#DOOMSDAY 3 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT UPDATE#

The Bulletin also added climate change to nuclear annihilation in 2007 as one of the greatest threats against mankind.Īs the Bulletin notes, the clock has become a cultural touchstone, used by religious cults for end-of-days prophecies, as a metaphorical background to the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film Dr. The situation has gotten steadily worse since, thank to political instability and nuclear tests by Pakistan, India and North Korea. At that point, it hit its safest point ever, 17 minutes to midnight, after the US and USSR signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), and the Soviet Union dissolved. The Doomsday Clock oscillated back and forth until 1991. In 1963, it was set back even farther to 12 minutes to midnight with the Partial Test Ban Treaty but shifted ahead five minutes when France and China acquired nuclear weapons. The clock stayed at that time until 1960, when it was moved back four minutes thanks to increased cooperation between the two nuclear powers.

#DOOMSDAY 3 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT UPDATE#

Update your settings here, then reload the page to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. That can create a blast equivalent to 57 million tons of TNT (in the case of the USSR's ' Tsar Bomba,' below) or 100 times more energy than the most powerful fission bombs. Also referred to as thermonuclear weapons, the devices fuse hydrogen atoms, often using fission bombs as a trigger.

However, the clock was moved ahead to midnight minus two minutes after both nations tested hydrogen bombs in 1953. The Hiroshima bomb, which had about 3 to 4 percent of that power, killed 100,000 people. Those early devices could 'only' release the equivalent energy of up to 500,000 tons of TNT. At that point, both the Americans and Soviets had fission bombs that split heavy radioactive elements like plutonium. The clock was first set to seven minutes before midnight but moved ahead four minutes in 1949 when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. The original Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' cover, and one from 1957 at two minutes to midnight. Physicist Alexander Langsdorf Jr.'s wife, Martyl Langsdorf, a landscape engineer, had the perfect idea: She fused the metaphor of midnight approaching with a ticking bomb, and the Doomsday Clock was born. The group created a magazine in June 1947 (pictured below), and was looking for a simple cover illustration that captured its fears about nuclear proliferation. In 1945, they founded the 'Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' to educate researchers, politicians and the public on the dangers of atomic weapons.

The scientists who developed the bombs were profoundly disturbed by the immense destruction and loss of life after their use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the first, and thankfully last, times. The Manhattan Project's 'Fat Man' and 'Little Boy' atomic bombs are frightening physical proof of Albert Einstein's famous equation E=MC^2. With Donald Trump in power, the groups says, all of those areas are more at risk. Nowadays, it takes into account not just nuclear dangers but climate change, geopolitics and other factors. Given this latest warning, it's a good time to recall the symbolic clock's history, from its 1947 creation by Manhattan Project scientists to the present. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just pushed the Doomsday Clock to two and half minutes to midnight, marking the closest point humanity has been to extinction since the first hydrogen bomb test in 1953.

Doomsday 3 minutes to midnight