A Choice Of Slippery Slope

The Doomsday Clock is less a clock
more a report of the deliberations
of a committee of scientists that reports
every January, where the communique
is called The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 
and this year the report for the choice
of slippery slopes seems particularly wide
and vertiginous as world leaders choose
how much they can push each other closer
towards disaster not knowing how much
they may well be being pushed further
towards catastrophe, unaware of it, themselves.

From this years report our choice of slippery slopes,
down which we might all disappear forever, is wider
and more precipitous than all the previous reckonings
set since 1947. The clock is now set at 89 seconds,
when in times past maximum safety from nuclear annihilation
was set at 17 minutes in 1991. With the end of the Soviet Union.

With President Putin seeking the return of the Soviet Empire
in some new Trump approved hegemony, we are nearer
to perilous times than we have ever been before.