![]() These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth. "World leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. "In 2015, unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity," read a statement from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We're now in an equally dangerous place, according to the scientists, for the first time in more than 20 years. The comic series Watchmen used a representation of the clock prominently to portray a world on the brink of disaster and the drastic steps its heroes used to save it. It has only been closer to midnight once, in 1953, when both the United States and Soviet Union were testing thermonuclear weapons. It has been at three minutes in 1984 during the Cold War, and in 1949 when the Soviet Union tested its own atomic bomb. This makes the current position tied for the second-closest it's ever been, says io9. The closer to midnight, the closer we're said to be to a global catastrophe. It has been at five minutes to midnight since 2012, when it was moved up from six due to concerns about nuclear safety. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Io9 reports that The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which administers the clock, cited global warming and nuclear proliferation as its reasoning behind the move. Top 10 Deadliest Natural Disasters in HistoryĬopyright 2015 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. ![]() This time last year the time on the clock was altered to show three minutes to midnight. The clock's hands were pushed all the way back to 11:43 p.m., 17 minutes to midnight, in December 1991, after the world's superpowers signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which at the time, seemed like a promising move toward nuclear disarmament.įollow Megan Gannon on Twitter. The symbolic clock, which has been maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947, is a visual representation of how close the world is to disaster based on political and technological threats such as nuclear annihilation and climate change. They were closest to midnight in 1953, set at 11:58 p.m., after both the United States and the Soviet Union conducted their first tests of the hydrogen bomb. The clock's hands shifted quite a bit over the following seven decades. The Doomsday Clock first appeared on a cover of the magazine in 1947, with its hands set at 11:53 p.m. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by scientists who created the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project and wanted to raise awareness about the dangers of nuclear technology. ![]() "The risk from nuclear weapons is not that someone is going to press the button, but the existence of these weapons costs a lot of time, effort and money to keep them secure," Squassoni said, adding that there have been troubling safety discrepancies reported in recent years at power plants. (That figure seems to come from a Congressional Budget Office report from December 2013.) She said the United States has good rhetoric on nuclear nonproliferation, but at the same time is in the midst of a $335 billion overhaul of its nuclear program. Russia is upgrading its nuclear program, India plans to expand its nuclear submarine fleet, and Pakistan has reportedly started operating a third plutonium reactor, Squassoni said. Sharon Squassoni, another board member and director of the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said nuclear disarmament efforts have "ground to a halt" and many nations are expanding, not scaling back, their nuclear capabilities. But, he said a temperature increase of that magnitude was enough to bring the world out of the last ice age, and it will be enough to "radically transform" the Earth's surface in the future. Some people might not feel alarmed when they see those numbers they might normally experience that kind of temperature swing in the course of a single day, Kartha said. "We move the clock hand today to inspire action."įor instance, if nothing is done to reduce the amount of heat-trapping gasses, such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere, Earth could be 5 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to 8 degrees Celsius) warmer by the end of century, said Sivan Kartha, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. ![]() "We are not saying it is too late to take action but the window for action is closing rapidly," Kennette Benedict, executive director of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said in a news conference this morning in Washington, D.C. Experts on the board said they felt a sense of urgency this year because of the world's ongoing addiction to fossil fuels, procrastination with enacting laws to cut greenhouse gas emissions and slow efforts to get rid of nuclear weapons.
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