My Take | The dominant Western powers are leading us closer to midnight
- By risking a nuclear holocaust over Ukraine and a possible genocide in Palestine, Washington and Brussels are threatening peace and humanity
The war in Ukraine now edges ever closer towards a nuclear confrontation that will risk humankind’s physical annihilation. The carnage in Palestine is challenging the conscience of the world and threatening the West’s moral collapse.
It’s time we wake up to the dead end to which the dominant Western powers, led by the United States, is leading us. This is especially so when America may be about to re-elect a president who is now a convicted felon.
When I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, many people were familiar with the Doomsday Clock. It was and still is set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to make it easy for the general public to understand how close we were to nuclear war. People have been complacent about the clock in the last three decades; but now, no longer.
The minute hand on the Doomsday Clock has been reset 25 times since its debut in 1947, most recently in 2023 when it was moved from 100 seconds to 90 seconds to “midnight”.
As Rachel Bronson, the Bulletin’s president and CEO explained: “When the clock is at midnight, that means there’s been some sort of nuclear exchange or catastrophic climate change that’s wiped out humanity. We never really want to get there and we won’t know it when we do.”
At a time when Ukraine and its Western backers openly admit it is losing the war against Russia, they are doubling down. Kyiv is now authorised to use Western-supplied weapons to strike inside Russia.
But rather than conventional military targets, Ukrainian forces have just deployed Nato missiles to knock out parts of a nuclear-attack early-warning system inside Russia. You don’t need to be an expert to realise it’s not a good idea to mess with each other’s nuclear defence systems.
