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Today, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that they had moved their Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight, their most dire reading since the invention of the hydrogen bomb in 1953.

The 71-year-old Doomsday Clock may be one of the world’s most recognizable warnings of nuclear weapons, but it’s also a wildly unscientific annual ritual that is shockingly bad at predicting actual nuclear risk.

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Below is a repost of a story from 2017, with updates, on the severe problems with the Doomsday Clock.

The Doomsday Clock never fails to grab headlines. The sight of dour old men portending global doom has a tendency to do that.

But when it comes to actually predicting nuclear Armageddon, it’s difficult to imagine a worse indicator than the Doomsday Clock.

First of all, what does it mean to be two-and-a-half minutes to midnight? Is the world going to end in 150 seconds? And, since we’re talking about nuclear Armageddon here, isn’t any amount of time bad? Even if the Doomsday Clock gave us three days to annihilation, that would still seem to be an extremely panic-worthy indicator.