What Is the Doomsday Clock and Are We All Really About to Die?
What Is the Doomsday Clock and Are We All Really About to Die?
Article by Phil Owen.
Big news today in the world, what with the Doomsday Clock moving 30 seconds closer to midnight. That puts us at two-and-a-half minutes to the apocalypse on the metaphorical timepiece from the The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Which is really not a good thing. It’s the closest we’ve been to midnight since the early 1960s — you know, back when that little incident known as the Cuban Missile Crisis happened.
We were at two minutes to midnight then, and that was probably the only moment ever in history where everybody was kinda just like, “Yeah, we’re all about to get nuked, huh.” It was a bad and scary time to live through.
And now, here we are living in 2017 — a year that, according to the Doomsday Clock, is the second scariest time ever to live in if you’re concerned about global apocalypses.
But what does this all even mean? Who exactly runs the Doomsday Clock? What are they factoring in when they figure out what the time should be?
Well, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is a magazine that was founded by scientists in Chicago who had worked on the Manhattan Project — that being, of course, the U.S. project to develop the atomic bomb way back when. The Bulletin began publishing the clock on its cover every issue starting in 1947 (though they no longer publish a print edition), and the clock was intended to be a gauge of the nuclear arms race and how close said arms race — and the accompanying Cold War — was to killing us all. With midnight as the apocalyptic moment.
The Clock “is intended to reflect basic changes in the level of continuous danger in which mankind lives in the nuclear age,” the Bulletin’s co-founder Eugene Rabinowitch explained.
It was an important mission in 1947, just a couple years after the U.S. dropped the bomb twice on Japan to end World War II. The atomic bomb represented the first ever man-made weapon that could, in the right circumstances, destroy all of humanity at once. It wouldn’t be the last, as we know.
Nowadays, the Doomsday Clock doesn’t just attempt to measure the likelihood of an imminent nuclear war — no, now we have other types of extinction-level events to contend with, like the global climate change problem we have.
So the Doomsday Clock factors in all of it. In 2017, the clocked moved up 30 seconds more or less because the folks at the Bulletin who decide what the clock should read view Donald Trump as an existential threat to humanity because of his reckless speech and skepticism of climate change. Plus, now we’ve got…whatever it is going on at the Environmental Protection Agency, which was not factored into the decision to move the Doomsday Clock forward. If the Clock committee had waited until this week to convene to decide on the time, it might have moved further.
Climate change has been the primary reason the clock has been so close to midnight the last several years (it’s been at three minutes to midnight since 2013) — and so Trump’s suggested walk-backs addressing climate-related issues are not seen as a good thing, for obvious reasons.
If you want to read the Bulletin’s rationale for the change, you can do that here. I also recommend reading the complete timeline of changes to the Doomsday Clock in its 70-year history, which you can do here.
The Doomsday Clock is not asserting that the apocalypse is definitely near. It isn’t saying that global thermonuclear war is definitely imminent, or that climate change will definitely kill us all very soon.
Instead, it’s a warning, from scientists, that those things could happen if something doesn’t change for the better, and soon. This was borne out with the Cuban Missile Crisis — the U.S. actually was pretty close to war (though it was not necessarily guaranteed to be nuclear) in 1962, and the Clock’s estimation that we were two minutes to midnight was pretty accurate.
Doomsday clock lurches to 100 seconds to midnight – closest to catastrophe yet.
- Nuclear and climate threats create ‘profoundly unstable’ world
- Robinson: climate inaction is ‘death sentence for humanity’
The risk of civil collapse from nuclear weapons and the climate crisis is at a record high, according to US scientists and former officials, calling the current environment “profoundly unstable”.
They said the rise of “cyber-enabled disinformation campaigns” compounds both threats by keeping the public from insisting on progress.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced its symbolic “doomsday clock” has moved forward to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest to catastrophe that the scientists have judged the world to be at any point since its creation in 1947, at the outset of the cold war.
“The world needs to wake up. Our planet faces two simultaneous existential threats,” said Mary Robinson, chair of an independent group of global leaders called The Elders, and the former president of Ireland and former UN high commissioner of human rights.
Robinson said that countries that don’t aim to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions heating the planet and instead exploit fossil fuels are issuing “a death sentence for humanity”.
She said while public pressure presents a “sliver of hope” for the climate, there is no such pressure on leaders to avert nuclear threats.
As long as nuclear weapons are available it is inevitable they will one day be used, “by accident, miscalculation or design”, she said.
Robert Rosner, chair of the Bulletin’s science and security board, said society has normalized a very dangerous world, and that “information warfare” is undermining “the public’s ability to sort out what’s true and what’s patently false”.
Sharon Squassoni, a board member and research professor at George Washington University, noted the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement, which has resulted in Iran reducing compliance. And she said although some thought Donald Trump’s unique approach might bring North Korea to the negotiating table, no real progress has ensued.
The warning comes as nuclear arms control is in danger of dying out altogether. The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty lapsed in August after the US accused Russia of cheating and Donald Trump declared he would leave the 1987 treaty altogether. The US has begun testing medium-range missiles similar to the new Russian weapon, although it is unclear where in Europe or Asia they would be based.
The death of the INF leaves the New Start treaty as the last remaining limit on the US and Russian deployed strategic arsenals. It was agreed in 2010 by the then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and Barack Obama, and it expires in February 2021.
It can be extended for five years and Vladimir Putin has said he is willing to agree an extension, but the Trump administration has insisted that China be included. China, whose arsenal is a 20th of the two nuclear superpowers and not as aggressively deployed, has ruled out joining in.
The farthest the doomsday clock has ever been from midnight was 17 minutes at the end of the cold war.
While nuclear warfare remains a threat, the climate crisis continues to intensify, as the US federal government under Trump has withdrawn from international climate efforts.
Last year was the second hottest on record for the Earth’s surface. The 2019 average temperature was 1.1C warmer than the average between 1850 and 1900, before the ramp-up of fossil fuel use. Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are on track to push that warming to 3 or 4C. The disruptions are intensifying extreme weather and expected to exacerbate poverty and global unrest.
“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 civilization,” said Silvan Kartha, a board member, senior scientist at the Stockholm Environmental Institute and author of the fifth and sixth assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Robert Latiff, a board member and retired air force major general, said the Trump administration’s “disdain for expert opinion” threatens action on climate change and a host of other science-based issues. New technologies and developments – from “deep fake” videos, to dangerous pathogens and artificial intelligence, all could threaten a fragile global peace.
As the climate crisis escalates...
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