The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock face, maintained since 1947 by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago. The closer the clock is to midnight, the closer the world is estimated to be to global disaster.
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In a sign of pessimism about humanity's future, scientists today set the hands of the infamous "Doomsday Clock" forward one minute from two years ago.
"It is now five minutes to midnight," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) director Kennette Benedict announced today (Jan. 10) at a press conference in Washington, D.C.
That represents a symbolic step closer to doomsday, a change from the clock's previous mark of six minutes to midnight, set in January 2010.
The clock is a symbol of the threat of humanity's imminent destruction from nuclear or biological weapons, climate change and other human-caused disasters. In making their deliberations about how to update the clock's time, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists focused on the current state of nuclear arsenals around the globe, disastrous events such as the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, and biosecurity issues such as the creation of an airborne H5N1 flu strain.
The Doomsday Clock came into being in 1947 as a way for atomic scientists to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons. That year, the Bulletin set the time at seven minutes to midnight, with midnight symbolizing humanity's destruction. By 1949, it was at three minutes to midnight as the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated. In 1953, after the first test of the hydrogen bomb, the doomsday clock ticked to two minutes until midnight.
The Bulletin — and the clock — were at their most optimistic in 1991, when the Cold War thawed and the United States and Russia began cutting their arsenals. That year, the Bulletin set the clock at 17 minutes to midnight.
From then until 2010, however, it was a gradual creep back toward destruction, as hopes of total nuclear disarmament vanished and threats of nuclear terrorism and climate change reared their heads. In 2010, the Bulletin found some hope in arms reduction treaties and international climate talks and nudged the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock back to six minutes from midnight from its previous post at five to midnight.
With today's decision, the Bulletin repudiated that optimism. The panel considers a mix of long-term trends and immediate events in the decision-making process, said Benedict. Trends might include factors like improved solar energy technology to combat climate change, she said, while political events such as the recent United Nations climate meeting in Durban play a role as well. This year, the Fukushima nuclear disaster made a big impression.
"We're trying to weight whether that was a wake-up call, whether it will make people take a closer look at this new and very powerful technology, or whether people will go on with business as usual," Benedict told LiveScience on Monday in an interview before the announcement of the "doomsday time" decision. [Top 10 Alternative Energy Bets]
Other factors that played into the decision included the growing interest in nuclear power from countries such as Turkey, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates, Benedict said.
The Bulletin panel found that despite hopes of global agreements about nuclear weapons, nuclear power and climate change in 2010, little progress has been made.
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12 Comments
Add CommentThese guys have ZERO CREDIBILITY, throwing in the Fukushima Nuclear Power incident, which has ZIP to do with Nuclear Weapons, or Nuclear Proliferation. Obviously these guys are just plain anti-nuclear, and are mostly interested in how to stop commercial Nuclear Power from preventing Big Oil's continuing Energy Hegemony.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this3 Causes for the Doomsday Clock's to Tick Forward
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.relevant-blog.com/2012/01/3-causes-for-doomsday-clocks-to-tick.html
So how much credibility do you have posting as an armchair scientist on these boards? At least the BAS provides reasoning for their decisions, reasoning you missed entirely. They ALSO mentioned H5N1 as another one of their concerns in the same paragraph. So, what does Bird Flu have to do with nuclear power either? According to your knee-jerk reaction, you miss the point entirely and just start blabbing on about how "big oil" ruined nuclear power.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisToo bad nuclear power didn't need "big oil" to stifle the industry since it killed itself off massive cost overruns and disasterous business decisions:
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/04/06/207833/does-nuclear-power-have-a-negative-learning-curve/
So, how did "big oil" stifle the industry? Where are the investigations, the lawsuits, or even ANY details supporting these accusations?
Do you realize that many uitilities that ran nuclear power plants ALSO ran oil-fired power plants and many today ALSO still run coal-fired power plants? If there was this eevul conspiracy to keep nuclear power down, you couldn't tell from the way the electric utility industry has behaved over the last 4 decades.
Look, have you even considered that Light Water Reactors might just be too expensive to build and run properly in light of the risks associated with a meltdown? Have you thought about how adaquately preventing these "black swan" events (meltdowns) for 60+ years of operation is just too costly? You need to weigh the evidence. You need to remove any Utopian fantasies you may have about a nuclear-powered future from your decision-making process and see what the facts say.
