The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced on Jan. 24 that the Doomsday Clock is now set to 90 seconds to midnight—the closest it’s ever been moved to, and a sign of how dangerously close scientists think we are to initiating our own apocalypse.
. The new time beats the previous record set in 2020 when the clock was moved to 100 seconds to midnight in the wake of the pandemic, and remained there until today..
“Today, the members of the science and security board move the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely, but not exclusively, because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine,” Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin,Members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Siegfried S. Hecker, Daniel Holz, Sharon Squassoni, Mary Robinson and Elbegorj Tsakhia stand for a photo with the 2023 Doomsday Clock ahead of a live-streamed event on January 24, 2023 in Washington, DC.
The clock was initially created in 1947 by a group, dubbed the Chicago Atomic Scientists, was founded by researchers who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. Shortly after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the group began publishing the Bulletin as a newsletter. Its cover depicted the Doomsday Clock to reflect how close they felt humanity was to destruction.
“It’s not scientific,” Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and chair of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, toldin 2018. “It’s a number that’s arrived at by a group of people who are exploring each of the questions, then having a huge amount of discussion, and ultimately a convergence on a number. And that number is frankly arbitrary. It’s not a scientific quantity.”
Over the decades, the clock’s proximity to midnight—which is supposed to signify calamity for the human species—has fluctuated pretty wildly, moving as far as 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 after the Soviet Union signed an arms reduction treaty with the U.S. before the U.S.S.R. dissolved later that year; and as close as 100 seconds to midnight in 2020 during the initial onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, runaway climate change disasters, and the end of a nuclear treaty between Russia and the U.
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