Ninety seconds to doomsday

New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance at risk of compromise through our security partnerships must be upheld, says Russell Tregonning.

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We have lost our fear of nuclear weapons. But the board of the non-profit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is alarmed. Its Doomsday Clock, which tracks man-made threats, states midnight is the time of the world’s apocalypse. In 1947, it was set at seven minutes to midnight. In January 2023, mainly because of the war in Ukraine, they reset it at 11/2 minutes.

More recently, more threats. In October, Russia simulated a nuclear strike and its parliament later rescinded ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. In November, Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu said dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was an option, and the US announced its new nuclear “gravity bomb” was 25 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. I was born in April 1945, four months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I grew up horrified by the death and suffering of Japanese civilians: about 220,000 died, half almost immediately, the rest slowly from radiation sickness, burns, injuries and malnutrition.