Doomsday Clock now 2 minutes to the end

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced the symbolic Doomsday Clock a notch closer to the end of humanity Thursday, moving it ahead by 30 seconds. It is now set at two minutes to “midnight.”

In moving the clock 30 seconds closer to the hour of the apocalypse, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cited “the failure of President Trump and other world leaders to deal with looming threats of nuclear war and climate change .”

The organization believes “the world is not only more dangerous now than it was a year ago; it is as threatening as it has been since World War II,” Bulletin officials Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert Rosner wrote in an op-ed published Thursday by The Washington Post. “In fact, the Doomsday Clock is as close to midnight today as it was in 1953, when Cold War fears perhaps reached their highest levels.”

In 1953, the U.S. tested its first thermonuclear device, followed months later by the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb test.

In their piece, Mr. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, and Mr. Rosner, an astrophysicist, added: “To call the world nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger — and its immediacy. North Korea’s nuclear weapons program appeared to make remarkable progress in 2017, increasing risks for itself, other countries in the region and the United States.”

The clock, a metaphorical measure of humankind’s proximity to global catastrophe, also advanced 30 seconds last year, to 2½ minutes to “midnight.” It has wavered between 2 and 17 minutes until doom since its inception in 1947.

Before Thursday’s announcement, experts said the clock could only move forward, given recent geopolitical events, including North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile test and the my-nuclear-button-is-bigger-than-yours war of words between Mr. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“I think it would be very hard for the clock not to move forward,” Alex Wellerstein, who specializes in the history of nuclear weapons at the Stevens Institute of Technology, said in an email. “We have members of Congress, White House advisers, and even the president implying that they think war with a nuclear state is not only likely, but potentially desirable. That’s unusual and disturbing.”