![]()
In January of 2021, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock down 20 seconds to 100 seconds before midnight -- the clock's closest approach to midnight, exceeding that of 1953 and 2018 -- and kept it at 100 seconds in January of this year,
That was before Russia invaded Ukraine, before Putin threatened the world with nuclear weapons, and before China made any serious threats about invading Taiwan.
I think the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists should hold an emergency session and reset the Doomsday Clock to 1 minute before midnight.
From the article below:
"This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” [Adm. Charles Richard, United States Strategic Command commander] said. “The big one (i.e., a conflict with China) is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested in a long time.”
Urgent rethinking of current U.S. defense strategies and deterrence capabilities is needed in order to prepare for the threat of conflict with China, Richard argued, as this would be a different caliber of conflict to Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, which began in February.
“We have to do some rapid, fundamental change(s) in the way we approach the defense of this nation (the U.S.),” he said.
Overall, Richard offered a bleak assessment of America's ability to deter China militarily in the near term:
“As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking. It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they (China) are putting capability in the field faster than we are. As those curves keep going, it isn’t going to matter how good our (operating plan) is or how good our commanders are, or how good our horses are — we're not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem.”
