Bush’s administration signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union. In fact, the hand has moved farthest away from midnight with a whopping 17 minutes before midnight in 1991, when President George H.W. It’s still possible to move the clock back with bold, concrete actions. At the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson cited the Doomsday Clock when talking about the climate crisis the world is facing, Bronson noted.īronson said she hopes people will discuss whether they agree with their decision and have fruitful talks about what the driving forces of the change are. When a new time is set on the clock, people listen, she said. If the clock is able to do that, then Bronson views it as a success.
The clock’s time isn’t meant to measure threats, but rather to spark conversation and encourage public engagement in scientific topics like climate change and nuclear disarmament. “So we never really want to get there and we won’t know it when we do.” “When the clock is at midnight, that means there’s been some sort of nuclear exchange or catastrophic climate change that’s wiped out humanity,” she said. The clock has never reached midnight, and Rachel Bronson, Bulletin president and CEO, hopes it never will. What happens if the clock reaches midnight? “While I wish we could go back to talking about minutes to midnight instead of seconds, unfortunately that no longer reflects reality,” she told CNN.
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What has always been important is the movement of the clock, not its absolute value.”Įvery model has constraints, said Eryn MacDonald, analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, adding that the Bulletin has made thoughtful decisions each year on how to get the people’s attention about existential threats and the required action. “It is clearly not a quantifiable scientific assessment, more of a qualitative one. “Now, it ticks in seconds it used to be minutes,” Krauss told CNN. Each year, he said, as the clock nears midnight, scientists would have to gauge how much available “real estate” is left before deciding on how much farther to move the clock. Theoretical physicist and former member of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors Lawrence Krauss said it can be difficult to take the clock’s results seriously since it’s been ticking dangerously close to the end of civilization in the last few decades. Still, he adds it “remains an important rhetorical device that reminds us, year after year, of the tenuousness of our current existence on this planet.” Mann, climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, told CNN, highlighting that the clock’s framing combines different types of risk that have different characteristics and occur in different timescales. “In fact, it reflects the judgment of the board that we are stuck in a perilous moment, one that brings neither stability nor security.”Īmong the positive developments noted by the board was the decision last year to extend the New Start arms control agreement between Russia and the US, the restart of talks over the Iran nuclear programme, and the coming to office in the US of an administration that believes in climate science and has pledged to act to mitigate global emissions.Although the clock has been an effective wake-up call when it comes to reminding people about the cascading crises the planet is facing, some have questioned the 75-year-old clock’s usefulness. But steady is not good news,” said Sharon Squassoni, a George Washington University professor and the co-chair of the Bulletin’s science and security board, which decides the clock’s hand movements each year. “The Doomsday Clock is holding steady at 100 seconds to midnight. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which curates the annual unveiling of the clock’s hands, said the decision to leave them unchanged reflects that a few positive developments over the course of the past year have been counterbalanced by continued drift towards the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the climate emergency, and the rise of biological threats.
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