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What is the Doomsday Clock?
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Why was 2015's Doomsday Clock stuck at 3 minutes to midnight?
Why is the Doomsday Clock set at 90 seconds?
The Doomsday Clock is a symbol that represents the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe, in the opinion of the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. [1] Maintained since 1947, the Clock is a metaphor, not a prediction, for threats to humanity from unchecked scientific and technological advances.
- Overview
- History
- References in popular culture
Doomsday Clock, symbolic clock adopted by atomic scientists to show how close human beings are considered to be to a global catastrophe, with midnight standing for annihilation, or “doomsday.” Metaphorically, the clock’s minute hand moves closer to or farther from midnight, depending on the level of threat thought to be posed by nuclear weapons, cl...
The concept of the Doomsday Clock originated in 1947 with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization that sought to warn the public about the danger of nuclear weapons. The Bulletin was founded by a group called the Atomic Scientists of Chicago in September 1945 at the University of Chicago. Its founding members and sponsors were scientists who had contributed to the development of the first atomic bombs as part of the Manhattan Project, including physicists Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Eugene Rabinowitch. Concerned about the devastating consequences of this new technology, the group published their first newsletter, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in December 1945. Their mission was to communicate with other scientists about the moral and social responsibilities regarding nuclear energy and to educate the public about its possible consequences.
The newsletter was expanded to a magazine format in 1947. To design the magazine’s cover, Bulletin coeditor and physicist Hyman Goldsmith commissioned artist Martyl Langsdorf, whose husband, Alexander, was also a physicist and an alumnus of the Manhattan Project. Langsdorf initially considered using the symbol for uranium in her design, but she decided on a clock to convey the urgency of getting atomic weapons under control. Her design featured four white dots representing the hours nine through 12. A black bar represented the hour hand, and a white bar represented the minute hand. Her final design showed a clock set at seven minutes to midnight, which she later said she had chosen because “it looked good to my eye.” (In 2007 the clock design for the Bulletin was modified by graphic designer Michael Bierut, who changed the dots and bars to all black and added a curved line signifying the edge of the clockface.)
The clock was reset for the first time, to three minutes to midnight, in 1949. The reason for the change was the first atomic bomb test by the Soviet Union, in August 1949, which marked the beginning of the world’s nuclear arms race. In 1953, after the United States and the Soviet Union tested their first hydrogen bombs, the Doomsday Clock was advanced to two minutes to midnight. The clock’s closest approach to midnight since 1947 occurred in January 2023, when it was reset to 90 seconds to midnight in response to “eroding norms of international conduct” and “thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons” made by the Russian government in Russia’s war with Ukraine, according to a statement in the Bulletin.
On a few occasions, however, the Doomsday Clock has been set back from midnight when political conditions improved and reduced the threat of nuclear weapons. In 1960 it was set back to seven minutes to midnight because international negotiations were taking place in Geneva to end nuclear testing and because the administration of U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower had unilaterally imposed a moratorium on such testing by the United States. It was set back farther, to 12 minutes to midnight, in 1963 after the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear testing in Earth’s atmosphere, outer space, and underwater. In 1991 the clock was reset to 17 minutes to midnight, its farthest from doomsday thus far. The decision came after the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) by the Soviet Union and the United States, which was an agreement designed to reduce the nuclear weapons arsenals of both countries.
During most of the clock’s history, the decisions to change the clock’s time were made by Bulletin editor in chief Eugene Rabinowitch, a Russian American physicist who had become a leader in the global disarmament movement. Rabinowitch based his decisions on conversations with other scientists and government experts regarding political and technological developments. After his death in 1973, the responsibility for moving the Doomsday Clock’s minute hand went to a board made up of various experts in nuclear technology and climate science. Known as the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it meets twice a year to discuss world conditions and whether changing the clock is necessary.
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Pop culture references to the Doomsday Clock have been common. This was especially the case during the 1980s, when Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were high and the threat of nuclear war loomed large in public consciousness. It appears in the fiction of horror writer Stephen King and science-fiction novelist Piers A...
Jan 25, 2018 · The Doomsday Clock was created by the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 as a response to nuclear threats. The concept is simple – the closer the minute hand is to midnight,...
What are the origins of the Doomsday Clock? The Doomsday Clock is a symbol that represents how close we are to destroying the world with dangerous technologies of our own making. It warns how many metaphorical “minutes to midnight” humanity has left.
Jan 27, 2017 · The Doomsday Clock was created in response to the development of nuclear weapons. Wikimedia The clock gradually moved closer and closer to midnight until the mid-1980s when it stood...
- Ian Lowe
Jan 23, 2023 · The Doomsday Clock depicts how close humanity is to armageddon – but where did it come from, how do you read its time, and what can we learn from it? Existential risk researcher SJ Beard explains.
Nov 15, 2023 · The Doomsday Clock, with its hands hovering close to midnight (“doomsday”), is a symbolic device that is designed to warn the world how close it is to catastrophe. Midnight is said to ...
