The Doomsday Clock is still two minutes to midnight
The Doomsday Clock will stay at two minutes to midnight, the same time as it was last year and the closest it’s been to the hour standing in for the apocalypse. A nuclear arms race, climate change, and the rampant and willful denial of the direness of these circumstances continue to threaten our existence. But a panel of experts doesn’t think the threat has changed enough since last year to merit shifting the minute hand closer to humanity’s doom.
The clock is a gimmick, a symbolic threat assessment made by a panel of experts at the nonprofit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. According to them, the clock is designed to warn people “how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making,” with midnight standing in for the point of no return. Last year, North Korea’s advancing nuclear arsenal, Donald Trump’s erratic behavior, and tensions with other nuclear powers advanced the minute hand by 30 seconds. It’s the same time the clock reached in 1953 when the US and the Soviet Union had tested thermonuclear bombs, the most powerful weapons humankind had created.
This year, the panel cited the start of a new nuclear arms race and a failure to address the ongoing threat of climate change when it elected to keep the minute hand steady at two minutes to midnight. “The fact that the Doomsday Clock hands did not change is bad news indeed,” Robert Rosner, chair of the Bulletin science and security board and a professor at the University of Chicago, said in the press briefing. The existential threats of nuclear war and climate change are becoming normalized, he said, and widespread lies and propaganda are making it harder than ever to fight them.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/24/18195866/doomsday-clock-two-minutes-midnight-apocalypse-nuclear-race