Underneath the Hazelnut Tree, Me Honey and Me

It doesn’t mean we stop shooting at each other, it just means we could switch from bullets to paint balls.

Sometime in the next few weeks, the Science and Security Board of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, with its nine Nobel laureates, will announce the 2025 setting of the Doomsday Clock. The clock was started ticking by Einstein, Oppenheimer, and other Manhattan Project veterans in January, 1947, using the countdown to zero to convey the near-term extinction threat to us all. The clock reached two minutes to midnight in 2019 and moved up to 100 seconds in 2022. In 2023 it moved still closer, to 90 seconds — the nearest to global catastrophe it has ever been — and where it remains.

I suspect that the hand will now advance a few more ticks forward in January, but I could be wrong. There is a new player on the field, one that might just change the game. It goes by name of Hazelnut Tree, or Oreshnik (фундук) in Russian.

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