Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced that the Doomsday Clock has been updated to 90 seconds to midnight in 2023. Midnight represents the “doomsday,” so the closer the clock gets to the fateful hour, the closer we come to our disaster.
90 seconds is closer to midnight than ever before. For the past three years, the clock has displayed 100 seconds to midnight, the closest time to apocalypse since its creation in the late 1940s. Still, this year’s announcement didn’t come as much of a surprise.
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists president and CEO Dr. “We believe humans have the ability to mitigate these threats as well as create them,” says Rachel Bronson.
The announcement was also made in Ukrainian and Russian for the first time, considering Russia’s war against Ukraine.
How is the doomsday clock set?
The watch was introduced in 1947 as a warning symbol of humanity’s ability to self-destruct. There, at the beginning of the Atomic Age, attention was drawn to the fact that an atomic war between the USA and the USSR could destroy us. Studies showed that even a small-scale atomic war could kill tens of millions of people in a matter of hours, followed by five billion deaths from the subsequent famine. Originally the clock was seven minutes to midnight.
Each year, members of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set out to answer two questions: Is humanity safer than last year, and is humanity safer from human-made threats than it has been in the past 76 years? And the answers to both of these questions determined the position of 2023.
The doomsday clock’s furthest point from midnight to date was 17 minutes, which came after tensions eased between the former Soviet Union and the United States in 1991. Crucial for this was the reunification of Germany and the signing of the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
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