Tweeting until midnight
Today, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced that its Doomsday Clock, which has for seventy years reflected the scientists’…
Today, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced that its Doomsday Clock, which has for seventy years reflected the scientists’ estimation of how close humanity is to Armageddon, ticked forward by thirty seconds. We are now, supposedly, closer to ‘midnight’ than at any time since 1953.
The ‘calculation’ is, of course, necessarily very crude. And as dark as the world seems – particularly this week – there is little reason to suspect that we are literally closer to obliteration than, say, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
Yet the clock is only updated every year, and so is as much a sort of macabre forecast as an outside temperature check. The scientists have to bake in how much worse things are likely to get in the year before they update the clock again – that is, if there is a clock left to update.
This is where, and why, we might allow the prognosticators a little leeway. For though we may not yet be in the dark days of a Cuba-style crisis, it is entirely possible that the year 2017 will see such an event arise. For all the dangerous things the Trump’s campaign promised, what is really scary is how quickly and unilaterally his administration has set about implementing them.
This – combined with the president’s persisting proclivity to tweet his often undiplomatic opinions – is what makes his style of leadership so dangerous and perhaps deadly.
Many people have rightly compared Trump’s temperament to that of his immediate predecessor, whose preternatural calm and professorial dispassion became (as hard as it is to believe now) a source of frustration for his supporters and of resentment for his detractors.
But the more pointed comparison might be to JFK, specifically during the missile crisis. Juggling the military, political, economic and humanitarian consequences of a small menu of unpalatable options, Kennedy and his team had to show both restraint and intelligence when figuring out how to respond to soviet provocation.
The eventual breakthrough to the stalemate – mere hours after Fidel Castro had urged the Soviets to launch a first-strike nuclear attack, and as the US was developing attack plans of its own – came when the Kennedy administration decided to respond to an earlier, more constructive telegram from Kruschev rather than a later, more provocative one.
Where once we had Kennedy, now we have Trump, and where once we had telegrams, now we have Twitter. The difference couldn’t be starker, and today offered a grim sign of things to come. President Trump used Twitter to bully Mexico, attack Chelsea Manning as a traitor, and launched an investigation into nonexistent voter fraud – all in the last 36 hours. Nor were these carefully choreographed policy announcements, but rather angry rants reflecting deeply held insecurities.
Could the US and the world have survived nuclear oblivion if a tweeting Trump had been in charge in 1962? The question doesn’t merit an answer. Both the rapidity and the audacity of Trump’s tweets already seem to pose a clear and present danger to US and global security – and it’s only been a week. The clock has only started ticking.