By Linda McQuaig

April 19, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - I’m as curious as the next person about the Mueller report, Donald Trump’s tax returns and Jody Wilson-Raybould’s inner thoughts, but is there really no room amidst all the media chatter for the news that the chances of nuclear war are “higher than they’ve been in generations.”

That was the frightening assessment the United Nations Security Council received last week from UN disarmament chief Izumi Nakamitsu, and it made barely a ripple in the media.

For that matter, Trump’s decision in February to withdraw from a key nuclear treaty, signed amid great hope 32 years ago by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, was deemed worthy of about 24 hours of news coverage.

Even as climate change is finally penetrating the mainstream news cycle, the media has all but lost interest in nuclear war.

Commentators rarely find time to remind us that all-out war between the U.S. and Russia, the two most heavily armed nuclear combatants, would be 100,000 times more destructive than Hiroshima. Billions of people would die in raging fires and from radioactive fallout, with the rest of humanity freezing or starving to death in the ensuing nuclear winter.

Unlike the climate change battle, where a worldwide movement is managing to push the issue onto the political agenda, the fight to rid the world of nuclear weapons has become widely regarded as hopeless, a genie that can’t be re-bottled.

This sense of hopelessness — promoted by the arms industry — is misplaced.

While it’s true that there’s no way to un-invent nuclear weapons, the most dangerous threat they pose could be eliminated. Indeed, such a goal is within reach.

That’s the conclusion of a number of experts, including former military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. Best known for leaking the Pentagon papers in the 1970s, Ellsberg also worked as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration.

In his recent book, The Doomsday Machine, Ellsberg argues that probably the greatest nuclear threat today is accidental nuclear war — that is, a false electronic alarm triggering a pre-emptive strike by either the U.S. or Russia. Over the years, there’ve been a number of chillingly close calls.