Every year, in late January, a small group of beetle-browed scientists, politicians, and journalists gather at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, to ponder the end of the world. This is a day of solemn kitsch: the unveiling of the Doomsday Clock, the minimalist midcentury dataviz that, since 1947, has been adjusted to dramatize the imminence of global catastrophe. But that’s too many syllables. Let’s use the shorthand: doom. And it’s close at hand. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the nonprofit group that maintains the clock, used to set the hands based entirely on the probability of nuclear hellfire. Then in 2007 they added climate change to their calculus and, in 2017, cyberwar. The clock’s setting is largely impressionistic. To rough out a relative idea of how safe or imperiled the world is, a committee meets twice a year to weigh signs of peace and climate amelioration—treaties, accords, regulations—against the rumblings of war and environmental disaster.

On January 24, before a hushed assembly, Jerry Brown, the freewheeling former governor of California, and William Perry, the stern former defense secretary, drew back a heavy black curtain to reveal the iconic clock graphic, now set for 2019—at two minutes to midnight. It was like seeing an MRI with bad news. Humankind has been this near to the apocalypse only twice before. The first was in 1953, shortly after the US and Soviet Union started testing hydrogen bombs, and the second was last year, when President Donald Trump was wrapping up his first year of reckless climate denialism and fire-and-fury saber rattling.

The Bulletin’s president and CEO is Rachel Bronson, former director of ­Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, author of Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia, and onetime cochair of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Producers’ Guild. The clock’s current setting, she said, reflects the ongoing threats posed by escalating arms races and rising temperatures. Widespread information warfare is amplifying these dangers. The mood in the room was funereal.

That’s the Doomsday Clock for you. It’ll break your heart. The stark, numberless face shows only the northwest quadrant of an analog clock; the end, by design, is always nigh. But even as I knew the clock had no morning and no afternoon, only dark night, I found it hard to stay clinical about the end. Sorrow almost knocked me out. A rising headache. “Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats … the future of civilization in extraordinary danger … frightening reality … too volatile and dangerous … catastrophe of historic proportions.” The panelists’ words ran together.

To get some focus, I asked Bronson during a break about the graphic, which designer Michael Bierut, who refreshed the image in 2007, calls “the most powerful piece of information design of the 20th century.” She told me about Martyl Langsdorf, a painter once known as a social realist prodigy—a Diego Rivera of the American plains. (Langsdorf’s yellow-gold 1940 mural Wheat Workers shows traditional Kansan harvesters baling hay while ominous smoke from new machines chokes the horizon.) Langsdorf’s husband, Alexander Langsdorf, had worked on the Manhattan Project before warning Truman against dropping A-bombs on Japan. At the Bulletin’s invitation, Martyl devised the icon for the cover of its first publication, setting her clock at seven minutes to midnight because it “looked good to my eye.”

However arbitrary its setting, the clock casts a spell. As I stared at it, the black hands and minute marks came to conjure lakes of fire, ice caps disintegrating like the Twin Towers, five-headed beasts from Revelation or maybe from Chernobyl. But then, as if by a trick of light, the image became brutal and institutional, something you might find in a hospital waiting room, ticking away the time until the grief to end all griefs.