Looks like it’s almost time for the end of the world, again, everybody.Leaders of most enrichment capable countries may be blowing hollow talk – and pointing fingers – over how they’re making good on stockpile disarmament efforts, and of how pleasant and verdant the coming nuke-free world will be because right now, in this precarious moment, they’ve decided to step up, once and for all, and end the silly, awful game.But the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is calling bullshit. The Bulletin, a periodical whose member scientists have been adjusting a symbolic Doomsday Clock since 1947, has just moved their grim timepiece one minute closer to nuclear midnight. We’re just five minutes out, now, people. Maybe now is a good time to tap your inner Grey Man survivalist.Don’t bum too hard, though. It’s been much, much worse. Beginning 1953, when the U.S. tested its first hydrogen bomb, and on through the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the BAS’ minute hand hovered even closer to annihilation time. Russia’s Tsar Bomba, a three-stage hydrogen bomb equivalent to 50-megatons of TNT and variously known as RDS-220, code-name Vanya, Kuzkina Mat’ (rough translation: “We’ll show you!”), Big Ivan, and Project 7000, is the Cold War’s flash par excellence. Dropped October 30, 1961, onto a remote Arctic Ocean archipelago, Tsar Bomba remains the most powerful nuclear bomb ever discharged.Read the rest at Motherboard.
