Cults often use doomsday predictions to maintain fanatical loyalty and recruit new members.

Panic is a powerful motivator. Paul Ehrlich and a few doomsayers put population control on the map in the late 60s, and we are still not rid of the cultists he inspired. And as with most doomsday cults, the failure of predicted doom to arrive at the scheduled time is irrelevant to belief.

Having grown up in the 70s and 80s, I lived through both the population bomb and nuclear bomb scares that defined those decades. While in college I had conversations with true believers who argued that Reagan was running for reelection in 1984 in order to bomb the Soviet Union. The fact that he had his finger on the proverbial nuclear button at that very moment and didn’t need reelection to do so never made a dent in that certainty.

One group of Doomsayers that always garners attention from the media, due to the cultish belief that scientists should make public policy, are the folks at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Ironically, there are actually few actual atomic scientists at the Bulletin, and the focus of their work is political action. None of these people is a dunce, but few of them know much about geopolitics.

Their ‘Board of Sponsors,” which appears to be people who lend their name to the group, is filled with some pretty eminent people –most of whom know little to nothing about politics. And not to put too fine a point on the matter, we already know that a thermonuclear war would be a pretty bad thing, so I am not certain what they bring to the table in these matters. A Nobel Prize in Chemistry is an impressive credential, but hardly one that makes the bearer a credible source on when a war will destroy the earth.

Yet every year the Bulletin reveals the setting of their so-called “Doomsday Clock,” as they did once again on Tuesday to great fanfare. This year, they inform us, we are “90 seconds” from the apocalypse.

Now of course they don’t mean that literally. The clock is a metaphor, meant to create a sense of urgency, not to predict how long any of us has to live.

This is the closest to midnight (Doomsday) they have ever set their clock, which seems odd given some of the crises that the world has faced since the clock was first revealed in 1947. It happened the year before I was born, but the Cuban Missile Crisis actually had American naval ships with guns trained on Soviet freighters in the waters surrounding Cuba, and actual nuclear weapons based in Cuba under the control of Fidel Castro, reportedly.

That was pretty scary, I would think.

Still, the advocates at the Bulletin have a point: the war in Ukraine is pretty threatening, although nobody actually expects a full-blown nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia. While certainly not impossible, the likelihood is really very low. Even should Russia use a nuclear weapon in the war–less likely than some believe, more likely than any of us would hope–it would not lead to an all-out nuclear exchange.

Even Putin would balk at that, and unless Biden and his advisors are completely insane, America would as well. Both sides have strategies to deal with the use of tactical nuclear weapons that don’t include all-out exchanges, because they must. Living out one’s life in a bunker would be unpleasant, even for world leaders.

If the point of the “scientists” at the Bulletin is that things are particularly dangerous right now, I grant them that. Even a relatively clean nuclear bomb is hideously destructive and would be a scary escalation in the war, to be avoided even at a high cost. But would hardly be armageddon, and wouldn’t even have effects nearly as bad as the Chornobyl meltdown radiologically. Using a tactical nuclear weapon would be important because it breaks a strong taboo, not because the world will end. Tactically it wouldn’t even accomplish much.

It is particularly annoying to me that scientists–both the real and pretend variety–feel the need to grossly exaggerate dangers in order to get their point across. For some reason, they and their media sycophants feel the need to terrify people to get their attention. It scares adults unnecessarily and terrifies children unhealthily. Children should not be made to have nightmares in order to convince people to comply with the wishes of scientists’ political diktats.

Most people understand that a nuclear apocalypse would be pretty bad, all things considered, and should be avoided. And I certainly hope that everybody in power, however obtuse they are, knows that avoiding a nuclear exchange is to be avoided.

We don’t need a Doomsday Clock to tell us that.