Tick Tock: Three Minutes to Midnight, and Time to Act on Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons

A distinguished scholar and philanthropist, Dr. Kennette Benedict is the Executive Director and Publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an award winning magazine established in 1945 by scientists, engineers, and other experts who created the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. Previously, Benedict was Director of International Peace and Security at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, where she also served as Senior Advisor to the President and managed grant making on issues of international peace and security, as well as programs in Russia. Dr. Benedict also serves on the Advisory Council of the Stanley Foundation and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute of Strategic Studies. She received her A.B. from Oberlin College and her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.

In January 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists updated its Doomsday Clock, a symbolic representation—in “minutes” until a catastrophic “midnight”—of the threats posed to global civilization by geopolitics, technology, and other factors. This year, the Clock was advanced to three minutes to midnight as a reflection of concerns about nuclear weapons and the unchecked progress of global climate change.

The rationale for advancing the Doomsday Clock to three minutes to midnight seems to be based largely on concern about the failure of political leadership. What are the most significant of those failures?

On the nuclear weapons front, the relationship between the US and Russia has been deteriorating for at least a couple of years, even before the crisis over Ukraine. We’re not moving forward on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The New START treaty, which was passed in 2010, was very good, but we needed to come to other agreements that would further reduce the number of nuclear weapons. In the current administration, for all the initial excitement and enthusiasm for what President Obama called a world free of nuclear weapons, we haven’t really seen follow-through on bureaucratic and military fronts. In fact, this month marks the end of formal cooperation between the US and Russia on a threat reduction program where we jointly dismantle our nuclear weapons. We take that as a bad sign that we’re really not seriously negotiating.

The other signs we’ve seen are weapons modernization programs, which at first sound as though they’d be very good. But if you’re serious about a world free of nuclear weapons, you probably want to be dismantling them. That’s the best way to ensure they won’t go off. Or at least decoupling warheads form missiles, which we haven’t done. There are other things we could be doing, like taking our weapons off a high state of launch readiness. We have 800, and the Russians have approximately 800, all of which can be launched within 15 minutes of an order. That’s too rapid, and it’s a state-of-launch-on-warning. So it’s just not a good situation, and there’s very little substantive communication between the US and Russia on these issues.

On the climate change front, President Obama is using the Environmental Protection Agency to try to reduce CO₂ emissions, especially from coal-fired power plants. And there have been changes in auto emissions standards regulations that have helped us reduce those emissions. But it’s not really enough to make a big difference. The conference in Lima in December was very contentious: A lot of people blaming other people and no real undertakings among the leaders to set goals and actually implement and follow up on them. So we just don’t see that the actions that political leaders, business leaders, and civic leaders are taking are sufficient to meet this challenge.

Are there examples of good political leadership on the issue of climate change?

I think Jerry Brown, Governor of California—along with his colleagues in the legislature, and businesses and civic leaders—has been doing a really good job. They’ve upgraded efficiency standards for buildings, there are tax deductions and incentives to put solar panels on your home, and they’ve been leaders in establishing emissions standards for automobiles. There’s been a huge push for electric vehicles there, and some entrepreneurs like Elon Musk have been doing great things to make that technology come to fruition. It’s a combination of regulations, entrepreneurial spirit, and investments in these new technologies that make a difference.

It’s at the national level in the United States where we see real foot-dragging. And frankly, it’s a pretty small minority of our country, as represented by the legislature, who are not seeing the problem [of climate change] and not wanting to see it.

The lack of commitment to climate change mitigation is easier to understand since it requires sacrifice in ordinary people’s lives. But I think people would be puzzled if they knew that so many nuclear weapons are still around. The Cold War is over. What’s keeping us from doing more?

The true number of nuclear weapons is a national security secret, but we estimate the numbers in our Nuclear Notebook. In the past, when people were paying attention, nuclear weapons were attached to a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, so we would talk and worry a lot about the Soviets’ nuclear capability. Once the political heat went out of the relationship between our countries, people just assumed that the weapons would go away.

But nuclear weapons had become part of the military strategy—they’d become part of a huge complex with contractors and subcontractors and scientists whose careers were made on the testing and design of nuclear weapons. It really takes a lot of push to bring that down. What’s remarkable is that we’ve come so far. We’ve gone from about 65,000 nuclear weapons between the US and Russia down to 16,300 or so. So we’ve made tremendous progress, but it takes continual leadership and continual pressure.

