Doomsday Clock as close to midnight as it was at the height of the Cold War
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists unveil the Doomsday Clock in Washington
Humanity remains as close to Armageddon as it has ever been, after scientists decided to leave the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight.
Citing nuclear arms races, threats of a cyberattack and ongoing climate change, the clock’s minute hand has remained at its 2018 position; a record only rivalled in 1953 at the very depths of the Cold War.
Launched in the aftermath of the Second World War, “the Doomsday Clock doesn’t represent a real prediction of calamity, but is instead used as a visual metaphor for how close the world is to a potentially civilization-ending catastrophe”, says NBC News.
Each year, the Washington-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists which oversees the clock, consults with a board of sponsors that includes 15 Nobel Laureates to analyse a wide array of threats, including nuclear risk, climate change and emerging technologies, then determines where the Doomsday Clock’s hands should be set.
Since it was first created in 1947, the time has ranged from between 17 minutes to two minutes to midnight – where midnight stands for the end of civilisation.
The Independent reports that “researchers stressed that the decision to keep the clock the same did not mean people should relax. In fact it reflects the “new abnormal” they said – a disturbing state of affairs where an unstable and unsettling state of affairs is becoming ordinary.”
“Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention,” they wrote. “These major threats—nuclear weapons and climate change—were exacerbated this past year by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting the future of civilization in extraordinary danger.”
Citing Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of several major Cold War-era nuclear arms treaties, CNN says that “by blunder or miscalculation, nuclear powers now risk the unthinkable by violating or walking away from existing nuclear agreements, while at the same time expanding their already bloated arsenals.”
At the same time, several leading economies have taken backward steps over tackling the other main global threat: climate change. The Trump administration has pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, with Brazil’s new president indicating he could follow.
Yet there is still cause for hope, concludes the Bulletin:
“Dire as the present may seem, there is nothing hopeless or predestined about the future. The Bulletin resolutely believes that human beings can manage the dangers posed by the technology that humans create. Indeed, in the 1990s, leaders in the United States and the Soviet Union took bold action that made nuclear war markedly less likely—and that led the Bulletin to move the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock far from midnight.”