This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Despite fears of the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war -- recently, Vladimir Putin ominously announced a plan to store some of Russia's in neighboring Belarus -- we are not (yet!) in a nuclear moment. In any case, the generation of young Americans growing up today seems far more focused on a different world-ending scenario: climate change.
Still, I can remember a time in the 1950s and early 1960s when nuclear destruction (like climate destruction now) was part of any young person's basic mindset. If you went to the movies, you were regularly nuked, whether in Stanley Kubrick's world-ending comedy, Dr. Stangelove; via giant irradiated ants in Them!; or by passing through a nuclear "mist" (as the Japanese ship Lucky Dragon 5 did after an American H-bomb test in the Pacific, and as all too many Americans in states like Nevada also did in that era of above-ground testing), and in the case of the hero of The Incredible Shrinking Man, find yourself in your own basement, shrunk to the size of a thumb, fighting your giant cat.
While the government of the time began digging itself into mountainsides and organizing post-atomic-war lines of political succession, real-estate ads promised "good bomb immunity." Newsweek reported then on a growing corporate interest in underground facilities, while in upstate New York, an enterprising entrepreneur set up vaults for corporate records deep in an abandoned iron mine. Everywhere, in those years, a world-ending bunker mentality was encouraged as, from private bomb shelters to communal ones, Americans were urged to prepare for a hellish descent into the national basement.
At least in its imagination, this country was digging in, as memorialized in a 1959 Life magazine article celebrating one couple's honeymoon of "unbroken togetherness" -- 14 days in a 22-ton steel and concrete private bomb shelter 12 feet underground. The possibility of world's end in a nuclear Armageddon, then part of growing up (including school "duck and cover" drills), made a deep impression on me, as it did on TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan. Today, as the nuclear moment once again grows more perilous, while the planet slowly heats to the boiling point, let her take you through her world of atomic peril and ask the obvious question: How many "minutes" from midnight are we now? Tom
90 Seconds to Midnight
The Doomsday Clock and Me
I'm not a TikTok person. I'm too old. But when I finally ventured onto that popular but much-maligned app, which traffics in short videos and hot takes, I was surprised to find many videos about the Doomsday Clock. It's nothing like a conventional timepiece, of course. It's meant to show how close humanity has come to nuclear Armageddon -- to the proverbial "midnight."
When it comes to TikTok content providers, I wouldn't normally think of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It's a deeply serious organization founded in 1945 by physicists in the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The clock was invented two years later by landscape artist Martyl Langsdorf as a way of graphically illustrating the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. In its 76 years of existence, its hands have been moved 25 times, but never more ominously than in January of this year!
And no need to look further than TikTok to see what happened. Amid all the tweens trying to jumpstart the next viral craze, a 30-second video features five representatives of the Bulletin's science and security board frozen in place as a voice intones: "We move the clock forward, the closest it has ever been to midnight." Then two of them pull a cloth off it and add, "It is now 90 seconds to midnight."
On TikTok, versions of this video got hundreds of thousands of "likes" and thousands of comments. Mind you, that's a blip compared to the videos of even minor celebrities. Still, I found myself scrolling through the comments, many of them versions of "Does this mean I don't have to pay my mortgage/bills/ taxes?" Others had lines like "Someone call the Avengers" or asked if it had anything to do with Taylor Swift's Midnights album. This being the Internet, there was all too much cursing and all too many oblique emojis, as well as people poking fun at the awkward staging and long stretch of silence in the video.
Mixed with such inanity were expressions of genuine fear, confusion, and distress over the possible immanence of nuclear war. That is, of course, what the clock, as a salient piece of public art, is supposed to do: generate conversation, spark inquiry, and lead to action. As artist Sam Heydt observes, the Doomsday Clock should remind us that "the edge is closer than we think. In a time marked by mass extinction, diminishing resources, global pandemic, and climate change, the future isn't what it used to be."
Tick, Tock Indeed!
One hallmark of TikTok is reaction videos where creators split the screen to show their response. In one, a young white woman reacts this way: "Are we supposed to be scared? My generation is never going to have retirement, never going to own a home. I'm living in a van." I get it: there's so much that seems more immediate in our world: school shootings, police violence, bank collapses, and inflation, to name just a few. Who even has time to notice now that the future isn't what it used to be?
But embedded somewhere in any of those in-your-face issues, whether we know it or not, are nuclear weapons, threatening the end to it all. Certainly, the Pentagon knows it, since (whether you've noticed or not), it continues to invest your tax dollars in nuclear weapons, big time. Between 2019 and 2028, the United States is on track to spend at least $494 billion on its nuclear forces, or about $50 billion a year, according to a Congressional Budget Office assessment. Analysts actually estimate that Pentagon plans to "modernize" -- yes, that's the term -- its nuclear arsenal could cost you as much as $1.5 to $2 trillion in the coming decades.
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