![]() ![]() ![]() You're so deep underwater that you don't know if the world is already at nuclear war. It sounds like the Americans are dropping grenades on you-or, at least, all around you. These boats would go to such ocean depths that their crews would lose radio contact with Moscow-something that's normally OK for brief periods of time, as long as a crisis isn't happening.īut when one of those boats has been "under" for a while, and its radar detects American military ships closing in on it at sea level, what can you do without outside command? It was part of the Soviet Navy's fleet called "Project 641"-and although this particular "undersea boat" wasn't commissioned until 1967, it's similar enough to the ones that were submerged near Cuba and armed with a nuclear warhead. Perhaps one of the best places to learn about what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis isn't actually Cuba, nor is it Russia, but San Diego-at the Maritime Museum, which has in its collection a B-39 (Б-39) Soviet era attack submarine of the Foxtrot class. Located so incredibly close to the tip of Florida, Cuba proved to be a strategic military alliance for the Soviet Union, which sent a number of its submarines into the waters there, helping bring the world's two biggest nuclear superpowers to the brink of war. The thing is, what happened in those waters surrounding the Cuban archipelago entered a crisis state, climaxed, and resolved too quickly for anyone to adjust the Doomsday Clock accordingly. Navy photograph via ), via Wikimedia Commons But after a bit of research-timely to our current situation, to say the least-I now understand that the closest nuclear war threat we ever had, and the closest the Doomsday Clock should've ever gotten to midnight, was in 1962.Ĭirca 1962, By USN (Official U.S. I didn't even remotely grasp the concept when I was in Cuba in 2016. It doesn't ever have to hit midnight, or even a minute to midnight.Īll this talk of North Korea and nuclear warfare has got me thinking about the Cuban Missile Crisis-something I knew by name but never learned about in history class. Fortunately, the Doomsday Clock-unlike actual timepieces-can move forwards and backwards. We are just as close to civilization-ending nuclear war right now as we were just four years into the nuclear arms race. was testing its H-bomb as part of Operation Ivy. Our demise has been imminent for quite some time, but it should create some alarm that the threat of nuclear war-compounded by climate change and "emerging technologies"-is just as bad right now as it was during the time that the U.S. At the beginning of the Cold War, at which point the clock launched in 1947, we were seven minutes to midnight. The best we've gotten since then has been 17 minutes to midnight in 1991. But if nothing else, it's significant by comparison. Now, the whole concept behind the Doomsday Clock is symbolic more than anything else-obviously we have more than 120 seconds before a man-made global catastrophe wipes us out. ![]() We are two minutes till doomsday, the closest to the end of humanity we've been since 1953 (at least in the time that anyone has been keeping track, over the course of the last 70 years). That puts it to 11:58 p.m.-just two minutes away from midnight, the end of the line. This past week, members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board advanced the time of the Doomsday Clock by 30 seconds. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |