{"id":20839,"date":"2016-05-29T18:41:04","date_gmt":"2016-05-29T23:41:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20839"},"modified":"2016-05-29T18:41:04","modified_gmt":"2016-05-29T23:41:04","slug":"ticking-closer-to-nuclear-midnight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20839","title":{"rendered":"Ticking Closer to Nuclear Midnight"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ticking Closer to Nuclear Midnight<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Even if you\u2019ve never won an office raffle, a sports pool or a lottery, consider yourself supremely lucky. Unlike the atomic bomb victims who were recognized by President Barack Obama\u2019s visit to Hiroshima, you\u2019ve never experienced the horrors of nuclear war.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s nothing any of us should take for granted, says former Defense Secretary William Perry. On at least three occasions,\u00a0he noted<\/u><\/a>\u00a0recently, the U.S. military received false alarms of a Soviet nuclear attack.\u00a0At least twice the Soviet military went on high alert from similar alarms. And anyone who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 survived \u201cas much by good luck as by good management,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

A scene from \u201cDr. Strangelove,\u201d in which the bomber pilot (played by actor Slim Pickens) rides a nuclear bomb to its target in the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The consequences of an accidental nuclear war would be staggering. Thousands of U.S. and Russian warheads, some of them orders of magnitude larger than the one that wiped out Hiroshima, are primed for launch on warning. Besides wiping out tens or hundreds of millions of people in urban centers, they would put a large fraction of the world\u2019s population at risk from starvation.<\/p>\n

A 2013\u00a0report<\/u><\/a>\u00a0by Physicians for Social Responsibility concluded that even a limited regional nuclear exchange \u2014 say between India and Pakistan \u2014 could \u201ccause significant climate disruption worldwide\u201d and jeopardize food supplies to as many as two\u00a0billion<\/em>\u00a0people.<\/p>\n

Many authorities believe the threat of accidental war is even greater today than during most of the Cold War.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ticking Closer to Nuclear Midnight Exclusive:\u00a0President Obama embraced Japanese survivors of the Hiroshima bomb, but his policies, such as heightening tensions with Russia, have raised the potential for a far worse nuclear catastrophe, explains Jonathan Marshall. Even if you\u2019ve never won an office raffle, a sports pool or a lottery, consider yourself supremely lucky. Unlike […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6963,13773,7430,553,581,584,694,862,10928],"class_list":["post-20839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-consortium-news","tag-cuban-missile-crisis","tag-jonathan-marshall","tag-nato","tag-nuclear-war","tag-obama","tag-russia","tag-war","tag-william-perry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20839"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20840,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20839\/revisions\/20840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}