Born in 1947 as the world was just waking up to the reality of the nuclear bomb and people’s newfound ability to threaten the continuation of their entire species, the Doomsday Clock has been on hand to depict just how close we are to destroying ourselves ever since. With the time reset every year by a group of nuclear and climate experts for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the closer it reads to midnight, the greater the danger we are in.
Once upon a time, the scientists only looked at the threat from atomic weapons, but they now consider rising global temperatures, biosecurity and AI, among other hazards. In 2024, they have evaluated that the figurative distance between ourselves and self-liquidation is one and half minutes, the same as in 2023.
However, there are strong reasons to believe that the margins now are even finer.
Nuclear proliferation
In the words of the 2024 statement from the bulletin’s Science and Security Board, “China, Russia, and the United States are all spending huge sums to expand or modernize their nuclear arsenals, adding to the ever-present danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation.”
This accords with the most recent U.S. Department of Defense’s yearly report to Congress on military and security developments in China. It assesses the country to be readying 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2030, of which an estimated 500 had already been produced by May 2023.
A similar figure is calculated by the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project, which concludes that Beijing has one of the fastest growing arsenals of the world’s nine nuclear-armed states.
Per The New York Times earlier this month, vertical boring at Lop Nur in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) indicates that the Middle Kingdom is set to restart nuclear testing, too, while it is furnishing its military with multiple land, air and sea delivery platforms for atomic weapons, according to the Pentagon, which believes that nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles have been loaded into some of the 300 probable new silos that China has amassed in recent years.
Such a weapons collection may have been built to deter opposition in case Beijing makes the decision to invade one of its neighbors, but China President Xi Jinping presumably also foresees scenarios in which it might be deployed.
Ambiguous and risky maneuvers by the People’s Liberation Army in combination with its patchy record of military-to-military communication with the U.S. are meanwhile adding to the risk of misunderstanding spiraling into conflict, a scenario that remains cause for concern despite recent dialogue improvements.
Rocket force realignment
Xi has been aggressively remodeling the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force as part of a wider purge of armed personnel in recent months. This has involved at least one mysterious suicide and even the disappearance of then-Defense Minister Li Shangfu (李尚福), who abruptly vanished during his tenure.
Since the rocket force would be responsible for any deployment of nuclear weapons in the event of war, the shake-up inevitably carries far-reaching implications. For one, it appears to be a response to the substandard condition of missile systems, some of which may be unable to launch their payloads due to alleged malfunctions and fuel mishandling.
While a more professional rocket force may decline the possibility of a nuclear incident caused by disrepair or incompetence, resolving corruption issues is minded to strengthen China’s combat readiness and could therefore make it more dangerous. That will take time, however.
Worse is the other probable reason for the military reformation, i.e. making the People’s Liberation Army more answerable to its commander-in-chief: Xi himself.
Consolidation of the power to launch Armageddon into the hands of a single man with expansionist tendencies is never reassuring in any political context, but when that man is constructing a cult of personality, brainwashing citizens from birth and displaying elevated intolerance to any alternative opinion, the hope diminishes for common sense and subordination to prevail if he does decide, one day, to push the button.
Aggression and territorial avarice
Peril from an accumulating nuclear hoard and the streamlining of the chain of command to launch it is ramped up by Beijing’s reckless and destabilizing antics in Far East Asia.
China spent much of 2023 impressing upon the Taiwanese people that the penalty for not choosing its preferred candidate in their country’s election is war, but the largest percentage of the electorate decided to go against its will and voted in president-elect Lai Ching-te (賴清德) instead. As a result, the Chinese Communist Party has put itself in an ominously silly position: Either have its bluff exposed or move deeper towards conflict.
Xi’s reaction has so far been relatively mild, but, on the eve of the vote, one of his diplomats did delightfully promise to push the entire population of Australia “over the edge of an abyss” if their government works with Taipei’s. Xi has also continued to float suspicious balloons toward Taiwan, while buzzing its vicinity with warplanes and ships. Another mock blockade of Taiwan’s main island is one option for the Lai’s inauguration later this year.
