Time we started to roll back the 100-seconds-to-midnight clock

Tom Lehrer is a mostly-forgotten American songwriter from the 1950s-1960s. A mathematician who taught at Harvard and MIT, he is best known for his satirical songs parodying contemporary society and politics. Some of his more enduring songs relate to the Cold War and nuclear proliferation.

In a song titled So Long Momma, he talks of Little Johnny Jones, a US pilot, who bravely goes off to fight in World War III, telling his mother not to wait for him, and “I’ll look for you when the war is over...an hour and a half from now.” Another song on the spread of nuclear weapons talks of how Egypt, Indonesia, Luxembourg and Monaco too could get the A-bomb, and how America will have to “stay serene and calm, when Alabama gets the bomb”.

They are prescient songs. Both issues — the terrifying prospect of a WWII and the growing feeling among small nations that only a nuclear capability can save them from the depredations of big countries — are being debated today. Many Ukrainians are lamenting that if they had not given up nuclear weapons they inherited when the Soviet Union broke up, they would not be facing such a situation.

But all that is in the realm of what American call “woulda coulda shoulda”. When it did give up nukes in 1991, Ukraine was just five years out of the Chernobyl disaster, and denuclearising seemed to be the wise thing to do. Besides, going nuclear is a slippery slope. There’s always a danger that a country calculates that it has faster or superior nukes, and bully you.

Which in fact is what appears to have prompted Vladimir Putin to throw down the nuclear gauntlet over Ukraine. Strategic circles believe America has no effective protection – for now – against Russia’s hypersonic missiles, which is what appears to have emboldened Putin to march into Ukraine, boasting that he has superior missile technology. America has refused to blink.

It is back to 1962, when Washington and Moscow went eyeball to eyeball over placement of nuclear weapons near each other in what came to be called the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Soviet Union bringing nukes to Cuba in response to the US deploying them in Turkey. Eventually both sides withdrew their nuclear missiles and the crisis passed. But with the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the weakening of Russia, Washington was emboldened to deploy nukes more aggressively in Europe via Nato. A resurgent Russia now wants to stop and roll that back. Ukraine is the flashpoint.

Although both sides mouth the mantra that a nuclear war can never be won and, therefore, never be fought, there are plenty of papers, calculations, and scenarios about who could survive in the event of an all-out Armageddon. The short answer is no one – the quality of life of those who survive the more than ten thousand nukes that could be released will be so poor that life will not be worth living.

But nonchalance about nuclear war goes back to the Cold War when a certain American general is said to have joked that in the end, “if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!”. Such a cavalier outlook was probably what prompted French statesman Georges Clemenceau to observe that war is too serious a matter to entrust to military men, although retired veterans too have provided sober assessments.

President Eisenhower warned there “aren’t enough bulldozers to scrap the bodies off the street in the case of a nuclear war”. Warning that “we know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living”. Gen Omar Bradley said “the way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. And the way to make sure it never starts is to abolish the dangerous costly nuclear stockpiles which imprison mankind”.

Such sage words have lately been forgotten. The current crisis should refocus attention on a subject that has receded almost completely from public and geopolitical discourse – total and universal nuclear disarmament. Scientists, particularly those instrumental in developing the weapons, have been even more leery of nuclear weapons. Albert Einstein, who regretted the letter he wrote to Franklin Roosevelt recommending making of the atom bomb, said he did not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, “but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”.

Over the last three years, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board has kept its ill-famed Doomsday Clock, which hypothetically represents the imminence of a global catastrophe in a “minutes to midnight” measure, at 100 seconds to midnight. It is the closest the Doomsday Clock has come to Armageddon since 1953, when back-to-back thermonuclear tests by the United States and Russia the previous year in the early days of Cold War brought it within two minutes to midnight. Even if the current crisis is resolved, it is likely the clock will tick forwards when it is reset next January as a salutary reminder of the danger we are in. About time the world began rolling it back.