Doomsday Clock measures global annihilation as 3 minutes to midnight

Somewhere in bowels of Washington D.C. resides a “Doomsday Clock” that measures the likelihood of Armageddon. This clock, headed by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, metaphorically depicts just how vulnerable the world is to complete and utter annihilation by nuclear weapons, climate change, or other new technologies.

Each year world events are assessed and the clock’s minute hand is assigned a time based on the urgency of the danger levels. Some years the hand is readjusted in the opposite direction, such when the US and Russia conducted nuclear talks in 2010, but on Tuesday, January 26, 2016, scientists decided to maintain the clock’s current time of three minutes to midnight. This is the closest the time has come to “midnight”—the time symbolizing the end of civilization—since the 1980s. But the closest minutes to midnight occurred in 1953, when the Soviet Union detonated a hydrogen bomb following US testing of the same kind of bomb.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is actually a journal founded in 1945 by the University of Chicago scientists who aided in the Manhattan project, following the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Doomsday Clock itself was established in 1947 and the decision to adjust (or leave) the clock is decided by a board of physicists and environmental scientists from around the world, advised by board of sponsors that includes 17 Nobel Prize winners.

This years’ time takes into account a number of considerations, explains the Bulletin, citing the multiple factors like cybersecurity, global warming to nuclear arming. NASA declared 2015 as the hottest year on record since record keeping from began in the late 19^th century. At the same time, the rising tensions between the United States and Russia highlight a rivalry that has not existed since the cold war, meanwhile, nations like North Korea are increasingly gaining access to nuclear weapons.

As grim as the report presents itself, it is not without hope; the clock can be moved backwards if world nations drastically cut down their spending on nuclear weapons programs, work toward weapon disarmament with diplomatic measures between Russia, China, and North Korea, and honor the historic climate change pact that was brokered in Paris at the end of 2015.

In its 69-year history, the clock has been updated a total of 22 times. Bear in the mind that the time it presents is not an accurate prediction model, but symbolic of existing threats in world issues.

Source: The Verge