What does the Doomsday Clock show? (Part 1)

- On January 24, 2023 the symbolic Doomsday Clock has been set for 90 seconds to alarming midnight (photo).

Before that I thought it will be changed from the previous 100 seconds to 60 or even 30 seconds to that time testifying the End of the World. Because the chances of beginning a global nuclear war by January 2023 have increased radically between the two nuclear powers – the USA and Russia.

90 or 60 or 30 seconds before the Armageddon hour makes no difference for the mankind. It is extremely dangerous path – blundering the human race into a universal disaster.

- By early 2023, too many bilateral and multilateral treaties and agreements had accumulated on the subject of the Arms Control Regime or ACR, which were either continuously violated by individual states or had been broken up and ceased to be completely. There are up to two dozen treaties on the global politico-military agenda that relate directly to the ACR.

Of these, there are fifteen multilateral and bilateral treaties and agreements to which the United States and the other states in the NATO military bloc have shown a negative attitude, manifested by explicit violations of their provisions and by withdrawing from them unilaterally.

In particular, this applies to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, from which the U.S. withdrew in 2002 when George W. Bush was the US president.

These are also the treaties on the elimination of intermediate-range and shorter-range nuclear missiles, on the international arms trade, on open skies and on the Iranian nuclear program. Washington unilaterally withdrew from all of them during the Donald Trump administration.

His successor, President Joseph Biden, has not shown any desire to restore American participation in all these arrangements. In other words, these accords are not working. It should be additionally noted: the American side, as a rule, does not return to treaties from which it has withdrawn earlier.

- All current US five key military strategies – National Security, National Defense, Nuclear, Missile Defense, Military Space Strategies – all are aggressive in nature and identify either Russia or the PRC as the US adversaries number one or two.

- There is a group of treaties that are routinely violated by supporters of excessive militarism and aggressiveness. For example, the U.S. side has violated its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as well as the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty known as the New START.

- There are several ACR treaties that the United States has signed but not ratified.

- There are draft international treaties that the U.S. side discusses most likely to pretend that they are nice, but in reality, outside the official discussion, regard them in its inner circle with disgust and prevents them to be implemented.

- There are two treaties that Washington refuses to discuss at all. The talk is about the US violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is manifested by the deployment of American nuclear weapons in Europe and Asia for decades and the refusal to remove them to the continental USA.

- The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty is being partially eroded when the United States refuses to show Russian inspection teams the number of nuclear warheads on some SOA carriers and avoids confirming the assured irreversibility of nuclear carriers converted to non-nuclear missions that later can be easily transformed into nuclear delivery vehicles again.

- Washington has long failed to comply with the provisions of two international conventions, namely the Biological Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention. Numerous violations of the Biological Weapons Convention by the U.S. side have been repeatedly cited in briefings by the Russian Ministry of Defense, showing dangerous plans to use biological weapons created at bilateral U.S.-Ukrainian military biolaboratories in Ukraine.

- The U.S. side is blocking the adoption of the draft international Treaty on the prevention of the placement of weapons in outer space. It does not support the adoption of a political commitment to refrain from being the first to place weapons in space. It should be recalled that the draft of this treaty, prepared by Russia and China, was originally submitted to the UN Conference on Disarmament back in 2008.

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