By Dmitry Samoilov, journalist and literary critic
When people talk about the threat of nuclear war, American popular culture inevitably creeps in. More than in almost any other field, the language, imagery and mythology surrounding nuclear apocalypse were created in the United States. Along with the weapons themselves.
One immediately thinks of Billy Joel’s song We Didn’t Start the Fire. In fact, we didn’t start the arms race either. We didn’t invent the logic of global instability, nor did we build the cult that surrounds it. That entire worldview was born in the United States.
It was there, after all, that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded, and it was its editors who invented the Doomsday Clock: the now-famous symbol showing how close humanity supposedly is to nuclear annihilation. They created it immediately after the United States developed the atomic bomb and dropped two of them, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
What is less often mentioned is that when the Doomsday Clock first appeared, humanity was not given much of a chance at all. In 1947, the hands were set to 23:53. Just seven minutes to midnight. This was two years before the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon. When the USSR did so in 1949, American nuclear scientists moved the clock forward to just three minutes before midnight.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: rt.com
