‘Doomsday Clock’ Moves Closer to Midnight
29th January 2025
Atomic scientists on Tuesday moved their “Doomsday Clock” closer to midnight than ever before, citing Russian nuclear threats amid its invasion of Ukraine, tensions in other world hot spots, military applications of artificial intelligence and climate change as factors underlying the risks of global catastrophe
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the clock to 89 seconds before midnight – the theoretical point of annihilation. That is one second closer than it was set last year. The Chicago-based nonprofit created the clock in 1947 during the Cold War tensions that followed World War Two to warn the public about how close humankind was to destroying the world.
“The factors shaping this year’s decision – nuclear risk, climate change, the potential misuse of advances in biological science and a variety of other emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence – were not new in 2024. But we have seen insufficient progress in addressing the key challenges, and in many cases this is leading to increasingly negative and worrisome effects,” said Daniel Holz, chair of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board.
“Setting the Doomsday Clock at 89 seconds to midnight is a warning to all world leaders,” Holz added.
If you aren’t familiar with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, then you are fortunate. They are a relic of the ‘peace at any price’ movement that originated after the Soviets got The Bomb and are in turn an outgrowth (one might almost say, an excrescence) of the proglodyte attitude that if we are facing an existential enemy, it’s our responsibility to avoid that situation even if it means surrendering to that existential enemy.
dNeedless to say, this ‘Doomsday Clock’ has absolutely no scientific validity whatsoever; it’s just academics attempting to leverage the respect that everyone has for science to push a pacifist political agenda. The threat of ‘annihilation’ is less now than it has ever been in my lifetime, and that is obvious to anybody with two brain cells to rub together.