Doomsday Clock is now just two minutes away from midnight
January 26, 2018 by admin
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We are now just two minutes away from the apocalypse — thanks largely to President Donald Trump.
That was the dire warning Thursday from the atomic scientists who run the metaphorical Doomsday Clock — and who have moved the hands 30 seconds closer to midnight, which represents the moment the world could be annihilated by nuclear war.
“The world is not only more dangerous now than it was a year ago, it is as threatening as it has been since World War II,” Lawrence Krauss and Robert Rosner wrote Thursday in The Washington Post. “In fact, the Doomsday Clock is as close to midnight today as it was in 1953, when Cold War fears perhaps reached their highest levels.”
That year President Harry Truman announced the U.S. had developed a hydrogen bomb.
Calling Trump “an undisciplined and disruptive president,” the scientists said that under his leadership the U.S. has “backed away from its long-standing leadership role in the world.”
His decision to leave the Paris Climate Accord coupled with the conflicting signals on a host of other pressing issues — plus his bellicose rhetoric aimed at North Korea and Iran — has sown even more uncertainty.
“Neither allies nor adversaries have been able to reliably predict U.S. actions of discern between sincere U.S. pronouncements and mere rhetoric,” wrote Krauss and Rosner, who sit on the board of Chicago-based Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which is the science journal that oversees the clock.
The failure of “Trump and other world leaders to deal with the looming threats of nuclear war and climate change” has endangered our very existence, they added.
NBC News has reached out to the White House for a rebuttal.
Trump has vowed to expand America’s nuclear capabilities and has claimed that global warming is a hoax, never mind that most scientists and departments like NASA and the Pentagon agree it poses a very real threat to America and the world.
Last year, the bulletin pushed the clock from three minutes to midnight to two and a half because “of destabilizing comments and threats from America’s new commander in chief” and Trump’s blatant disregard of facts and science.
The group’s latest warning comes as Trump has been waging a war of words with the leader of North Korea over that country’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons program.
Trump’s threats against Pyongyang have not resulted in “a temporary freeze on North Korea’s development” and the communist country’s neighbors are growing increasing nervous, the scientists warned.
The nuclear threat is also growing in Europe as U.S. and Russian relations fray and as NATO conducts military exercises along the Russian border while upgrading their nuclear arsenals and “eschewing arms control negotiations” with Moscow.
“And in the Middle East, uncertainty about continued U.S. support for the landmark Iranian nuclear deal adds to a bleak overall picture,” the scientists wrote in the Post.
Trump has repeatedly criticized the 2015 agreement under which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in return for lifting economic sanctions — despite assurances by the International Atomic Energy Agency that the country has been in compliance.
Pivoting to climate change, Krauss and Rosner said the danger “may seem less immediate that risk of nuclear annihilation” but it needs to be dealt with now to avoid a catastrophe.
“The Trump administration’s decision essentially to turn a blind eye to climate change transpired against a backdrop of a worsening climate, including exceedingly powerful hurricanes in the Caribbean and other parts of North America and extreme heat waves in Australia, South America, Asia, Europe and California,” they wrote.
Also endangering the world “is the rise of cyberthreats targeting national infrastructure, including power grids, water supplies and military systems.”
Krauss and Rosner know from whence they speak. Krauss is a distinguished physics professor at Arizona State University. Rosner is a world-renowned professor in the astronomy, astrophysics and physics departments at the University of Chicago.
And the decision to move the time on the clock forward came after consulting the bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 16 Nobel Prize winners.
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Trump, in Davos, Seeks to Mend Strained Ties with Britain
January 26, 2018 by admin
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In a Twitter message before leaving Washington, he said he would use the trip to sell his story of economic success. “Will soon be heading to Davos, Switzerland, to tell the world how great America is and is doing,” he wrote. “Our economy is now booming and with all I am doing, will only get better … Our country is finally WINNING again!”
Before his speech to the assembled leaders scheduled for Friday, Mr. Trump used his time on Thursday to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as well as with Ms. May. He also planned to attend an evening reception being held in his honor and then be host at a dinner for European corporate executives.
The meeting with Mr. Netanyahu showcased one of Mr. Trump’s strongest international relationships. To Mr. Netanyahu’s delight, Mr. Trump recently discarded decades of American policy to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and has also threatened to pull out of a nuclear deal with Iran that the Israeli leader despises.
Vice President Mike Pence, during a visit to Israel this week, announced that the United States embassy would move to Jerusalem in 2019. It would be the only foreign embassy in the disputed city, which Palestinians consider the capital of their future state.
With Mr. Netanyahu at his side, Mr. Trump excoriated the Palestinians for having refused to meet with Mr. Pence, citing the Jerusalem decision, and he again threatened to cut financial aid. “They disrespected us a week ago by not allowing our great vice president to see them,” he said. “That money’s not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace.”
