![]() ![]() Secretary General Antonio Gutteres told the global body last year that “humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.” The clock, he says, aims to “give a sense of the catastrophic risk that we face as a planet, largely through our own deliberate activities.” Does anyone really care?īut leaving aside the Doomsday Clock, there is no shortage of international organizations-many better resourced-that research major threats, including the United Nations the U.N. “In more recent times it has taken on climate change and emerging disruptive technology,” Paul Ingram, senior research associate at Cambridge University’s Center for Existential Risk, told the BBC this week. Since then, the clock’s doomsayers have sounded more and more anxious, as they have begun weighing new threats the setting is set each year by a group of 18 experts, including climate and health scientists. The image stuck, and has since served as a yearly snapshot for the state of the world. So, in 1947, an artist drew the first Doomsday Clock for the cover of the University of Chicago’s Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, showing the setting of seven minutes to midnight. Simpson, one of the original scientists, said later on. “Scientists were saying it was necessary to make judgments about what to do with their inventions,” John A. and the Soviet Union could result in obliterating entire parts of the world. They feared that a Cold War arms race between the U.S. exploded the nuclear bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan in 1945, effectively ending World War II, Albert Einstein and other physicists at the University of Chicago began sounding the alarm about the bombs’ existential threat to the planet. But in many ways, it is a Cold War relic.Īfter the U.S. The Ukraine War, climate disaster, and the pandemic have all given the Doomsday Clock fresh relevance. ![]() Of course, the Doomsday Clock is not a timepiece you can put on your bookshelf, although there is a physical reiteration of it in the University of Chicago Keller Center on New York City’s Upper East Side, indicating year by year how close we are to doom-at least according to the group charged with measuring the global threat level. Russian President Vladimir Putin, he said, “has repeatedly raised the specter of nuclear use.” “Nuclear risks increased significantly last year due largely to Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,” said Steve Fetter, professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, announcing the new setting on Tuesday. In brief, Armageddon is no longer a remote abstraction. On Tuesday, the keepers of the Doomsday Clock moved the second hand 10 seconds closer, to just 90 seconds to midnight-marking the most perilous moment the world has faced since 1947, when the Doomsday Clock was invented. During the COVID lockdowns in 2020, the world felt so dystopian, that the Doomsday Clock was set to 100 seconds to midnight-the closest to a global apocalypse since the metaphoric clock came into existence more than seven decades ago. ![]()
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