The Doomsday Clock predicts that the world will come to an end at midnight.
The clock is a powerful symbol of the human potential for self-destruction first seen in 1947 on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Two years previously, the United States had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were embarking upon a nuclear arms race. The driving force behind the arms race was to become Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD locked the two superpowers into a deadly chess game in which each believed that if they had enough nuclear weapons to blow the other into oblivion, neither side would be willing, or insane enough, to drop the first bomb.
The clock, which is shown at the head of this article, is a simple graphic which shows the top left-hand quadrant of a clock face with the hour hand at midnight and the minute hand at several minutes to midnight. The original Doomsday Clock showed the hands at seven minutes to midnight, a direct visual representation of how close the world was to global nuclear war, and has been shown on the cover of every issue of the Bulletin, with the minute hand in various positions, since June, 1947. As the arms race heated up, the minute hand was moved gradually closer to midnight. In response to the development of the hydrogen bomb, the Bulletin moved the hands of the clock to two minutes to midnight in 1953, predicting that:
Only a few more swings of the pendulum, and, from Moscow to Chicago, atomic explosions will strike midnight for Western civilization.
The publishers of the Bulletin have continued to move the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock away from and towards midnight in response to global events. For example, it stood at twelve minutes to midnight in 1963 after the U.S. and U.S.S.R. signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty. It returned to seven minutes to midnight during the Vietnam War in 1968, when France and China entered the nuclear club. The furthest the hands have been from midnight was 17 minutes in 1991 at the end of the Cold War, when the Bulletin stated that:
the illusion that tens of thousands of nuclear weapons are a guarantor of national security has been stripped away.
Since 1991, the minute hand has been creeping inexorably back towards midnight. India and Pakistan entered the nuclear club in 1998, followed by North Korea in 2007, and the clock now also takes terrorism and environmental threats into account.
In 2010 the clock was reset at 6 minutes to midnight. The Bulletin expressed optimism about progress on a follow-on agreement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, planned reductions in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenal, and international cooperation concerning global warming. However, it also expressed concern about the easy availability of nuclear technology, the possibility of terrorist attacks on nuclear facilities, and new biological threats from advances in genetics and bioengineering.
The Doomsday Clock originated to make the nuclear threat a visible and concrete reality, and to jolt the conscience of the world. Following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan used the power of the atom to supply its energy needs, but ironically faced another nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in the wake of a devastating earthquake and tsunami in March, 2011. Disasters like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima Daiichi demonstrate that even the peaceful use of nuclear energy is not danger-free, while the Doomsday Clock continues to prophesy the fate of humanity like a modern day Cassandra.
