SAEDNEWS: The group of atomic scientists who created the Doomsday Clock in 1947 stated that they had set the clock’s hands to a specific time approaching midnight.
According to Saednews, Scientists from the group that created the Doomsday Clock in 1947 announced that they had set its hands to three minutes before midnight.
According to The Associated Press, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said the clock had reached three minutes to midnight because world leaders were failing in one of their most important responsibilities.
Lawrence Krauss, chairman of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, said humanity would remain in serious danger unless people changed the way they think.
The Doomsday Clock reflects how vulnerable the world is to catastrophic threats such as nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies, with midnight symbolizing global catastrophe.
Krauss noted that the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate agreement were positive developments. However, he said these achievements had been offset by nuclear threats, including tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, as well as uncertainty over whether the Paris agreement would lead to meaningful reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions.
The previous year, the scientists had moved the symbolic clock forward from five minutes to three minutes before midnight.
They warned that climate change, the modernization of nuclear arsenals, and the continued existence of large nuclear stockpiles represented clear and alarming threats to humanity’s survival.
Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University who was not affiliated with the Bulletin, said that from a climate-change perspective, three minutes to midnight was an extremely alarming position if midnight represented the destruction of humanity.
He added that if midnight meant humans had emitted so many greenhouse gases that dangerous climate change had become unavoidable, then three minutes to midnight could be considered a reasonable assessment.
California Governor Jerry Brown appeared at Stanford University alongside former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry following the clock’s unveiling to discuss the issue.
Perry expressed concern about Russian statements regarding the use of nuclear weapons, saying that the threat of nuclear catastrophe was greater today than it had been during the Cold War.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by scientists from the University of Chicago who had helped develop the first atomic weapons. The symbolic clock was created two years later.
In 1953, after the Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb following the United States’ development of its own hydrogen bomb, the clock was set at two minutes before midnight—the closest it had ever been to the end of the world.
