For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the ludicrously pointless Doomsday Clock may actually be pretty close to being right.
I get the point of the clock, I just really hate the forced symbolism and the seemingly arbitrary movements of it.
For example, the clock is now at “two minutes to midnight,” a level it hit when hydrogen bombs were invented.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we actually were minutes from nuclear annihilation, the clock was at 7 minutes and didn’t move at all.
Back then, the U.S. Navy dropped harmless signaling depth charges over a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo with orders to use it if it was damaged.
The captain thought they were under attack and wanted to launch, but three officers on board had to agree. One did not and cast a single vote that probably saved humanity.
The scientists behind the clock couldn’t have known it back then, but that shows how inaccurate the alarmist symbol they maintain truly is.
But what if we’re entering an age when it lines up with how long it would actually take for a doomsday scenario to play out?
Russia’s Latest Saber Rattling
Russian state television decided (more likely, was ordered) to list U.S. military facilities Russia would target in the event of a nuclear strike.
The Sunday evening broadcast of Russia’s main weekly news show “Vesti Nedeli” cooked up some graphics for the segment:
Plus, this comes just days after Putin stated that Russia was ready for a standoff similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Combined with the now widespread knowledge about that crisis mentioned above, this is a dark media campaign.
We’re certainly used to Russian bluster, but even Reuters noted that it was “unusual even by the sometimes bellicose standards of Russian state TV.”
The eye-opener for many is that there was absolutely none of the exaggeration that is par for the course in this broadcast, even when it declared that all of the targets listed could be hit in under five minutes.
This isn’t some announced weapon that will never be made or deployed. The hypersonic missile it mentioned, the Zircon, has been in production for seven years.
Round Two… Fight!
All of this is coming from Russia’s need to stay relevant beyond its immediate neighbors.
As Reuters stated, “Some analysts have seen his approach as a tactic to try to re-engage the United States in talks about the strategic balance between the two powers, for which Moscow has long pushed, with mixed results.”
Putin is what my dad would call, if you’ll excuse the vulgarity, King Shit of Turd Island. He’s the leader of a pack of kleptomaniacs living in the faded trappings of a superpower out in the sparsely populated hinterlands of Eurasia.
But he remembers the glory days. So do his friends. And they want more than anything to live them again.
That makes him a desperate adversary, and one at risk of creating an even more aggressive one when he passes away or passes on power, one way or another.
The cold war with Russia never went away. It just stalled and had to restart at a lower gear before it could get back up to speed.
And in spite of how hard Russia went down, it will get back up to speed. The world desperately wants the raw materials, especially oil and gas, that it has in abundance. Low prices slow it, but can’t stop it, and only hurt the proletariat.
Meanwhile, America ignorantly embraced the idea that we won and it’s over. “The End of History?” was the 1989 essay that summed it up, and its title was wholeheartedly embraced. Now even its author has abandoned it.
We’re facing the wake-up call that it was just round one, and the next round isn’t one-on-one.
Cold War On Two Fronts
China doesn’t bother with the rhetorical flourishes of its Northern neighbor as often. It doesn’t need to.
It is so large in so many ways — economically, geographically, militarily — that it just needs to keep growing to become the next dominant superpower.
We’re already seeing the second front open up as it pulls virtually all of Africa and Asia into its orbit, and directly claims the vast majority of the South China Sea.
And, at least as the U.S. maintains a global presence, it has no reason to directly compete with Russia or anyone else. An enemy of an enemy is a friend.
America’s greatest challenge lies ahead and we’re finally realizing it.
The fate of our nation — be it to remain strong or collapse into poverty like the European empires of the last century — is at stake and action is needed now.
The mother of all arms races is underway, money is pouring into companies on the cutting edge of it, and the weapons it is producing are beyond anything we’ve seen to date.
Russia and China are dedicating themselves to building arsenals of hypersonic missiles, integrated combat systems, advanced armored vehicles, stealth aircraft, and drones.
They are even weaponizing space to threaten the U.S. military’s information and communications advantages.
Everything is faster, quieter, and deadlier, and everyone — including us — needs a whole lot more of it to get ahead. Let’s hope that we can avoid using the worst of them again.
