It’s five minutes to midnight; do you know where your children are?

If you don’t you might want to corral them up sooner rather than later, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock. The clock, a gauge of how close the world stands to nuclear Armageddon, has been moved to five minutes to midnight. Midnight of course being the figurative end of the world, so I guess it doesn’t matter where your kids are; the end is the end.

According the Bulletin’s website, the Doomsday Clock has not been this close to midnight since 1984. It sat at three minutes till when communication between the United States and the Soviet Union broke down to virtually nothing . Of course, you all know the rest of the story, the U.S. and the Soviet Union made up and the Cold War ended. This event then marked the farthest the clock has been from midnight, at 17 minutes till, in 1991.

So the Cold War is over and thanks to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which greatly reduced the number of strategic arsenals of the two countries, we shouldn’t have so much to worry about right? Well, said government professor Ron Fox, who teaches a class on war and peace in the nuclear age, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been keeping up with the times. It is now also including threats resulting from climate change, technologies and new developments in biological and chemical weapons. I know we’re all pretty comfortable in the Guitar Hero and McDonald’s world we live in, but the possibility that we could destroy those things and everything else we hold dear is very real.

The problem lies with the powers that be; our governments have created these devices that can do us in and they need to take more responsibility to get rid of them. The U.S. and post-Soviet Russia can set the right example by starting a complete nuclear disarmament, or by their actions can encourage proliferation in other countries.

Fox agrees that less is more in this case. “As a first step, the nuclear powers must make a firm, unmistakable and credible commitment to abolition. The abolition of nuclear arms should be the organizing principle and goal of all activity in the nuclear field,” Fox said.

In the early stages of nuclear capability, the only two players in the game were the U.S. and Russia. Since their initial proliferation, that number has grown to 20 to 30 countries possessing the capability, if not the intent, to pursue the Bomb, said Mohamed Elbaradei, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He elaborated more on the dangers of nuclear proliferation in February of 2004 in an op-ed piece in the New York Times: “We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction, yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security – and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use.”

There are steps that need to be taken if we are to push back the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock. Fox suggests stronger government proposals strictly enforcing the anti-proliferation of nuclear weapons, and that a tracking system be devised to keep tabs on fissile materials. He also recommends that serious reduction talks be implemented to bring the number of strategic weapons down into the hundreds.

In a perfect world there would be no weapons of mass destruction, no reason to fear biological or chemical attacks and the polar bears would still have a place to live. Alas, we inhabit this place we like to call Earth and because of that and the huge rise in the technologies of mass destruction over the last hundred years, such a world will never exist. Well, maybe it will, after we all blow each other up.

Matt Rasher can be reached at [email protected]