Doomsday Clock Moved One Minute Back

Humanity gets a reprieve. The symbolic Doomsday Clock was moved back by one minute morning of Thursday, January 14. It now stands at 11:54.

The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock face, maintained since 1947 by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago. Its is an analogy of the human species being at a time that is “minutes to midnight”, wherein midnight represents “catastrophic destruction”. The number of minutes before midnight measures the degree of nuclear, environmental, and technological threats to mankind.

The sliding back was announced from the New York Academy of Sciences after agreeing that “for the first time since 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material. And for the first time ever, industrialized and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable.”

The clock has moved 19 times during its 63 year history. It came closest to midnight when it ticked at 11:58 in 1953 during the testing of the hydrogen bomb. The world felt safest in 1991 when it was 11:43 when the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. In both cases, the countries responsible for the time setting were Soviet Union and the United States.



