According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which provides the public, policymakers, and scientists with the information needed to reduce manmade threats, we presently live in a time of unprecedented danger. The Bulletin’s 2023 Doomsday Clock now stands at only 90 seconds before midnight.
The data from this clock has appeared on almost all mainstream media sources since June 1947, and it is meant to symbolize the possibility of nuclear catastrophe. It was set at 17 minutes in 1991 – the end of the USSR and the Cold War – and has decreased almost constantly in the decades since.
Things have gotten a lot more dangerous in recent years. The doomsday hand closed to two minutes in 2018-19, and to 100 seconds in 2020 at the height of Russiagate scandal, when the former Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and Senator Sam Nunn wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine that we are “Sleepwalking Toward the Nuclear Precipice” and that “The World Needs a Wake-Up Call.” It looks like no one in Washington listened, and as a result the Doomsday Clock has now reached the historical minimum: 90 seconds to extinction.
We must thank President Biden for this gloomy news since according to his own claims, expressed in Foreign Affairs almost immediately after moving in the White House, “I will protect the United States’ economic future, and once more have America lead the world.” This statement and many others in this article and elsewhere, including in his State of the Union address, are full of lies. But when it comes to the nation’s security, both his lies and actions have brought us to the current sad state of affairs.
Let’s start with the February 2014 coup in Ukraine, the foundation of the current crisis, when President Obama gave Biden the Ukrainian portfolio, an authority he used to coordinate the coup with the help of his National Security advisor Jake Sullivan, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. All this is proven in the leaked February 4, 2014 phone call between Nuland and Pyatt, 18 days prior to the overthrow of then-President Victor Yanukovich, Ukraine’s democratically elected leader recognized by all UN countries, who was still negotiating with the opposition and Western leaders on how to end the crisis. Joe Biden also used this coup it to install his son Hunter on the board of one of the most corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, who then, according to Hunter himself, shared the profits with “the Big Guy.”
Then came the fake “Russiagate” scandal. Ashley Rindsberg of The Spectator has dubbed Russiagate the “media’s Vietnam”: “Over more than four years, Russiagate became more than a cause. It became the media’s raison d’être, so important that it forced some of the most reputed outlets in the country to openly disavow cherished journalistic values, like objectivity and neutrality, in favor of a crusade against one man.”
One of the major factors in Biden’s victory in 2020 was his blaming of Russia for implanting the content of megabytes compromising the whole Biden crime family in Hunter’s “laptop from hell.” This lie was also supported by many former US government officials, as well as the media. These and many other actions by Biden and his team shows how they managed to succeed in presenting Russia, which has been trying to be an American friend since the Gorbachev days, into an enemy.
And so here we are, on the edge of the abyss.
Edward Lozansky is President of the American University in Moscow. The views expressed here are his own.