Former Secretary of Defense Keith Payne, long a missile defense maven, dismantles the latest adjustment of the Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The clock was set on January 14, 2010 to 6 minutes before midnight, one minute earlier than during the Bush years and one minute later than the original 1947 setting. The Doomsday Clock Timeline reveals that twice it was set at 2 minutes away (1949, when the Russians detonated their first atomic device & 1953, after the US tested the world's first hydrogen bomb). Once it was set a 3 minutes away (1984, when Ronald Reagan allowed the Soviets to walk away from the negotiating tale, due to his refusal to pre-emptively abandon the US Euromissile deployment & thus accept the then-existing Soviet Euromissiles already in place). Its earliest setting was 18 minutes in 1991, when the Cold War ended as the Soviet Union imploded.
A Weekly Standard piece notes that scientists foolishly speak as if scientific prowess equates to strategic acuity:
This is no doubt music to the ears of the atomic scientists, who feel themselves to be especially qualified to judge these matters. But knowing in detail how the bomb works does not necessarily grant one any special insight into the complex geopolitics of nuclear posture, deployments, bargaining, and hosts of other issues. To believe otherwise is a conceit that stretches back to Oppenheimer himself, but one that ignores the enormous gulf between technical proficiency—even scientific brilliance—and political wisdom. It’s the job of statesmen, not scientists, to think through the latter, and they may not always come to the same conclusion.
Tellingly, Payne notes an unimpeachable source for the PR focus of the Clock, in its original setting:
The keepers themselves recognize the lack of precision underlying their showy claims: Kennette Benedict, publisher of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, apparently observed that the Doomsday Clock originally was set “at seven minutes to midnight because that’s where it would look best in a design sense.” One can only wonder: Where was the scientific substance in this aesthetically pleasing timekeeping?
Bottom Line. Scientists often have high IQs to go with equally high Ego Quotients. The Bulletin's Clock is set by dovish scientists who fear conservatives and worship liberals, and calibrate their clock accordingly. The two, when combined, often yield (excuse the nuclear pun) low-yield foreign policy quotients.
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