Doomsday Clock:
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the world has ever been to global catastrophe in its estimation.
- It is a symbolic clock adopted by atomic scientists to show how close human beings are considered to be to a global catastrophe, with midnight standing for annihilation, or “doomsday.”
- Metaphorically, the clock’s minute hand moves closer to or farther from midnight, depending on the level of threat thought to be posed by nuclear weapons, climate change, or disruptive technologies.
- The clock was created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS), which was founded two years earlier.
- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) is a nonprofit organization that sought to warn the public about the danger of nuclear weapons.
- The Bulletin was founded by a group called the Atomic Scientists of Chicago in September 1945 at the University of Chicago.
- Its founding members and sponsors were scientists who had contributed to the development of the first atomic bombs as part of the Manhattan Project, including physicists Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Eugene Rabinowitch.
- Concerned about the devastating consequences of this new technology, the group published their first newsletter, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in December 1945.
