of this. One accident is enough to precipitate things.\u201d<\/p>\n The Pope\u2019s comments reflected, whether intentionally or not, the strong sense of the presidents who lived through the danger of the Cold War: They rarely feared the superpowers intentionally launching global general thermonuclear war. Instead, what men like Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan feared was a rapid escalation through miscommunications, misunderstandings, and miscalculations that resulted in the two countries stumbling into a war neither intended.<\/p>\n As it turns out, if there\u2019s one critical geopolitical lesson of the Cold War\u2014one that should be impressed on every commander-in-chief in turn\u2014it\u2019s that nuclear war is actually hard to avoid.<\/p>\n Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander and the president who perhaps knew war better than any other during the nuclear age, declared that his proudest accomplishment was seemingly the simplest: \u201cWe kept the peace. People ask how it happened\u2014by God, it didn\u2019t just happen.\u201d<\/p>\n 'To call the situation dire is to understate the danger.'<\/p>\n Rachel Bronson, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists<\/p>\n During Eisenhower's eight years, the United States and the Soviet Union repeatedly had to take active action to step back from escalating tensions. Many times, in fact, Eisenhower sat in rooms as president where military leaders recommended war as the best option\u2014where, incredibly, starting a war would have been easier politically than choosing peace. It seems hard to imagine today, but the US seriously contemplated the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War, and even to defend the islands of Matsu and Quemoy in the Taiwan Strait from invasion by the mainland Chinese military.<\/p>\n Eisenhower paid a political price for his forbearance. Democrats hammered him in the midterm 1958 elections as \u201csoft on defense,\u201d and Ike\u2019s reputation as a peacemaker helped John F. Kennedy defeat Vice President Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential race.<\/p>\n Kennedy, though, quickly came to agree with Eisenhower: Keeping the peace is often harder than going to war.<\/p>\n The US has invested trillions of dollars in a sophisticated defense and intelligence apparatus that, left to its own devices, protectively escalates the country to war.<\/p>\n More simply put, war is the default setting. Only through careful, sober, active leadership has the US avoided a nuclear exchange since 1945.<\/p>\n Kennedy\u2019s own scare <\/span>came in 1962, as the Soviet Union loaded nuclear-armed missiles into Cuba. In reading historian Barbara Tuchman\u2019s The Guns of August\u2014which traces how the Great Powers defaulted, almost accidentally, into beginning the Great War in the summer of 1914\u2014 Kennedy fixated on a conversation between two German leaders.<\/p>\n \u201cHow did it all happen,\u201d asked a former German chancellor of the current chancellor. The latter, who had led his nation into the terrible, destructive \u201cWar To End All Wars,\u201d replied, \u201cAh, if only one know.\u201d Amid the Soviet standoff, President Kennedy told his brother Bobby that his driving motivation was to avoid a history book someday entitled The Missiles of October.<\/p>\n Indeed, the more historians have learned about the Cuban Missile Crisis<\/a>, the more we\u2019ve realized how correct Kennedy was: Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev communicated poorly throughout the faceoff, and both sides misunderstood the others\u2019 motivations, red lines, and military readiness. Numerous scares could have escalated: A routine preplanned U-2 surveillance flight strayed into Soviet airspace; a US attempt to scare a Soviet submarine resulted in the sub readying its nuclear-tipped torpedo.<\/p>\n War is the default setting.<\/p>\n In the context of the last seven decades of near-misses, the accidental Hawaiian missile alert is remarkable only in that was a public-facing mistake. Over the years, warning systems on the American and the Russian side have mistaken satellites, flocks of birds, and even the rising moon as incoming surprise missile attacks. Boris Yeltsin\u2014back when the Doomsday Clock stood at a remarkably peaceful 14 minutes to midnight\u2014was actually handed the Russian nuclear briefcase, known as the Cheget, in 1995 when Russian radar mistook the launch of a Norwegian scientific rocket<\/a> for a surprise attack from a US submarine. He had less than five minutes to decide whether to launch a retaliatory strike.<\/p>\n The Cold War saw all manner of high-level scares. Jimmy Carter\u2019s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was awoken one night with news that 2,200 Soviet missiles were on their way to the United States. He was preparing to wake the president for a retaliatory strike when word came through that the incoming missiles were just a computer glitch, a gremlin inside the system at NORAD. Brzezinski never bothered to wake his wife, figuring that she\u2019d be dead anyway in a few minutes, so why bother her?<\/p>\n The Soviets misinterpreted the 1983 NATO nuclear weapons command exercise, known as ABLE ARCHER<\/a>, as the preparations for a surprise attack and readied their own forces to respond. \u201cIn 1983, we may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger,\u201d a classified 109-page US intelligence review later concluded.<\/p>\n In 2018, the <\/span>focus instead lies on North Korea<\/a>, as the isolated regime\u2019s rapidly progressing missile program<\/a> has become the center of geopolitical tension. During the first of what have now become regular scares, news reports circulated of a US aircraft carrier battle group steaming rapidly to the Korean peninsula\u2014only to report days later that the Pentagon had garbled the location. The ships were, instead, thousands of miles away off the coast of Australia<\/a>.<\/p>\n For a weekend, though, Kim Jong Un might have correctly believed the US was coming to kill him\u2014and acted accordingly.<\/p>\n Each time until now, careful reflection and cautious leadership\u2014leadership on all sides in all countries\u2014in these crises has de-escalated rather than escalated. As President Trump has repeatedly shown, past is not necessarily prologue when it comes to nuclear weapons, particularly as more nations arm themselves and as the global rise of social media can spread reports\u2014accurate or not\u2014faster than policymakers can understand it, increasing the chances of miscalculations.<\/p>\n The current system makes nuclear war easier to start than to avoid; there\u2019s precious little room for reflection. The first ICBMs will leave their silos just four minutes after a presidential order; once they launch, there\u2019s no mechanism to stop them. Any country on the planet possesses the capability to shoot down an incoming strike.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s Doomsday Clock announcement offers a critical reminder that continuing Eisenhower\u2019s dictum that he \u201ckept the peace\u201d requires the continuation of active, steady leadership throughout the world.<\/p>\n In an age where the blunt instrument of 280-character tweets all but beg to be misinterpreted, it\u2019s a reminder that can\u2019t be stressed enough.<\/p>\n By this point, North Korea's nuclear ambitions have almost been fully realized<\/a><\/p>\n Meanwhile, Donald Trump's nuclear rhetoric seems designed to stoke tensions<\/a>, rather than defuse them<\/p>\n In some ways, he echoes Richard Nixon's "madman" tactics during the Vietnam War<\/a>\u2014but without the strategy to back it up<\/p>\n