Search results
77 years
- The Doomsday Clock that has been ticking for 77 years is no ordinary clock — it attempts to gauge how close humanity is to destroying the world. On Tuesday, the clock was again set at 90 seconds to midnight — the closest to the hour it has ever been, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the clock in 1947.
www.ctvnews.ca › world › the-doomsday-clock-reveals-how-close-we-are-to-total-annihilation-1
People also ask
How long has the Doomsday Clock been ticking?
What is the Doomsday Clock?
How long has the Doomsday Clock been ticking in 2022?
How many times has the Doomsday Clock been set?
Jan 23, 2024 · The Doomsday Clock that has been ticking for 77 years is no ordinary clock — it attempts to gauge how close humanity is to destroying the world. On Tuesday, the clock was again set at...
- Overview
- Powerful wake-up call
- Drumbeat of crises
A Cold War icon, the clock conveys scientists’ views on humankind’s risk of destroying itself. Its current setting: just 100 seconds to midnight.
The Doomsday Clock, reset each January, remains at 100 second to midnight for the third year in a row. “The world remains stuck in an extremely dangerous moment,” say scientists who set the clock’s time.
Regardless of what your watch tells you, it’s 100 seconds to midnight. That’s the interval on the symbolic Doomsday Clock between the present moment and “planetary catastrophe.” The alternative rock band R.E.M. put it another way: “It's the End of the World as We Know It.”
In 1947, a group of scientists who had worked on the first nuclear weapons dreamed up the Doomsday Clock as a metaphor warning just how close humanity was to destroying itself. The iconic clock has been the symbol of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ever since, and on its 75th anniversary the group’s experts say we’re closer than ever to that dreadful wakeup call.
The clock is reset every January, and not even at the height of the Cold War, when Americans were digging fallout shelters and kids were being told to “duck and cover” under their school desks in case of atomic attack, were the clock’s hands this far into the final countdown.
That’s a pretty grim way to celebrate your 75th birthday, but as Bulletin editor John Mecklin observes, the ingredients for a possible doomsday scenario are more numerous than ever. When the clock was first depicted on the June 1947 issue—set at seven minutes to midnight—the editors were concerned solely with the likelihood that atomic bombs would soon rain down on the world’s capitals. Now, the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board considers more than just the nuclear threat when deciding where to set the clock’s hands each year.
In their unnervingly entertaining new book, The Doomsday Clock at 75, Robert K. Elder and J.C. Gabel trace the history of the clock, which they argue is “the most powerful piece of informational design of the 20th century.”
The clock came about simply because the association’s editors—most of whom had been scientists working on the Manhattan nuclear project during World War II—wanted a striking cover for the first issue of the new magazine they were launching.
“The editors were afraid that the nuclear weapons they had helped create were not fully understood by either politicians or the public,” says Mecklin. “They wanted people to understand that these weapons could literally end civilization—and even, perhaps, the human species.”
Luckily, the Chicago-based scientists in charge didn’t have to look far for a graphic designer. Martyl Langsdorf, a celebrated landscape artist, was married to physicist Alexander Langsdorf, who worked on the Manhattan Project.
“Being the so-called artist-in-residence for the scientific community, they asked me to do the first cover for the magazine-to-be,” Langsdorf, who painted under the name “Martyl,” said in an interview before her death in 2013.
Sketching on the back cover of a bound copy of Beethoven’s sonatas, Langsdorf hashed out the concept of a clock with its minute hand sweeping toward midnight—symbolizing, as she said, “the urgency and the time of essence.”
As I scanned vintage issues of the Bulletin, each headline bristled with reminders of my 1960s childhood, spent under the shadow of a mushroom cloud: “Nuclear Blast Effects” (1961). “The Bomb in China” (1964). “The Politics of Bedlam” (1963). I vividly recall scrutinizing a map, printed on the front page of our suburban New Jersey newspaper, depicting concentric circles of destruction from a theoretical atomic bomb dropped on the Empire State Building (and sighing with relief to note that the outermost circle passed through not my town, but the town next door).
For many of us, that ‘60s dread of falling nukes has long since been diluted by a drumbeat of subsequent crises. It’s almost as if we’re becoming comfortable skating around the fringes of Armageddon.
Mecklin understands.
“No one wants to carry around, every day, all the time, the idea of a nuclear threat,” he says. “When you stop to think about all the false warnings that have almost resulted in nuclear war, when you think about all the times sheer luck has saved humanity, that’s scary.”
Resetting the Doomsday Clock each January, he says, gives the world at large permission to contemplate the nuclear threat that hums, like a transformer behind an electric chair, with ominous persistence. “If there’s nuclear war, then any other issues you happen to have won’t matter.”
And so, Mecklin and his colleagues stubbornly play the part of the Biblical bad-news prophet Hosea, preaching a warning of doom to a distracted, if not disinterested, people.
- Bill Newcott
Jan 23, 2023 · In January 2024, the hands of the Doomsday Clock did not budge. At 90 seconds to midnight, it is the nearest the world has been to disaster in the 77 years that the Bulletin of the Atomic ...
Jan 20, 2022 · 4 minute read. Published 10:29 AM EST, Thu January 20, 2022. Link Copied! The Doomsday Clock remained at 100 seconds to midnight in 2022 -- the same time it's been set as since 2020. Bulletin...
Feb 12, 2024 · A year ago, after Russia invaded Ukraine and brandished the threat of using nuclear weapons, the clock was set to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has yet come to The End. The threat of...
Jan 21, 2022 · That matches the setting in 2020 and 2021, making all three years the closest the Clock has been to midnight in its 75-year history. “The world is no safer than it was last year at this time...
Jan 25, 2023 · On January 24, 2023, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that its Doomsday Clock was being shifted to 90 seconds to midnight—30 seconds closer to theoretical nuclear annihilation...
