Abstract
“No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is doomsday,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote.
He was reflecting upon our own personal mortality. Yet, today his words resonate on a larger scale. The rapid advancement of science and technology compels us to assess knowledge through the prism of humanity's potential for self-destruction.
As the original atomic scientists warned more than 60 years ago, no single nation could hope to indefinitely maintain a monopoly over the means to build nuclear weapons. The failure to heed that message yielded a world where nine countries now possess nuclear weapons, and many more have the capacity to follow. Meanwhile, in the years since physicists first achieved a controlled chain reaction, biologists have cracked the DNA code, raising concerns over the emergence of modified viruses or genetic engineering that could change the very nature of what makes us human. The world's growing demand for energy has spewed climate changing gases into the atmosphere, threatening to devastate agriculture and submerge coastal cities. Human beings have put their own unique imprint on the biblical prophecies of fire, flood, famine, and pestilence.
But, unlike prophecy, our self-made apocalypse is not predestined. In this special issue of the Bulletin, leading experts on science and security offer a grim assessment of our present trajectory, but also find room for optimism. Scientists in the emerging fields of biotechnology and nanotechnology are showing keen foresight with regards to developing codes of conduct. Rising temperatures are thawing the reluctance of governments and the private sector to take measures against global warming. Growing worries over nuclear terrorism could stir renewed awareness of the urgent need to reduce global arsenals and safeguard nuclear materials.
The instruments of change are hidden in plain sight. All that's lacking is the will to use them. It is that sense of frustration–and growing alarm–that prompted the Bulletin's Board of Directors to move the minute hand of the “Doomsday Clock” from seven to five minutes to midnight. “We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age,” the Board states. This new nuclear era, unlike the dawn of the first nuclear age in 1945, is characterized by a world of porous national borders and expanded commerce in potentially dangerous dual-use technologies and materials. Yet, this period of globalization coincides with an erosion of the global agreements and norms that have constrained the spread of nuclear weapons for decades. North Korea's recent nuclear test, Iran's nuclear ambitions, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptoms of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.