Doomsday clock: minutes to midnight, 1945 - 2015.Wikicommons/Fastfission. Some rights reserved.At the very point of origin of the cold war, June 1947, a group of scientists wanted to highlight the extreme danger posed by rapid nuclear development for military purposes. That month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded at the University of Chicago, published on its frontpage the image of what it called a Doomsday Clock. The clock showed the time at seven minutes to midnight. In later decades, at various critical junctures in United States-Soviet Union relations, the clock hand was moved closer to the fateful hour. It was a clear signal that a major confrontation between the two superpowers was becoming more likely.
By contrast, the end of the cold war and the expectation of a "peace dividend" helped to move the clock hand back, as far as seventeen minutes to midnight. Yet since 1995 the time has once more crept forward, gradually approaching the dreaded hour. Over the next two decades, several factors - huge nuclear arsenals, accelerated environmental degradation, new technological advances - have generated an increasingly turbulent international situation. In January 2015, the clock was positioned at three minutes to midnight because, in the words of the Bulletin, “international leaders are failing to perform their most important duty - ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization.”
Nine states possess some 10,215 nuclear warheads with a destructive power equivalent to a million times those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the last five years there has been a growing number of incidents (theft, loss, accidents) involving sensitive nuclear material. In addition, the average global temperature, the sea level, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are all on the rise. To this list can be added other disturbing phenomena such as the spread of massive spying and of cyberattacks between nations, together with worrisome technological transformations derived from robotics and its application in the field of lethal weapons.
