The Doomsday Clock was reset Thursday to just 100 seconds before midnight – the closest we have ever been to the complete and total annihilation of the earth (well, at least metaphorically).
Midnight on the Clock symbolises the end of the world, and each year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decides what time it is.
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“It is 100 seconds to midnight, said the Bulletin’s President Rachel Bronson, in Washington DC on Thursday, after moving the clock forward 20 seconds.
“We are now expressing how close the world is to catastrophe in seconds – not hours, or even minutes.
“We now face a true emergency, an absolutely unacceptable state of world affairs that has eliminated any margin for error or further delay.”
So what factors determine how close we are to midnight? Mainly, the threat of nuclear weapons and climate change, Bronson said.
When the Clock was created in 1947, the greatest threat to humanity was nuclear war as the US and Soviet Union were headed into a nuclear arms race.
“But in 2007, we felt we couldn’t answer those questions without including climate change,” Bronson told CNN.
In recent years, the Bulletin’s panel of scientists and other experts has started to look at other “disruptive technologies,” including artificial intelligence, gene editing, and cyber threats, Bronson said.
‘Fake news is a threat enabler.’
While climate change and the nuclear threat remain the main factors, the Bulletin has identified “cyber intrusions and fake news as a threat enabler.”
“The information environment has become complicated and increasingly difficult to separate out facts from fiction, and that has made all the other threats more significant,” Bronson said.
Wake up call
University of Melbourne’s Professor Tilman Ruff, the co-founder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) which collected the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, said the 20-second jump was the furthermost the hands of the clock had ever been since 1947.
“It’s of significant concern and a real wake up call,” he told 7NEWS.com.au.
‘Time is no longer on our side.’
“The threat from nuclear weapons and climate change is not just remaining with us, it is accelerating.
“It’s showing that the responses from governments are not just inadequate, they are exacerbating the problem.
“Time is no longer on our side.”
In 2018, the clock was set to 11:58 pm and it remained that way for 2019 as the threat of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and climate change had the world on its toes.
This past year, however, those same threats were amplified, with Iran adding to the nuclear threat, moving the Clock ever closer to midnight.
Can we set the Clock back?
The threats of nuclear destruction and global warming might seem too big for us to handle.
But the Bulletin’s goal is not to use the Clock as a scare tactic, but to get people talking.
“What we try to do is give the public the ability to talk about the state of nuclear security and to really pressure their leaders to pay attention to that and climate change and show that they’re concerned about it,” Bronson said.
“In democracies, we try to encourage people to talk to their political representatives that these huge investments that are going into nuclear arsenals might be directed elsewhere. That arms control agreements should be signed to reduce the threats.”
It moved the hand farthest away – a whopping 17 minutes before midnight – in 1991, when President George H.W. Bush’s administration signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union.
Factors that have pushed the hands forward
Recent historic meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by President Donald Trump and South Korea’s Moon Jae-in initially raised hopes of a possible deal on denuclearisation, but there has been no significant progress made.
North Korea has threatened to abandon negotiations with the US altogether, saying the last year and a half of talks was “lost time.”
Recently, the Pentagon’s No. 2 general said North Korea is “building new missiles … new weapons as fast as anybody on the planet.” Earlier this month, state news agency KCNA reported that Kim told his government officials that North Korea should no longer feel bound by its self-imposed halt on nuclear weapons and long-range missile testing.
And with Iran, the hashtag #WWIII started trending on Twitter after top Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani was killed in a US strike. Iran retaliated with a strike of its own, firing more than a dozen ballistic missiles at Iraqi military bases housing US troops.
Iran President Hassan Rouhani said his country is working on developing new, advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges, according to Iranian state news agency IRNA. It’s a move that violates the nuclear agreement Tehran signed with other world powers in 2015.
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