The Doomsday Clock is a symbol which represents the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe. Maintained since 1947 by the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board, the Clock represents an analogy for the threat of global nuclear war. Since 2007, it has also reflected climate change and new developments in the life sciences and technology that could inflict irrevocable harm to humanity.
The Clock represents the hypothetical global catastrophe as "midnight" and The Bulletin's opinion on how close the world is to a global catastrophe as a number of "minutes" to midnight. Its original setting in 1947 was seven minutes to midnight. It has been set backward and forward 22 times since then, the smallest-ever number of minutes to midnight being two (in 1953 and 2018) and the largest seventeen (in 1991). As of January 2018, the Clock is set at two minutes to midnight, due to global threat of nuclear war, the United States not being involved in world leadership roles, and climate change. This setting is the Clock's joint-closest approach to midnight since its introduction, only matched by that of 1953.
The world is teetering on the edge of a disaster and an apocalyptic nuclear war is now more likely than at any point in human history. That's the terrifying warning we're expecting to hear from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that is about to move the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight.
Last year, scientists blamed Donald Trump for their decision to sound the alarm about an imminent apocalypse as they set the clock at two and a half minutes to midnight.
Lawrence Krauss and David Titley, who lead the organisation, wrote: ‘Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the clock largely because of the statements of a single person.
‘But when that person is the new president of the United States, his words matter.’
In another statement, the Bulletin’s executive director Rachel Bronson didn’t mention Trump by name, but she alluded to him potentially causing a nuclear war ‘by accident’.
She added: ‘Today’s complex global environment is in need of deliberate and considered policy responses.
‘It is ever more important that senior leaders across the globe calm rather than stoke tensions that could lead to war, either by accident or miscalculation.’
The Bulletin was founded by concerned US scientists involved in the Manhattan Project that developed the world’s first nuclear weapons during the Second World War.
In 1947 they established the Doomsday Clock to provide a simple way of demonstrating the danger to the Earth and humanity posed by nuclear war. Today the Bulletin is an independent non-profit organisation run by some of the world’s most eminent scientists.
It was in that year that the US took the decision to upgrade its nuclear arsenal with the hydrogen bomb, ‘a weapon far more powerful than any atomic bomb’.
