Chapter 8 - What is happening to our world?

This is affecting the political and military stability of Asia, the Middle East, Europe, America and other parts of the world—for the intercontinental missiles North Korea is developing can potentially reach almost every continent.

Let us not ignore the reality that we live in a time-bomb place and all it needs is someone to ignite it. This is not doom-and-gloom talk. This is the reality of what many scientists and political leaders are constantly stressing.

Wikipedia describes "The Doomsday Clock" as a symbol which represents the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe. Maintained since 1947 by the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist's Science and Security Board, the Clock represents an analogy for the threat of global nuclear war. Since 2007, it has also reflected climate change and new developments in the life sciences and technology that could inflict irrevocable harm to humanity.

The Clock represents the hypothetical global catastrophe as "midnight" and The Bulletin's opinion on how close the world is to a global catastrophe as a number of "minutes" to midnight. Its original setting in 1947 was seven minutes to midnight. It has been set backward and forward 22 times since then, the smallest-ever number of minutes to midnight being two (in 1953 and 2018) and the largest seventeen (in 1991). As of January 2018, the Clock is set at two minutes to midnight, due to global threat of nuclear war, the United States not being involved in world leadership roles, and climate change, hence the importance of Donald Trump's involvement as president of the United States of America.

In its two most recent annual announcements on the Clock, the Science and Security Board warned: “The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon.” The danger is obvious and imminent. The world has and is seeing the misuse of information technology and witnessed the vulnerability of democracies to disinformation."

In 2015, the same Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist's Science and Security Board said that the unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernization, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity, and world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth. Despite some modestly positive developments in the climate change arena, current efforts are entirely insufficient to prevent a catastrophic warming of Earth. Meanwhile, the United States and Russia have embarked on massive programs to modernize their nuclear triads-thereby undermining existing nuclear weapons treaties. The clock ticks now at just two minutes to midnight because international leaders are failing to perform their most important duty (it was six minutes to midnight as recently as 2010) - ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization.

This dire situation is especially the case since North Korea has stepped up its nuclear threats, Iran is close to developing its own nuclear bombs, global terrorism is multiplying, political instability is widespread, and nuclear accidents are becoming increasingly possible as more impoverished nations acquire them. The “nuclear genie” is out of the bottle, and no one has been able to put it back in. And now these “nuclear genies” are appearing in so-called rogue states! (to be continued - Biological weapons)