The Doomsday clock is at 90 seconds to midnight - how close are we to catastrophe? Explained
Once every year, a select group of nuclear, climate and technology experts assemble to determine where to place the hands of the Doomsday Clock. Presented by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Doomsday Clock is a visual metaphor for humanity's proximity to catastrophe. It measures our collective peril in minutes and seconds to midnight, and we don't want to strike 12. In 2023, the expert group brought the clock the closest it has ever been to midnight: 90 seconds. On January 23 2024, the Doomsday Clock was unveiled again, revealing that the hands remain in the same precarious position.
No change might bring a sigh of relief. But it also points to the continued risk of catastrophe. The question is, how close are we to catastrophe? And if so, why?
The invention of the atomic bomb in 1945 ushered in a new era: the first time humanity had the capability to kill itself.
Later that year, Albert Einstein, along with J. Robert Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists, established the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in the hope of communicating to the public about the new nuclear age and the threat it posed.
Two years on, the Bulletin, as it came to be known, published its first magazine. And on the cover: a clock, with the minute hand suspended eerily only seven minutes from midnight.
The artist Martyl Langsdorf sought to communicate the sense of urgency she had felt from scientists who had worked on the bomb, including her physicist husband, Alexander. The placement was, to her, an aesthetic choice: “It seemed the right time on the page … it suited my eye.”
Thereafter, Bulletin editor Eugene Rabinowitch was the gears behind the clock's hands until his passing in 1973, when the board of experts took over.
The clock has been moved 25 times since, particularly in response to the ebb and flow of military buildups, technological advancement and geopolitical dynamics during the Cold War.
Nuclear risk did not abate after the collapse of the Soviet Union, even as the
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