How much can the average American do to affect policy on both climate change and nuclear issues?

I think a lot, even on the nuclear front. Ordinary people marching on the streets during the 1980s really provided the impetus for not only the end of the Cold War but for reductions of nuclear weapons. In the Freeze Movement during the early Reagan years, people said, “No, we don’t want more of these, we don’t need more of these.” It was after that that Gorbachev saw what was happening to his own people in his own country. And I think, certainly in European capitals, leaders heard their constituents and worked hard to bring about the end of the hostilities and a reduction of nuclear weapons.

None of us wants to be the victim of a nuclear bomb, nor do we want to perpetrate genocide, which is exactly what nuclear weapons would do. They are indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction. When people begin to understand the enormity of that, we’ve seen times when they’ve taken action.

On climate change, I think people are already taking action. There is a tremendous amount of attention, especially from young people. That is where the push may come.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there’s still time to address climate change in a meaningful way. But when will time run out? And what role does the Bulletin believe remediation efforts—things like carbon sequestration—will play in dealing with the crisis?

Looking at some recent evidence from glaciologists who are tracking the glacial fields in Antarctica, the scientists on our board have determined that the collapse of those fields right now means we will see a three-foot rise in sea levels over the next 50–100 years. That’s unstoppable, that’s happening. So the island nations will disappear. Many of those nations are applying to countries for asylum, essentially, so they can move their entire populations somewhere else. That’s irreversible.

We need to reduce our levels of CO₂ emissions to a level that would allow for an increase in temperature of only two degrees Celsius. And from all the analysis, there are ways to do this. But it will take large-scale development of alternatives to fossil fuels, like solar power, wind energy, geothermal, hydropower, and efficiency measures—these are all beginning to make a small dent in the carbon budget.

All of this is going to take cooperation on a global scale. That’s the other piece of this. We haven’t developed the international ability to work on these issues cooperatively, and that’s what I think is most distressing and needs a lot of work. Many experts tell us that there is a possibility of meeting the targets, but without sufficient galvanizing by leaders, it’s going to be tight. There will be adaptations, and the rich countries will be able to adapt more than poor countries. So that’s another piece of it—the inequality that feeds into who’s going to make it through this. But none of us really are going to make it through this unless we change drastically. If we continue on the path we’re on, some say that in a couple of centuries we’ll look like Venus, which is not habitable by human beings. But, yes, there’s time.

The Bulletin seems wary of nuclear power. What are the most significant challenges it poses as an energy source?

The cost is certainly a challenge. In the US, that’s particularly important because we rely on private investment. All other countries have more dependence on sovereign wealth, which makes it more doable. Safety is also still a concern, and the cost of safety regulations is often indicated as a problem for the nuclear industry. The other issue is the problem of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. If you have the capacity to enrich fuel for civilian power, then you have the capacity to enrich it for weapons. The United Arab Emirates have a kind of political-technical solution. They are permitted to develop nuclear power, but not the technology to enrich fuel. So they’ll buy the fuel pre-made.

We also haven’t figured out what to do with the waste. The one place we were successfully storing it was the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, where the United States was placing its military waste and radioactive material. But that suffered an accident last year and had to be closed. We just haven’t figured out how to deal with dangerous material that will be around for 100,000 years. A really tough problem, politically and technically. We need people to work on that.

Beyond climate change and nuclear issues, what other threats to civilization should we be concerned about?

A few years ago, we started looking at the issue of cyber warfare. Pandemics are another thing. But it’s the developments in synthetic biology that are more worrisome. Biologists are developing new agents, and because we don’t have natural ways of combating them, they could be quite deadly.

The other one we’re starting to focus on is artificial intelligence. We’ve heard from Stephen Hawking (who is on our board of sponsors) and Elon Musk, and some others, that this idea of super-intelligence—robotic intelligence that would be more intelligent than humans—is becoming a little more concerning.

Humans are developing new technologies, and some of them are extraordinarily helpful. But many of them have a downside. And until we figure out how to govern and manage these technologies, there will be unintended consequences-there will be accidents. So we have to be vigilant. And we have to make sure that lawmakers have enough information to enact regulations that ensure everybody’s safety. We’re not there yet. That’s where the responsibility of citizens, lawmakers, policymakers, business leaders, and the scientific community comes in. That’s where I think we’ve got more work to do.

Feature Photo: cc/(dymidziuk.janusz)