The apocalyptic countdown clock was started up at 23.53 in the period after the second world war. It’s said that at midnight the world would end as a result of a nuclear war. Unlike an ordinary clock whose hands only go forward, its hands have been going both forward and backward. Ordinary time doesn’t exist for the destruction of humanity. Today that clock is indicating 23.54, six minutes to midnight. In a single situation it arrived at a minute from the final chimes of midnight, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, but the resolution of the crisis was so fast that the clock keeper didn’t have time to move the hands of the clock forward.
Since 1945 in Alamogordo in New Mexico when the first nuclear test was carried out more than two thousand nuclear war heads have been exploded in the world. The first two, "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" anticipated the modern humanitarian aid in Iraq and in Afghanistan. In fact, History has taught us that Hiroshima and Nagasaki with their hundreds of thousands of civilian victims (above all women and children) were useful to avoid a greater number of victims among the American military for the conquest of Japan. A necessary sacrifice.
The nuclear warheads are the sweeties and the “tests” have been going on all over the place from the Pacific islands, favoured by France and the United States, to the internal regions of Asia, the nuclear destination of China and of the USSR, but also Great Britain that has nuclearised a few remote regions of Australia. In the period after the war, the terrorists bombed themselves, without managing to destroy themselves. Seen by some alien civilisation, we must seem like tenacious lemmings that continue to throw themselves over the precipice. We have survived the atomic bombs, but the apocalyptic clock could not have foreseen that the end of humanity could happen because of the civil use of nuclear, the so-called “good nuclear”. There are about 500 plants in the world. There have been thousands of incidents. The most important ones: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. With the increase in the number of power stations, just by a simple probability calculation, there’s an increase in the number of incidents. The next incident could be the last. Each power station moves the hands of the clock forward by a few seconds. Every source of international tension, increases the possibility of terrorist acts against nuclear power plants. During the last world war, nuclear power stations didn’t exist, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. Who will protect the power stations if there’s conflict?
The apocalyptic clock has to be stopped. When a war finishes, you can start again, but after Chernobyl the life of an immense territory is finished forever.
There’s an association called La Rondine {the swallow}, that helps children living in Belarus at least for a few months a year to flee from the radiation that is present after 25 years even outside the forbidden area that is 30km in diameter. The children can be the guests of an Italian family in the Summer. And as has been described by Sergio Bollini in the video, it’s an experience that changes your life.