I'll see your Doomsday Clock story Doomsday Clock moves 30 seconds closer to midnight - Chicago Tribune and raise you a Rapture Index story The RAPTURE index that predicts when the Earth will end | Daily Mail Online
Kill for gain or shoot to maim But we don't need a reason The Golden Goose is on the loose And never out of season Blackened pride still burns inside This shell of bloody treason Here's my gun for a barrel of fun For the love of living death The killer's breed or the Demon's seed, The glamour, the fortune, the pain, Go to war again, blood is freedom's stain Don't you pray for my soul anymore? 2 minutes to midnight, The hands that threaten doom. 2 minutes to midnight, To kill the unborn in the womb. The blind men shout "Let the creatures out We'll show the unbelievers." The napalm screams of human flames Of a prime time Belsen feast ... yeah! As the reasons for the carnage cut their meat and lick the gravy We oil the jaws of the war machine and feed it with our babies. The killer's breed or the Demon's seed, The glamour, the fortune, the pain, Go to war again, blood is freedom's stain Don't you pray for my soul anymore. 2 minutes to midnight, The hands that threaten doom. 2 minutes to midnight, To kill the unborn in the womb. The body bags and little rags of children torn in two And the jellied brains of those who remain to put the finger right on you As the madmen play on words and make us all dance to their song To the tune of starving millions to make a better kind of gun. The killer's breed or the Demon's seed, The glamour, the fortune, the pain, Go to war again, blood is freedom's stain Don't you pray for my soul anymore. 2 minutes to midnight, The hands that threaten doom. 2 minutes to midnight, To kill the unborn in the womb. Midnight Midnight Midnight It's all night Midnight Midnight Midnight It's all night
tick, tick, tick http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/doomsday-clock-moves-seconds-closer-midnight-article-1.3778669
FWIW, the situation with nuclear weapons hasn't actually changed much since I was at sea in the Navy during the Cold War. I hate being where we are but I don't really expect to die in a bright flash. The world is balanced on a knife's edge but it's in no one's interest to shake the table. I am also at a loss as to how we can back away from the edge. We've lived here a long time and it's most unnerving but I don't see a clear way to achieve universal nuclear disarmament.
Back then, we all expected a massive all-out nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Thousands of nuclear weapons on both sides going off and the very likely end of civilization and conceivably the extinction of the human race. Full-on apocalypse movie stuff. (I expected to die at some point, thought that it was almost inevitable.) Today the threat is entirely different. Nuclear proliferation has continued (into the hands of schizophrenics in Kim Jung Un's case or an Islamist-infested almost failed-state in Pakistan's) and the most threatening places for nuclear war today are the Korean peninsula, Pakistan/India and Pakistan/Israel along with (soon) Iran/Israel. Despite all the frenzied attempts recently to restart the Cold War, I don't think that a US/Russia nuclear war is very likely. So what we are most likely to see isn't the old-style 1960's planet-killer-conflagration, it's a much smaller regional nuclear war of some kind. A nuclear weapon detonating over Seoul (with others soon following over Pyongyang and the NK military facilities), or perhaps a spasm of several hundred nuclear weapons detonating in India and Pakistan. The latter mid-size nuclear war would create big-time problems (fallout, economic upheaval etc) for the rest of the planet and would result in tens of millions of dead (and hundreds of millions in need of aid), but it wouldn't threaten civilization itself or the continued existence of the human race. So I'd say that while the likihood of nuclear war has increased, as nuclear weapons have spread to less-stable hands, the consequences of nuclear war have become less devastating. A nightmare scenario I have is the Pakistani government imploding and Pakistan turning into a collection of cantons ruled by nuclear-armed Islamist warlords. Then seeing terrorists detonating nuclear bombs in London, Paris, Tel Aviv and New York. (That's something that we wouldn't have seen in the 1960's.)
Dunno about that. Even the North Korean regime has a well-developed sense of self-preservation. I have never put much faith in the idea of a terrorist atomic bomb, by the way. You can't really build a bomb without a substantial industrial base. Conventional bombs that spread, say, plutonium are within the realm of the possible but diverting nuclear waste and processing it to recover the Pu is a non-issue. Spent fuel enforces its own isolation. Well, we shall see. But ultimately nuclear weapons are not really military weapons of war; they are political weapons of mass terror. They are more useful as a looming threat than in actual use. Whistling in the dark? Maybe.
They also love to create provocations. Sinking that South Korean navy warship, shelling those South Korean islands, and on and on. Creating provocations makes them players in Pyongyang's view, and possession of nuclear weapons puts them in the Big League, makes them the equal to the United States. So the likelihood of miscalculation goes through the roof. Agreed. But Pakistan already has produced 100 or so nuclear weapons. So what happens if that country's central government were ever to collapse? You are apt to see regional warlords (the Pakistani Taliban, the Haqqani network, assorted generals with rank-and-file followings, and all the others) establishing a collection of little statelets, some of them quite radical (especially depending on what kind of events caused the central government to collapse in the first place), and some of them nuclear armed. And it isn't hard to imagine some of the more pungent of these distributing a few nuclear bombs to those who want to detonate them in kaffir capitals, along with technicians who know the codes and whatnot to make them work.
Well, if one faction gets the Bomb is it really likely to arm another faction? Again, maybe, but it's far from a foregone conclusion. Then again, who profited from the 9/11 attacks? No one, as far as I can tell. So the religious factor might make things unpredictable (as it so often does).