As mentioned previously, the danger here is not only that China is practicing warcraft and gathering possible intelligence for an invasion, but also that a hot conflict could be sparked by a misinterpreted maneuver, eventually pulling more and more countries into the fray. The chance of this outcome multiplies given the breadth of China’s actions as well.
For Taiwan is not the only place where Beijing is pushing the envelope. Hardly a week goes by without some form of physical or rhetorical conflagration between it and the Philippines or Vietnam in the Western Pacific. The Japanese air force has had to scramble its fighter jets some 392 times in response to Chinese aircraft during 2023. Simultaneous aerial activity from China and Russia led South Korea to take similar actions in December of the same year. One month earlier, Australian naval divers operating in Japan’s exclusive economic zone were injured by sonar pulses that were likely from a nearby Chinese naval ship.
China can only persist with these grayzone tactics for so long before it meets with a more serious reaction from the countries whose toes it is repeatedly stepping on, a prospect which could ultimately draw in the United States of America.
Russia-Iran-North Korea axis
As both the Ukraine and Middle East have burst into flames, Beijing’s role in facilitating rogue states has come more sharply into focus.
China’s capital city appears to be an interface for the exchange of weapons know-how between Tehran and Pyongyang, while the former’s Hamas proxies have somehow acquired fairly sophisticated Chinese equipment, if the Israel Defense Force is to be believed.
Hong Kong is meanwhile a primary node in the supply chain that, in just six months, forwarded over half a billion dollars of microelectronics to Russia and its war effort in Ukraine. The Aerospace Force Self-Sufficiency Jihad Organization of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been the grateful recipient of drone components that also route through the city. After being assembled into unmanned aerial vehicles, such equipment has a more than outside chance of being used against Ukrainians or adding to the widespread carnage in Tehran’s neighborhood.
Together with sanctions-busting on North Korea’s behalf, intimidating related United Nations missions and providing a $240 billion outlet for the Russian economy, the Chinese Communist Party is therefore tightening a weave of violent autocracies that is increasingly threatening the rest of the world with a stark choice: accepting the slow march of tyranny or confronting the possibility of a nuclear war to stop it. The situation is all the more dangerous due to the powerlessness of the peoples within the countries of China’s sphere to influence or oppose their leaders’ decisions.
Diplomatic and economic tools are still on the table to avert a more extreme crisis, and dictatorships are always at risk of crumbling from within, but the general trend as 2023 blends into 2024 is not exactly auspicious.
Biocalypse
Despite grandstanding as an ecological civilization and centering itself at the heart of the green energy transition, China is heating planet Earth and wreaking havoc in the natural world.
On the one hand, many people might be more enthusiastic adopters of solar, wind and electric vehicle technology if making the change did not imply complicity in forced labor or ceding strategic power to the Chinese Communist Party. On the other, the obvious folly of being reliant on Beijing for critical materials is leading to a global mining boom that will perforate habitats and pollute waters in diverse locations, some of which destruction could perhaps be avoided if resource extraction was concentrated between dependable partners.
And that is before the more direct obliteration of ecosystems and their component species is considered. China’s hydropower projects will imperil river systems in places like Mongolia and Indonesia, cascading effects to snow leopards and orangutans along the way. Its rapacious fishing fleet, whose activities are part commercial and part geostrategic, continue to allegedly plunder coral reefs and piscine shoals from West Africa to the Galapagos. The climate-goading pipeline it is funding and facilitating in East Africa together with France’s TotalEnergies will bulldoze through the homes of people and unique plants and animals alike. Its fleet of new-build coal power stations at home and abroad will undermine its widely vaunted domestic photovoltaic capacity, much of which is not sufficiently integrated with battery storage or the energy grid.
To date, we remain uncertain of how far weather systems can be pushed or ecosystems depleted before crossing a point of no return, such as by collapsing food webs or inducing a climate so hostile that it exceeds our economic and social ability to mitigate. Reversing negative trends requires cooperation, but that in turn rests on trust and good will, something difficult to achieve with a regime accused of ongoing crimes against humanity that would conceal a threat to health and harmony as serious as COVID-19 and which denies its citizens the basic information they require to drive their country towards a more responsible trajectory.
In other words, the Doomsday Clock continues to tick towards midnight.
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