“In more recent times it has taken on climate change and emerging disruptive technology,” Paul Ingram, senior research associate at Cambridge University’s Center for Existential Risk, told the BBC this week. Since then, the clock’s doomsayers have sounded more and more anxious, as they have begun weighing new threats the setting is set each year by a group of 18 experts, including climate and health scientists.
The most peaceful year of all was 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, ending the Cold War and with it, Communist rule in central and Eastern Europe. While that seven-minutes-to-midnight setting seemed alarming back in the 1940s, that level is the most relaxed the Doomsday Clock has been since 2002. The image stuck, and has since served as a yearly snapshot for the state of the world. So, in 1947, an artist drew the first Doomsday Clock for the cover of the University of Chicago’s Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, showing the setting of seven minutes to midnight. But in many ways, it is a Cold War relic. The Ukraine War, climate disaster, and the pandemic have all given the Doomsday Clock fresh relevance. Of course, the Doomsday Clock is not a timepiece you can put on your bookshelf, although there is a physical reiteration of it in the University of Chicago Keller Center on New York City’s Upper East Side, indicating year by year how close we are to doom-at least according to the group charged with measuring the global threat level. Russian President Vladimir Putin, he said, “has repeatedly raised the specter of nuclear use.” “Nuclear risks increased significantly last year due largely to Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,” said Steve Fetter, professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, announcing the new setting on Tuesday. In brief, Armageddon is no longer a remote abstraction. On Tuesday, the keepers of the Doomsday Clock moved the second hand 10 seconds closer, to just 90 seconds to midnight-marking the most perilous moment the world has faced since 1947, when the Doomsday Clock was invented.
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