![]() ![]() Last year, the world community failed dismally. To do that, they must undertake serious climate actions this year and each year hereafter. To halt the worst effects of climate change, the countries of the world must cut net worldwide carbon dioxide emissions to zero by midcentury. On the climate change front, global carbon dioxide emissions – which seemed to plateau earlier this decade – resumed an upward climb in 20. Meanwhile, the world’s nuclear nations are proceeding with programs of so-called nuclear modernization that are all but indistinguishable from a worldwide arms race, and the military doctrines of Russia and the United States have increasingly eroded the long-held taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. Although the United States and North Korea moved away from the bellicose rhetoric of 2017, nothing of substance has been settled and great dangers remain. The United States abandoned the Iran nuclear deal and announced it would withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, grave steps toward a complete dismantlement of global arms control. This and other defense systems are being met by Russia’s willingness to escalate with new and perhaps unlimited offensive systems in response, establishing another nuclear arms race that threatens to be as expensive and as futile as the race we ran in years past. The Trump administration is proposing an illusory “space shield” that falsely purports to be able to shoot down any and all missiles Russia might launch. In place of serious dialogue, Russia and the United States plan more dangerous weapons of mass destruction. Terminating the INF Treaty could be disastrousīy blunder or miscalculation, nuclear powers now risk the unthinkable by violating or walking away from existing nuclear agreements, while at the same time expanding their already bloated arsenals. US President Donald Trump (L) and Russian President Vladimir Putin arrive for a meeting in Helsinki, on July 16, 2018. Tragically, things did not improve on either front in the last 12 months. Humanity faces two dire and simultaneous existential threats: nuclear weapons and climate change. This is not our only survival-imperiling challenge. Subsequently, there have been false warnings of incoming missiles both to Russia and to the United States. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were two close calls that might have initiated a full-scale nuclear exchange. We won that gamble, more by good luck than by good management. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were, in effect, playing Russian roulette. Once more, we’re putting at risk the survival of civilization. Why? Because a new Cold War is underway – one equivalent to the most dangerous year of the first Cold War. ![]() In 2018, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists experts equated the nuclear danger to that dangerous time in the Cold War, setting the clock to two minutes to midnight. And US troops in West Germany, fully expecting an invasion, were preparing to use tactical nuclear weapons against the invaders. ![]() There was danger of a military conflict erupting in Berlin. Eastern Europe was in the iron grip of the Soviet Union. We have to go back 66 years, to 1953, to find a time of equal danger: The Soviet Union had just tested a hydrogen bomb. ![]()
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