The Kassandras and The Doomsday Clock

Are you familiar with the Greek tales of Kassandra, the Trojan Horse, and the Fall of Troy? Troy was a rich and powerful city whose walls were impenetrable. 

In addition, the Trojan government employed prophets to give early warning of danger. One of the prophets was the beautiful and fiercely loyal Kassandra.

The God Apollo was attracted to her. As an enticement to romance, he granted her the gift of clearly seeing the future. She rebuffed his advances. In retaliation, he did not rescind his gift of foreseeing the future but vindictively cursed her prophecies. All her prophecies would be accurate, but no one would be capable of believing them.

If you are familiar with the Iliad, Troy repulsed an enemy army’s siege. Troy’s attacking enemies, frustrated and apparently defeated, left a giant wooden horse as a gift to the valiant Trojans conceding defeat. It was a trick. Inside the horse were saboteurs. Having 20/20 prophetic vision, Kassandra warned her countrymen. All of Troy was deaf to her warnings.

At night the saboteurs slithered from the horse and opened the gates. Troy fell. The men were killed, the women were raped, and the children were enslaved.

In 1947 a group of scientists, worried nuclear war would incinerate the world, generated a report called the “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists”. They created an imaginary clock, to give us a visual picture of how close the world might be to destruction.  Midnight with both the vertical hour and minute hands pointed to the heavens, signifies the end.

The minutes to midnight have varied greatly. After the cold war the scientists set the clock to 17 minutes to midnight. This was the most optimistic evaluation. On January 23rd, 2020, the scientists set the clock at 100 seconds.

They sight these reasons for the emergency warning:

First: Politicians have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing nuclear weapons (verifiable weapons restriction agreements) to erode.

Second: Scientist’s warnings that climate change will destroy our benign atmosphere have been ignored.

Third: Putin’s Russia and other hostile countries have, hidden in the Trojan Horse of social media, created doubt and cynicism about our traditional media, our scientists, and our government. Russian cyber propaganda disinformation campaigns have infiltrated our protective walls of good judgement disabling our ability to distinguish what is true from what is false.

As a longtime student of climate change and of tobacco company lies, I must add hostile governments have an easy disinformation program to copy. Foreign adversaries have seen how easy it was for corporations to confuse us.  Tobacco companies even created doubt in our minds about the link between smoking and lung cancer. Russia saw and almost certainly participated in the fossil fuel companies’ disinformation program about climate disruption.

How do we protect ourselves?   How do we pull the hands back away from midnight? I say dedicate yourself to truth. If you hear something questionable simply ask, “Who said that?, Are they lying?, Are they qualified to make a comment on the subject?, Are they affiliated with a reputable institution or a fake institution created to fool us?, Is the institution staffed with honorable, intelligent people of high character?”

When negotiating with foreign governments we wisely insist on verifiable agreements. Should we not be just as deliberate when accepting a statement on a personal level?

We build our confidence in what is true and what is a lie the old fashion way, by hard work. The reward for this extra work is we inoculate ourselves from Trojan Horse misinformation viruses. Lies are contagious.  If allowed to move from victim to victim societies fall ill.

If we continue the present course, unable or unwilling to understand our scientists, our scientists become modern day Kassandras. And, we risk the fate of Troy.

https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/

The Union of Concerned Scientists battles ceaselessly to forestall nuclear war and climate destruction: ucsusa.org.

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