The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced the symbolic Doomsday
Clock a notch closer to the end of humanity Thursday, moving it ahead by
30 seconds after what the organization called a “grim assessment” of
the state of geopolitical affairs.
“As of today,” Bulletin
president Rachel Bronson told reporters, “it is two minutes to midnight”
— as close as the world has ever been to the hour of apocalypse.
In
moving the clock forward, the group cited “the failure
of President Trump and other world leaders to deal with looming threats
of nuclear war and climate change.”
The organization — which has
15 Nobel Laureates on its board — now believes “the world is not only
more dangerous now than it was a year ago; it is as threatening as it
has been since World War II,” Bulletin officials Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert Rosner wrote in an op-ed
published Thursday by The Washington Post. “In fact, the Doomsday Clock
is as close to midnight today as it was in 1953, when Cold War fears
perhaps reached their highest levels.”
The
last time the clock advanced so far, the United States had just tested
its first thermonuclear device, and the Soviet Union had tested a
hydrogen bomb.
Today, Bronson said, “to call the world’s nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger and its immediacy.”
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