Since January, the doomsday clock has been at two minutes to midnight, the closest ever to nuclear war, thanks to the rhetoric exchanged between North Korea and the U.S.
The clock was created in June 1947 by Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to measure imminent nuclear war.
At its inauguration, the clock was set at seven minutes to midnight.
The only other time the clock was also this close to doomsday was in January 1953 after both the United States and Soviet Union began testing thermonuclear bombs.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was too rapid an event to give the scientists time to reset the clock but we now know that two incidents during that crisis very nearly triggered atomic war.
Only the presence of mind of officers – one American and one Russian – forestalled two nuclear launches.
A new book, The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg, recounts that, aboard a Russian nuclear-armed submarine in the Caribbean, two officers had broken open the weapons launch keys and were ready to fire their missiles.
They needed the agreement of a third officer who refused to launch and opted instead to confirm the order to fire, and confirmation was not given.
On its website, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, there is also an account of the near-firing of nuclear-armed missiles on Okinawa Island during the crisis.
The missile bases received orders to fire, however, a senior officer knew that several of the missiles were aimed at non-Russian targets in countries not involved in the showdown.
He delayed the launch until he was ordered not to proceed.
As Ellsberg says in his book, there is no longer a limit to the destruction of the latest generation of nuclear weapons.
Even the detonation of a handful of thermonuclear bombs would kill hundreds of millions of people immediately and create a nuclear winter that would wipe out the human race.
There are 13,050 nuclear bombs in U.S. and Russian armories, 1,135 in the hands of seven other nuclear nations, and Israel may have an additional 75.
A regional nuclear war, say between India and Pakistan, or the unilateral use of nuclear weapons, say by North Korea or Israel, could start a global war writes Ellsberg.
What’s that got to do with non-nuclear Canada?
In Mountain View County, we live near an airfield that has been treated as a U.S. air force asset since 1942, when McCall Field was used to refuel U.S. aircraft hauling military supplies to Alaska and the Soviets.
After the Second World War, the U.S. Strategic Air Command designated the Calgary airfield for refuelling during a nuclear war.
Since the 1950s, runways at McCall Field, renamed Calgary International Airport, have been longer than needed for commercial aircraft but suitable for big nuclear bombers like the B-52 Stratofortress.
When the runway system was expanded in the mid-1990s, runway 17L35R was extended to 14,000 feet in length (4,267 metres).
The B-1 Stealth Bomber usually uses 8,000 feet of runway.
But hot summers, high altitude, and combat loads extend that requirement to 13,000 feet.
Calgary International is still the preferred option for a wartime B-1 bomber field in Western Canada.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran journalist and author.
