Rare it is that one gets the chance to say this, but I think I have proof that I have grown as a person. From the age of seven until I was 10, I was gripped by the fear of nuclear war. My parents had to sit up with me at night as I gibbered and cried. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get home in time if the four-minute warning went off while I was at school; my mother had to promise me that there would be enough warning signs of an impending apocalypse to enable her to keep me off for days beforehand so we could die together.
Now, 4o years on, look at me! Reviewing a documentary called Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We?, presented by the veteran reporter Jane Corbin with nary a flicker of anxiety. Indeed, these days I find myself leaning in the opposite direction. Would a global razing be the worst thing? It might offer a quick end to what has been a fairly dismal human experiment and avoid us descending slowly, one non-atomic conflict at a time, into hell.
Corbin’s documentary is pegged to the annual meeting of the board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to reset the Doomsday Clock – the bane of my life as a child, but now merely a point of detached interest and mostly as a design classic. This is the device used since 1947 – two years after the dropping of atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima – to represent how close we are to destroying ourselves.
It was set initially at seven minutes to catastrophic midnight. In 2023, that grace period was down to 90 seconds, the shortest it has ever been, thanks mostly to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s various threats to deploy nuclear missiles against anyone who helps the targeted country. The British Isles, noted the former deputy commander of Russia’s southern district on state television, could be turned into “a Martian desert in three minutes flat” if it came to Ukraine’s aid. With the Middle East in such terrible convulsions, the possible return of Trump and assorted other potential disasters in the offing, it is unlikely that the clock will read any better this year.
Corbin takes us gently through the history of nuclear weapons, from the Manhattan Project and the subsequent arming of all the major players to the cold war and the Cuban missile crisis. By the 90s, China, France and Pakistan were in on the act, then the Start treaty between George HW Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev inaugurated a brief period of de-armament, since when there has been a steady regression.
The arming of rogue nations, North Korea’s testing of armed missiles that can reach Japan and South Korea and are edging towards the US (“They will be there eventually,” one expert assures us) and Putin’s lust for power will all be under consideration at the meeting. Also on the agenda are the threats posed by the climate crisis and nascent technologies such as AI, with their unknown capacities for harm.
The problem is that to a lay viewer – hi! – it is all a bit woolly. Unless you are an expert in geopolitics, there is not enough information here to give any more than a sense that things are, generally, getting worse – which most of us have likely gleaned from even the most cursory perusal of the headlines.
There is no detail about how the Bulletin board weighs the various concerns. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they just doomscroll and look at the headlines like everyone else. Maybe the clock is a distillation of mood, rather than facts. I am sure this isn’t the case, but I could do with more evidence of their rigour, much more deep-diving into how 2024 compares with other years.
Much more attention on the question that arises towards the end of this documentary, too: does the nuclear deterrent work? Does the fact that we have all been armed to the teeth for the past 70 or 80 years without destroying the Earth prove that an equal capacity for devastation is a good thing, or a sign that our luck cannot hold for much longer?
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If I were still capable of being terrified, Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We? would have terrified me simply because of the subject matter, but not with its conclusions. The main feeling as the end credits roll is: “Is that it?” Which is an odd thought to have about anything to do with the apocalypse. Still, my parents will be relieved.