As for the price to pay? Well, there are two. Robert Rosner calls the Doomsday Clock ‘the canary in the coal mine’, and while said canary is coughing up its toenails, it’s still not dead. The Doomsday Clock wasn’t invented as a metaphorical countdown to our eradication but, as the Bulletins’ Scientists have always attested, as a means to spur humanity into doing something about the state of affairs that has put us in such a perilous position. But now there are additional factors, with the most prominent being climate change, though determining that exact 'midnight' moment isn’t as simple as someone pressing the ‘do not press’ button. So, what does happen if the clock strikes midnight? The 1947 answer was easy, extinction via nuclear destruction. Read more about: Modern History A brief history of NATO In 2020, the minutes were gone and we were into seconds, 100 of them to be precise, but a further ten seconds have come off the Doomsday Clock since, and, as of 24th January 2023, we’re left with just a mere 90 seconds. By 2002 a full ten minutes had been wiped off the clock and in 2018 it was, once again, down to two minutes. In essence, since 1991’s seventeen minutes, time has been running out. If this all sounds rather depressing, it’s because it is. And all the while there remains the ongoing nuclear threat, these days bolstered by non-NATO countries such as China, North Korea, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and India. Other elements, breaches in biosecurity, Covid-19 for example, or the advancement of technologies that pose a risk to humanity are taken into consideration as well. In 2007, the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board - a collective of experts in science, technology and risk assessment, plus Nobel laureates, scholars and policy analysts - began to include more general risks to humanity outside of simple nuclear warfare, such as climate change, extreme weather events or ‘cyber-enabled disinformation’ that could lead to the ‘breakdown of global norms and institutions'. This was, however, a short-lived respite. But, in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the clock went back to seventeen minutes to midnight, the furthest back in its history. These have the potential to be 1,000 times more powerful than the more conventional atomic bombs. For example, in 1953, the clock reached two minutes to midnight when both counties began experimenting with thermonuclear weapons, aka Hydrogen or H-Bombs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the time on the clock changes in line with the activity of the two main nuclear-warhead-rich countries as cited above. Read more about: Modern History Able Archer 83: the NATO war game that almost led to nuclear conflict
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