The abuse of information technology has promoted “a loss of trust in political institutions, media, science and facts”, said Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University in Tempe. “If world leaders respect science and make rational choices, there’s room for hope,” Kartha said.Ĭyber risks are another challenge for an increasingly tech-savvy world. Last year’s record-high temperatures across the globe, the devastating wildfires in the United States - probably exacerbated by drought - and the thinning of the ice caps all indicate humanity’s failure to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, said Sivan Kartha, a climate researcher at the Stockholm Environmental Institute.īut despite the US government’s withdrawal from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the Bulletin’s board was pleased to see other countries reaffirm their commitment to addressing climate change. And although US President Donald Trump opposed the Iran nuclear deal - which his predecessor and US allies had negotiated to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons - he “did not offer a single viable alternative”, she said.Ĭlimate change, too, is contributing to the planet’s progression towards catastrophe.
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Moreover, the United States and Russia aren’t discussing how to deal with their stockpiles of nuclear weapons, said Sharon Squassoni, a security-policy researcher at the George Washington University in Washington DC.
And “provocative” statements by US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un have made the nuclear risk “greater than necessary”, said Robert Rosner, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago in Illinois and chair of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board. North Korea accelerated its nuclear- and ballistic-missile tests last year, in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions. The clock’s reset also stems from concerns that weapons of mass destruction might be used “intentionally or because of miscalculation”, according to the Bulletin’s board of directors, which includes 15 Nobel laureates.
It cited tensions in the South China Sea over US naval operations, the strained relationship between Pakistan and India, US–Russian military entanglements, and recklessness in nuclear rhetoric from certain world leaders. The security situation of our planet is “as dangerous as it has been since World War II”, the Bulletin said in a statement. This year’s decision to push the clock’s hands closer to midnight stems from growing nuclear threats and unchecked climate dangers, said Rachel Bronson, president and chief executive of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, at a press conference in Washington DC on 25 January.
Back then, the Bulletin adjusted the clock after the Soviet Union and the United States tested their nuclear weapons within nine months of each other. The only other time the clock - a symbolic measure of humanity's risk of self-destruction - came so close to the apocalypse was at the height of the Cold War, in 1953.
That’s according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has advanced its Doomsday Clock to two minutes until midnight. The end of the world is as close as it’s ever been.
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