Is global warming really more dangerous than Putin’s nuclear threats?

Having just dusted down my Geiger counter and argued with the family about whether or not there is room for our dog, Jessie, in the cellar fallout shelter, I thought I would check in with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to see how long we’ve got before our recently acquired small paddock sprouts its first crop of Cobalt-60.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was begun in 1945 by the physicists who, having devoted several years of their lives to the Manhattan Project, suddenly realised that their striving might not be, in the end, exclusively beneficial for the human race. As the most lionised of them, J. Robert Oppenheimer, put it at the time (without a great deal of cheer): ‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.’

Concerned, then, that their babies would proliferate and eventually curtail the existence of the human race, the most senior nuke specialists created this bulletin to report, every year, on how close to annihilation we were. So, for example, during the early height of the Cold War in 1953, just after the USA’s ‘Ivy Mike’ nuclear test (the first ever thermonuclear explosion which, briefly, created every element known to mankind and invented several new ones too), the hands of the Doomsday Clock were placed at two minutes to midnight. Fair enough, you might suppose; it was an awfully fraught period.

The Doomsday Clock remained, for the next 30 or so years, a baleful and very media-friendly indicator of our yearning for extinction. The problem is that in later years it became both politicised and Thunbergised. With nuclear conflagration off the menu for most of the 1990s, the scientists needed a new existential ogre to chill us with, and of course climate change provided them precisely with that.

If you look at the Science and Security Board of the BOAS, there are plenty of people for whom the word ‘quark’ would likely conjure up not a bunch of important sub-atomic particles – up, down and what have you – but a rather insipid form of soft cheese.