Rejecting Palestinian protests, Mr. Trump repeated his assertion that recognizing Jerusalem would take the dispute over the city off the table for peace negotiations, an assertion that has puzzled European, Arab and many American political leaders and diplomats. And he again added that Israel “will pay” for getting that concession up front without explaining what he meant.
While looking uncomfortable at that notion, Mr. Netanyahu thanked Mr. Trump warmly for the Jerusalem decision. “That will be forever etched in the hearts of our people for generations to come,” he said. “People say that this puts peace backwards. I say it puts peace forward, to recognize the history.” He added, “Peace will only be built on the basis of truth.”
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Mr. Trump’s pushback on the Palestinians was echoed across the Atlantic on Thursday at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, where his ambassador, Nikki R. Haley, delivered a rebuke aimed at the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.
Denouncing Mr. Abbas’s speech earlier this month in which he rejected any American role in peace talks, Ms. Haley said: “He insulted the American president. He called for suspending recognition of Israel. He invoked an ugly and fictional past, reaching back to the 17th century to paint Israel as a colonialist project engineered by European powers.”
Ms. Haley said the United States “remains deeply committed” to an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. But she also warned: “We will not chase after a Palestinian leadership that lacks what is needed to achieve peace.”
While Mr. Trump’s Davos meeting with Mr. Netanyahu was warm, the meeting with Mrs. May was more fraught. Although the British prime minister made a point of being the first foreign leader to visit Mr. Trump in Washington after he was inaugurated last January, the two have found themselves on the opposite end of repeated flare-ups.
The White House at one point suggested that on behalf of President Barack Obama, British intelligence had spied on Mr. Trump when he was a candidate, an assertion that drew heated objections from London. Mr. Trump accused London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, a Muslim, of being soft on terrorism by mischaracterizing the mayor’s statement reassuring the public after an attack.
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And Mrs. May personally criticized Mr. Trump as “wrong” for retweeting anti-Muslim videos first posted by an ultranationalist fringe group in Britain.
When Mr. Trump this month canceled his trip to London to dedicate a new United States embassy, he attributed the move to his dissatisfaction with the building project. That explanation was accepted by very few in Britain, where it was widely assumed that he called off the trip for fear of widespread protests. More than 1.8 million Britons have signed a petition calling for a separate invitation for a state dinner to be withdrawn.
Nonetheless, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the so-called special relationship between the United States and Britain remained undiminished. “I do think we’ve had a very special economic relationship for a long period of time, and we would expect that to continue,” he said.
Mr. Trump is only the second American president to attend the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos while in office, after Bill Clinton in 2000. And he comes under radically different circumstances.
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While Mr. Clinton championed lower economic barriers, no occupant of the White House in generations has been more skeptical of free trade than Mr. Trump. He has scrapped or threatened to scrap trade agreements with countries across the Pacific, South Korea, and Mexico and Canada. This week, he slapped new tariffs on imported solar panels and washing machines.
Mr. Trump will discuss those differences when he gives his much-anticipated speech on Friday, but advisers said the plan was not to be belligerent. Instead, they said, he would reaffirm that he believed in robust trade, but that it had to be fair, and that the United States had not been treated well by its partners. And they said he would push for foreign investment in the United States, touting his success at lowering corporate taxes and rolling back business regulations.
“The agenda is going to be, again, that the U.S. is open for business, that the new tax law, tax cuts act, makes investing in the United States very attractive,” Mr. Mnuchin said.
Still, the administration has spoken with different voices on these matters this week. While Mr. Mnuchin has sought to emphasize potential areas of agreement, Wilbur L. Ross, the commerce secretary, has more defiantly said the United States was ready to wage trade wars.
At a briefing on Wednesday, Mr. Ross said other countries had been waging trade wars against America for some time. “The difference is, the U.S. troops are now coming to the ramparts,” he said.
At another briefing, on Thursday, he toned that down a bit, saying the Trump administration was not seeking a trade war, but “we’re not flinching from that” either.
“We are the least protectionist country, regardless of the rhetoric that other people put,” Mr. Ross said. “We would like their behavior to match their rhetoric.”
Despite the doctrinal differences with the Davos attendees, Mr. Trump arrives with a bit of momentum, having pushed through $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, mainly for corporations, and presiding over a growing economy that is nearing full employment. Many business leaders at Davos, while still rolling their eyes at a president they consider erratic and ill informed, are nonetheless happy with his business-friendly policies.
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Even leaders with grievances against the Trump administration seemed intent on putting aside their differences and playing up to him.
Mr. Trump said this month that he would suspend almost all security aid to Pakistan for what he described as the country’s “lies and death,” notably its policies in Afghanistan. Yet, at a dawn breakfast here on Thursday, Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi of Pakistan described in warm terms his brief meeting with Mr. Trump in September in New York, at a reception during the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly.
“I found him to be a different person from his public persona,” Mr. Abbasi said. “He is a very warm person, and he engaged me.”
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