For 60 years, the "Doomsday Clock" has measured mankind's proximity to its own annihilation. The closest it ever came was two minutes to doomsday -- registered in 1953 at the beginning of the thermonuclear age. At the end of the Cold War, the timekeepers moved the minute hand back in recognition of the diminished threat as the superpower confrontation ended. Earlier this year, the minute hand was brought forward again by two minutes and we are now just five minutes from midnight.
The change was triggered by two sets of developments. The first was acknowledgment that the world is "at the brink of a second nuclear age." The North Korean nuclear test, Iran's nuclear ambitions, the U.S. emphasis on the military utility of such weapons, the failure to secure nuclear materials and the continued presence of tens of thousands of weapons "are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth."
The timekeepers highlighted a second set of problems: "The dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons." That view was hammered home last week with the release of a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which warned that human activity was "very likely" the cause of global warning and the trends will continue for centuries. As one scientist explained, "we are creating a different planet."