Doomsday Clock Is Ticking: US Foreign Policy & the Global Crisis

Keynote Speech at China Institute at Fudan University in Shanghai, China

Thank you so much for that very kind welcome and also for this wonderful invitation, and thanks to all of you for the chance to spend a couple of hours together to talk about the world situation.

Indeed, while the title is about Israel and Iran, and therefore the Middle East crisis, I’d like to be a little bit more general than that, and to talk about geopolitics more generally. Geopolitics, the relations among especially the major powers – The United States, China, Russia, India, Europe – are at a very difficult and fraught time. And we’re in a crisis that is very serious.

It’s a crisis because we’re living in the nuclear age. There are nine countries that we know of that have nuclear weapons, maybe some others also do, but nine that we know of. Most of those nine are in conflict with at least one other country that has nuclear weapons in geopolitical or diplomatic terms, and in the case of The United States and Russia, in open conflict in Ukraine, because that’s actually a war between The US and Russia, and a very dangerous war.

So my view is that we need to understand the global scene well so that we avoid terrible, terrible mishaps. And I often refer to the doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. This is a US publication that was started in 1947 after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it was started by the atomic scientists who had their journal, and they wanted to tell the world “this is very dangerous indeed, and the risks of this new age of nuclear weapons is unprecedented, because the power of destruction is something unlike any time before.”

So they started this clock, and the clock puts the hands of the clock closer or farther from midnight.