Image by Mandy Ferrer.

I’ve read the New York Times since I was a teenager. It was once a way to keep up on the news. It’s now a daily way to experience a living nightmare of a world. I’m thinking, of course, of Donald Trump’s world — although it could be Vladimir Putin’s, too — and that’s just to start down an ever-lengthening grim list. This, in all honesty, is not the world that anyone should want to be on at a time when humanity has discovered at least two ways of doing this planet in, the slow-motion version known as climate change and the (more or less) instantaneous version of nuclear war. And in this strange world of ours, who honestly knows what Artificial Intelligence, or AI, might be able to do when it comes to creating a potential third pathway to ultimate destruction? (Not this old man, that’s for sure.)

Consider it strange, given that nuclear weapons are clearly also doomsday ones, that, in the 80-plus years since the U.S. dropped two of them on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with devastating effect, including the deaths of more than 200,000 people (almost 40,000 of them believed to have been children), nine countries have come to possess far more devastating versions of just such weaponry. It’s now estimated that there are more than 12,000 nuclear weapons on this planet, with the U.S. and Russia each believed to possess more than 5,000. That’s enough, of course, to destroy any number of planets, with most of those weapons six to 50 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Worse yet, their cumulative numbers only continue to grow in this world of ours, and they are ever more devastatingly powerful.

Given our history over all these centuries (and the global hellscapes we’ve already created), what could possibly go wrong? Count on this (if you’re still counting): in the near future, the number of countries in possession of such weaponry will undoubtedly only rise again.

Once upon a time, end-of-the-world scenarios were nightmarish........

© CounterPunch