4/29/2023 0 Comments 3 minutes to midnight transparent![]() ![]() It will remain set at 11:57-three minutes to midnight. ![]() This year, we’ve decided not to move the clock either forward or backward. In a statement, we wrote that “Unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity.” Last year, in January, 2015, the Bulletin set the Doomsday Clock at three minutes to midnight. This task has become even more complex in the past decade because the Bulletin has begun to explore issues beyond nuclear weapons, including climate change, bioterrorism, and cyber threats. Many disparate, worldwide factors must be judged in order to realistically assess the total existential risk facing humanity. As a result, I also work with the Bulletin’ s Science and Security Board, which, each year, decides on the position of the Doomsday Clock. I am privileged to chair the Bulletin’ s Board of Sponsors, a group of scientists, including sixteen Nobel laureates, that was created by Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer after the Second World War to advise the Bulletin. In total, in the past sixty-nine years, the clock has been changed twenty-two times, giving the world an easy way to gauge the likelihood that our species will destroy itself. At the end of the Cold War, in 1991, it was turned back to 11:43, or seventeen minutes to midnight (its furthest from doomsday). That year, it was set at 11:53, or “seven minutes to midnight.” In 1953, following American and Soviet tests of the hydrogen bomb, the clock reached 11:58, or two minutes to midnight (the closest to doomsday it’s ever been). In 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published, on its cover, a “Doomsday Clock.” The clock was designed to represent the existential threat to humanity posed by nuclear weapons. The Doomsday Clock in 2002, when it was set at 11:53. ![]()
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