There are perfectly valid economic reasons why nuclear power was a spectacular failure in the U.S. during the 70s and 80s. There is no need to invoke conspiracy when safety issues, construction delays, inflation and lower cost alternatives are plenty enough.
Looks like someone has been watching scary movies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut seriously, why be so morbid with so many good things happening?
Not ONE WORD about Iran.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisZero credibility, indeed.
Well, they talked about nuclear power, and since Iran is using its civilian nuclear power program as a cover for its weapons program, they mentioned it indirectly. Since the LWR fuel cycle employed my almost all commercial reactors today is inseperable from the activities necessary to produce weapons-grade nuclear material, we will ALLWAYS have this problem as long as we insist on using this 70-year old technology developed for the Manhattan Project.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrom http://www.thebulletin.org/content/media-center/announcements/2012/01/10/doomsday-clock-moves-1-minute-closer-to-midnight:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"However, failure to act on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by leaders in the United States, China, Iran, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Israel, and North Korea on a treaty to cut off production of nuclear weapons material continues to leave the world at risk from continued development of nuclear weapons."
Rather more than one word.
Sault's misguided opinion, blown apart by REAL SCIENTISTS, these are Phd's and Nuclear Engineers with impeccable credentials. Charles Till and Yoon Il Chang:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"...Organized opposition had begun, arguing environmentalism initially, and then joined by proliferation-related attacks. In the last year or two of the sixties the attacks had begun and with growing influence, by the mid-seventies the anti-nuclear groups had had their way. Their strategy focused on driving up the cost of nuclear power plant construction, so far up that the plants would be uneconomic, if possible. To do so, they attacked every issue that could be used to insert the legal system into interference with construction decisions, blocking construction progress by any means possible. In so doing they introduced very lengthy construction delays. Success in delaying nuclear construction while interest on the borrowed construction funding kept increasing and increasing eventually made their argument self-fulfilling. They had made their assertion a reality; nuclear construction was now expensive. Every possible facet of the legal system was used. Plant after plant with financing in place for billions of dollars, and interest charges running up, had construction held up month after month, year after year, by one legal challenge after another, as a rule related in some way to environmental permits. Nuclear opponents could congratulate themselves; they had destroyed an industry. Their strategy had been a brilliant success. To what purpose, though, may one ask? It stopped orderly progression of nuclear power development and implementation by the U. S., and, indeed, led to similarly destructive movements in other countries too. The world then went back to fossil energy and hundreds, more probably thousands, of new fossil fuel plants have gone into operation in the years since then..."
atomicinsights.com/2012/01/cloistered-nuclear-scientists-needed-sun-tzus-advice-know-your-enemy.html
In this article. Good grief.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTaken in isolation, the description here of Fukushima could only move the "clock" further from midnight. (Potential wake-up call or business as usual.) Moving it closer to midnight requires mentioning the deleterious effect of Fukushima on efforts to counter global warming, but it seems they consider nuclear energy as completely separate from global warming, and as a purely negative factor.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoesn't matter, it's nonsensical anyway, and their recent inclusion of all sorts of not quite as doomsday'ish factors in the "clock" only serves to highlight how it's all just an outdated metaphor in search of a raison d'être.
There seems to be several physicists on the board - they should know enough about statistical fluctuations to discard the idea of a clock hovering back and forth that close to midnight for over six decades, without the clock striking.
If Fukushima showed anything, it showed that the most catastrophic event ever to hit nuclear reactors and an six old ones at that, managed to kill no one and might not have injured anyone either. That's amazing. Commercially it's a disaster for Tokyo Power, but the nuclear threat to humans is apparently, from the facts, non existent and we can comfortably go on building nuclear reactors. The power companies had better be careful or they can lose a lot of money.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisdwdb, who first mentioned 'these guys' and 'zero credibility' was talking about the BAS, not the article here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article doesn't mention North Korea, Isarel, India, Pakistan, the UK, France, but it doesn't have to, unless its sole purpose is to pander to the likes of you who have to be spoonfed.
"Good grief" yourself.