By John Yoon
The Doomsday Clock, a metaphorical timepiece meant to depict how close humanity is to destruction, ticked closer than ever to midnight on Tuesday: 85 seconds to the stroke of doom.
It is the grimmest outlook yet on Earth’s future from the clock’s creators, a nonprofit organization and publication called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that has set the clock each year since 1947.
Tensions between nuclear powers, failures in climate action, disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence and the rise of autocracy are among the reasons that the Bulletin’s experts in global security, climate and nuclear science cited for advancing it four seconds from last year.
“Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline, and we are running out of time,” said Alexandra Bell, president and chief executive of the Bulletin. “Change is both necessary and possible, but the global community must demand swift action from their leaders.”
Antinuclear activists were paying attention to the Doomsday Clock — especially those working with survivors of the atomic bombings in Japan at the end of World War II.
“This is a warning that we need to take urgent action to avoid global catastrophe,” Hideo Asano, coordinator of the Japan Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in Tokyo, said in an interview. “We should know that the risk of nuclear war is the highest since the end of the Cold War.”
The nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union was the primary concern when the clock was invented. At the time, the people involved with the Bulletin included Albert Einstein and some of the scientists who made the first nuclear weapons, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The clock was first set at seven minutes to midnight, and has fluctuated throughout its nearly 80-year history.