SJ Beard, a researcher at the Centre of the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, said: “Covid-19 could have been a crisis that pulled governments together to make all of us safer, as the Cuban Missile Crisis did 60 years ago, but it was not. Still, the pandemic serves as a historic wake-up call, a vivid illustration that national governments and international organisations are unprepared to manage nuclear weapons and climate change, which currently pose existential threats to humanity, or the other dangers – including more virulent pandemics and next-generation warfare – that could threaten civilisation in the near future.” “Covid-19 will not obliterate civilisation,” the Bulletin said, “and we expect the disease to recede eventually. That the clock has been closest to midnight during the Covid-19 pandemic is no coincidence, even though the connection is not a direct one.
As ever, technology is a morally inert tool, but its applications can be positive or negative depending on how it’s used. “If the Earth warms by what we tend to think of as just a few degrees and human life pushes the planet into the opposite of an ice age, or even pushes the climate halfway there, we have no reason to be confident that such a world will remain hospitable to human civilisation,” says Bulletin board member Sivan Kartha.ĭisruptive technology includes artificial intelligence, biological weapons and nanotechnology – and the clock can reflect their advancement.
Climate change was officially added as a consideration in 2007 and, 15 years on, it’s clear that the international response has been inadequate, most recently at Cop26. The nuclear threat may not be as piquant now as it was then – Generation X will remember classroom drills in case of nuclear attack and in the cellar of our house is the local Cold War warning telephone with siren patterns for Attack Warning Black and Fallout Warning Red – but the prospect of even a localised war turning nuclear remains a constant worry.Īnd the clock now takes into account two other factors which were either distant or non-existent in those Cold War days: climate change and disruptive technologies.
#NUCLEAR TIME CLOCK FULL#
For the clock’s first 40 years or so, it concentrated entirely on the nuclear threat: two minutes to midnight in 1953, after the US and USSR had exploded thermonuclear weapons 12 minutes in 1972, after the superpowers had signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty back to three minutes in 1984 as Ronald Reagan intensified the arms race and finally a full 17 minutes in 1991, when the USSR was disbanded and the Cold War ended. That danger is certainly more complex now than it has ever been before. The twin elements of a launch countdown and an apocalypse informed Langsdorf’s design of a clock nearing midnight and that iconography – simple, powerful and transcending language – has burned a hole in the public consciousness ever since. Robert Oppenheimer as the first chairman who had, upon seeing the first successful nuclear test, quoted a line from the from Hindu sacred text the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Albert Einstein himself established the Bulletin’s board of sponsors and appointed J. The Bulletin was founded in 1945 by scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project and were concerned that the nuclear technology they had developed could be disastrous if used improperly. The clock is also designed to tell us how well humanity is responding to those risks. It is not designed simply to be an assessment of the risks facing the world and it doesn’t respond to every short-term fluctuation and international crisis in real time (indeed, it didn’t even shift during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world ever came to Cold War nuclear annihilation, because the crisis was resolved before the Bulletin’s board could meet to discuss its ramifications). The Doomsday Clock is one of the most famous symbols in international politics and science, but also one of the most misunderstood. The doorstep of doom is no place to loiter.” “Citizens of the world can and should organise to demand that their leaders do so – and quickly. “Leaders around the world must immediately commit themselves to renewed co-operation in the many ways and venues available for reducing existential risk,” the Bulletin announced yesterday. That’s the stark message from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who have kept the Doomsday Clock’s annual setting unchanged at 100 seconds to midnight – the nearest it has been in the 75 years since American artist Martyl Langsdorf created it in 1947. Humanity remains closer to global catastrophe than ever before.
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