Al Gore and the Doomsday Clock

Since 1947, the board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been using the "Doomsday Clock" to keep us informed on how close we human beings are to wiping ourselves out of existence with nuclear weapons. Today, they moved the clock forward two minutes to five minutes to midnight, with midnight representing the point where a nuclear conflagration breaks out, killing us all.

The bad news is that this is the closest the clock has been to midnight since the end of the Cold War. The good news is that it is exactly where the clock was in 1947. So after 60 years, we're not any worse off than when we started. That's quite miraculous when you think of what we've been through in the meantime.

It's unfortunate that the scientists this year chose to factor global warming into their calculations. That was a frivolous and obviously political move made for no reason other than to please Al Gore and other members of their left-leaning constituency.

There are myriad ways humankind can kill itself, and the value of the Doomsday Clock is that it focuses on just one of those. Yes, global warming may kill us before nuclear weapons. But then so might an as-yet unknown disease or a meteorite. We can have a clock for each of these, but let's not have nuclear scientists moonlighting as climatologists. Let's keep politics out of nuclear war. Tell Mr. Gore he can start his own clock, if he likes.