Image: The Doomsday Clock, which is now as close to midnight as it has been since the height of the Cold War. Credit: Olivier Douliery/ABACAPRESS/PA Images, all rights reserved.
It is the "new abnormal", says the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, announcing that the Doomsday Clock for 2019 will stay at two minutes to midnight. World leaders have not only failed to deal adequately with nuclear and climate threats but they have allowed them to increase, while their citizens are lulled into "a dangerous sense of anomie and political paralysis". CNN puts it bluntly: "It's almost the end of the world as we know it". Meanwhile at Davos, the World Economic Forum has been warned (if it was listening) about the new abnormal in global inequality and poverty and worsening human rights as well as climate change. Are we sleepwalking into another world disaster, this time perhaps terminal, and do we have the imagination and energy with which to confront it? Three times in the last century the world has had to deal with the consequences of catastrophe, and lessons should be learnt from how far it succeeded or failed.
A hundred years ago, for ten evenings in February 1919, international politicians met in Paris to draft the Covenant of the League of Nations. During the day they worked on what would become the Treaty of Versailles; after dinner they moved to an ornate salon in the Hotel Crillon and sat till midnight in evening dress poring over rival drafts of the Covenant. President Woodrow Wilson presided, sitting in front of a huge gilded mirror -- it was his enthusiasm which propelled the discussions forward -- and he was flanked by the somewhat less enthusiastic British and French delegates. On February 14th he announced success with an agreed text of the Covenant: "A living thing is born...", he declared, 'it is a definite guarantee of peace".
