There is something comforting about North Korea’s nuclear weapons

Rod Liddle takes issue with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and otherdoom-mongers: Kim Jong-il’s nukes are quaintly amateurish

Apparently it’s now five minutes to midnight. I am referring not to the actual time, but to the figurative clock of the apocalypse which tells us how long it will be until we are all annihilated. It was invented by something called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists back in 1947 when, gravely worried by international developments, not least those two nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had the hands of the clock positioned at seven minutes to midnight. Within a few years the hands had edged forward still further, to three minutes to midnight, as the Russkies did a spot of nuclear testing and the Korean war got underway.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was, back then, the preserve of atomic scientists, much as it said on the tin — the engineers and experts who had worked on the Manhattan Project and were subsequently unconvinced that they had helped to make the world a safer place. Since then, the clock has swung this way and that. In 1953, for example, it stood at two minutes to midnight — scarcely time to make a cup of tea before your eyeballs melted — but back to seven by 1961 and then down to a scary three minutes as Ronald Reagan started talking about Star Wars and evil empires in 1984. There was a respite in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet empire, when the hands of the clock moved back to 17 minutes to midnight — enough time to rustle up a quick snack and watch half of The Simpsons before Armageddon. Curiously, the hands stood at a languorous seven minutes to midnight in 1961 even as JFK’s finger was hovering over the button while those Russian ships steamed towards Cuba; perhaps they forgot to wind it that year.