Ultimate Violence: Doomsday Clock Ticking Faster and Louder

A Subject We Cannot Afford to Ignore

In psychiatry, the true seriousness of a problem is not assessed by how dramatic the symptoms appear; it is gauged by the degree to which a person denies that there is a problem.  In other words, the ability to confront an issue is most of the solution!

This is equally true when it comes to confronting our collective suicidal tendency.  I thus feel compelled to return to this issue more often than might be comfortable, but I do so with the hope for urgent betterment.

We are currently in an extremely dangerous predicament, as never before in human history, for three reasons:

· First, our own country is considerably responsible for increasingly escalating, rather than deescalating, situations of violence. 

· Second, our government, our establishment media, and our universities are inhibiting and discouraging critical information from getting to the American public, such that there is much misunderstanding about what options there really are and why we are making the choices we are.  

· And thirdly, the official keepers of “the Doomsday Clock” are badly failing us with a false sense of security, themselves having undergone a masked takeover by elements of the military-industrial-CIA complex, including the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department.

I have been a social psychiatrist involved in public health approaches to violence prevention through a large part of my career. It is now extremely challenging for me to watch our leaders miss numerous opportunities for a “diplomatic” way out of what has now become all but in name a U.S./U.K./NATO war against Russia—and less directly against Russia’s ally China. (“Diplomacy” may conjure up a kind of “coddling” of Vladimir Putin, but I am referring to the countless times in which the slightest psychological understanding could have made him the easiest potentate to subdue, just as Donald Trump at one time would have been the easiest president to convince to resign—we do not see these opportunities when we mistake weakness for strength.)

There is an entire war industry relentlessly pushing to elevate Putin to the position of statesman, just as it once pressed to elevate a gang of terrorists to the status nation—any excuse, it seems, to declare “war”. These “wars” are self-defeating in ways that far exceed the ability of any “enemy” we claim we are trying to destroy.

Meeting with the British prime minister in London just a few days ago, on July 10, 2023, and on his way to the summit where Ukraine would be admitted to de facto NATO status—a clear provocation to Russia—Joe Biden ominously declared: “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”

It was only last October that Biden publicly said that the U.S. was not going to provide Ukraine with the weapons he is now delivering, because: “That would be World War III.”  And just a few months earlier, Biden had said he realized Putin is “not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons.”

All attempts by the United Nations and other countries—including China, India, and Brazil—to urge the pursuit of a cease-fire and a “negotiated” way out of this war have been not only rebuffed but rather unilaterally undermined and prevented by the U.S.  This is part and parcel of what I have been calling a “death spiral,” which is leading directly to World War III.

Ominously, the cultural as well as diplomatic barriers that have held us back from what I term, “Ultimate Violence,” or the risk of global nuclear annihilation, have greatly weakened in recent years.  That in itself is an extremely dangerous development.  No longer are there vocal objections to the military leaders playing out their insane Dr. Strangelove war games.

Public warnings of total destruction date back to 1946, when nuclear scientists published One World or None and established the Doomsday Clock.  Now, in the midst of even a compromised Doomsday Clock reaching 90 seconds to midnight, there is very little discussion of the need to stop our relentless course.

Instead, there is only the opposite: a number of Russia's most senior personalities, all known to be close to Putin, have warned that “nuclear war” is approaching and that the use of “tactical nuclear weapons” to stop NATO is now justifiable.  Former President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev has publicly warned that “World War III is becoming more likely,” because of “the completely crazy West.”  Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has echoed the same with somewhat more diplomatic language: “The U.S. and its NATO satellites create the risk of a direct armed confrontation with Russia, and this may lead to catastrophic consequences.”

Whereas many have seen me as the face of individual psychiatry when I spoke up against Donald Trump, my expertise extends to the overall subject of violence, which I have dubbed a “societal disorder.”  Violence is our collective responsibility, and I therefore wish to bring the subject of Ultimate Violence to the forefront of our attention, at this extremely critical and ominous time, with the Doomsday Clock ticking faster and louder than ever before.  I do so because, as the Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres has warned: “Humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation, away from nuclear annihilation.”

When a problem seems too massive in scale, it is easy to numb ourselves and to look the other way in denial.  We may have done so with global warming, with “Trump Contagion,” and now with nuclear war.  This is almost a guarantee that the problem will grow into becoming truly, imminently serious, if not terminal.  The way to healing, on the other hand, begins with awareness.  Knowing that human-made problems are human-solvable, and facing them by studying them, gaining more knowledge, and participating in the solutions that naturally come to light with that knowledge can help reverse our destructive trend.  Complacency, complicity, and corruption do not spread where the citizenry is aware of what is happening, what is being done, and that there is another way.