Most dire prediction yet by the Doomsday Clock
SCIENTISTS have reset the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than ever before.
The symbolic clock, which marks how close humanity is to destroying ourselves and the world, is now just 90 seconds away from striking midnight.
Russia’s ‘thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons’ and the threat of escalation are the primary reason.
Rachel Bronson, chief executive of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the Doomsday Clock, said: ‘As UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres warned this past August, the world has entered a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War.’
Other threats which could end humanity include climate change, following a ‘monsoon on steroids’ which affected a third of Pakistan, some of the most lethal floods ever seen in West Africa and extreme summer temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere.
The scientists say devastating events such as the Covid pandemic can no longer be considered rare, once-a-century occurrences, and the world’s ability to predict which viruses and microbes are most likely to cause human disease is ‘woefully inadequate’. Following suggestions that the pandemic may have been caused by a laboratory leak in China, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says laboratory accidents continue to ‘occur frequently’. Meanwhile, the risk that Russia will engage in biological warfare increases as conditions in Ukraine become more chaotic.
When the Doomsday Clock was invented in 1947, by experts who were working on the Manhattan Project to design and build the first atomic bomb, the greatest danger to humanity came from the prospect of the US and Soviet Union heading for a nuclear arms race.
After the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, the clock was reset from seven minutes to midnight to three minutes to midnight.
The clock was furthest from ‘doomsday’ in 1991, at 17 minutes to midnight, as the Cold War ended.
In 2020, the clock was set at 100 seconds to midnight, and remained unchanged for the next three years. The time is decided by a board of scientists and other experts in nuclear technology and climate science, including 13 Nobel laureates.
In a statement, the scientists said: ‘Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict – by accident, intention, or miscalculation – is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high.’
‘Escalation is a terrible risk’