Is the end of the world nigh? Atomic scientists set to make ‘major announcement’ about Doomsday Clock

• Symbolic clock was established by Manhattan Project scientists in 1947
• It’s designed to show how close civilisation is to facing global catastrophe
• Scientists track threats by monitoring nuclear weapons and climate change
• The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) will host a live international news conference to make a ‘major announcement’ on Thursday
• Expected to reveal the board’s decision regarding the clock’s minute hand
• Last time, Doomsday Clock minute hand moved was in January 2012, when it was pushed ahead one minute from six to five minutes before midnight
• Nuclear modernisation, climate change reports and terrorism could feature

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The conference will begin at 4pm GMT (11am EST) on 22 January 2015.

Inside the Ring: Russia boosts Cuba ties

The Russian military recently dispatched a guided-missile warship to Cuba as part of what U.S. officials say are growing military, intelligence and economic ties between Moscow and Havana.

The missile cruiser is the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, according to state-run Russian news reports.

Off to a Bad Start — Why is the president letting America’s nukes rust?

It’s been said, “where there’s a will, there’s a way”… The United States in this case has no will, and therefore will in the future have no way to effectively stop other militarily advanced countries from attacking should they attain first-strike capability (or in Iran’s case, it likely wouldn’t matter) — something Moscow has wanted since before the Cold War.

In his April 8 article on FP, “Time to Face Facts,” Secretary of State John Kerry observed how “in the Senate, we clawed our way to ratification [of the New START Treaty] with 71 votes, a big bipartisan statement that the arms control and nonproliferation consensus could hold together even in a polarized political culture.”

The secretary fails to mention, however, that the reason he, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was able to “claw” together enough votes to secure ratification is that President Obama and the Senate agreed to a 10-year effort to modernize our aging nuclear weapons complex and our nuclear delivery systems. It was this consensus on the link between nuclear modernization and nuclear force reductions that made New START ratification possible — not a consensus on arms control, as Secretary Kerry suggests.