“Because of the extraordinary danger of the current moment, the Science and Security Board today moves the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock 30 seconds closer to catastrophe. […]This is the closest the Clock has ever been to Doomsday, and as close as it was in 1953, at the height of the Cold War,” said Rachel Bronson, president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. So humanity is closer to destruction.
The clock evolution in decades
The statement explaining the resetting of the time of the Doomsday Clock mentioned also that “in 2017, world leaders failed to respond effectively to the looming threats of nuclear war and climate change, making the world security situation more dangerous than it was a year ago and as dangerous as it has been since World War II.” The possibility of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation is considered the major risk now but the climate change danger requires again attention to keep climate risks manageable. Political factor is explained: “Last year, the Clock ticked forward largely in response to candidate Trump’s alarming campaign rhetoric. But the reality of a nuclear-armed President Trump running loose in the world is worse than we feared, and that is clearly a central factor in this decision,” Derek Johnson, the executive director of Global Zero, a group that wants to eliminate nuclear weapons said. The clock has been maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947. The group was founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first nuclear weapons.
