Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Is global warming really more dangerous than Putin’s nuclear threats?

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issue 12 March 2022

Having just dusted down my Geiger counter and argued with the family about whether or not there is room for our dog, Jessie, in the cellar fallout shelter, I thought I would check in with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to see how long we’ve got before our recently acquired small paddock sprouts its first crop of Cobalt-60.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was begun in 1945 by the physicists who, having devoted several years of their lives to the Manhattan Project, suddenly realised that their striving might not be, in the end, exclusively beneficial for the human race. As the most lionised of them, J. Robert Oppenheimer, put it at the time (without a great deal of cheer): ‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.’

Concerned, then, that their babies would proliferate and eventually curtail the existence of the human race, the most senior nuke specialists created this bulletin to report, every year, on how close to annihilation we were.

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