Josh Hafner

USA TODAY

The Doomsday Clock, a symbolic countdown to the world’s end, stands still at three minutes until midnight, scientists announced Tuesday.

It remains at the position it moved to one year ago.

That the clock moves no closer to midnight, the indicated end of humanity, remains "grave" news, its makers stressed.

"Unless we change the way we think, humanity remains in serious danger," said Lawrence Krauss of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the nonprofit that sets the clock.



"Action now can reduce these threats," he said at an announcement in Washington, "but only if we recognize them honestly and face them head-on."

Manhattan Project scientists, concerned about the first atomic weapons, founded the nonprofit Bulletin in 1945. They created the clock two years later, and update its minute hand each year.

Just how the minute hand moves is determined by the Bulletin’s boards of directors and sponsors, which include environmental scientists, physicists and 18 Nobel Laureates, its site notes.

Krauss, a physicist who chairs the group's Board of Sponsors, said Tuesday that progress over the past year including America's nuclear deal with Iran and the Paris accord to slow climate change balanced out negative developments including tension between the U.S. and Russia and North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weaponry.

The clock remains at the closest it has pointed to mankind’s doom since 1984 amid the Cold War. The reasoning for its move there last year: rampant climate change and an ongoing threat of nuclear weapons.

“The probability of global catastrophe is very high,” Kennette Benedict, the Bulletin’s publisher at the time, said. “This is about the end of civilization as we know it."

The closest point it had been as of Tuesday morning was two minutes, in 1953, when the U.S. and Soviets had tested hydrogen bombs.

But the Doomsday Clock isn’t bound by time, and as such, can move backwards.

In 2010, an optimistic Bulletin did move the minute hand backwards, from five minutes to midnight to six, citing improved relations and nuclear talks between the U.S. and Russia and small advancements to address climate change.

In 1991, with the Cold War over, the clock moved back a full 17 minutes from midnight.

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