– NEWS ADVISORY – The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will host a live worldwide news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.at 1:30 p.m. EST/10:30 a.m. PST/1830 GMT on January 26, 2016 to announce whether the minute hand of the historic “Doomsday Clock” will be adjusted.
Advertisement
Positive developments in 2015 center on the worldwide accord that limited Iran’s nuclear program, and the agreement among nearly 200 countries in Paris on a process to reduce output of climate-changing carbon dioxide, the Bulletin said in a statement.
The clock counts forward to midnight, or oblivion.
When the clock started running, it was set at seven minutes to midnight.
Please allow a moment for the liveblog to load.
Just how the minute hand moves is determined by the Bulletin’s boards of directors and sponsors, which include environmental scientists, physicists and 18 Nobel Laureates, its site notes.
According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the danger posed by climate change, the recent North Korean nuclear test, and tensions between the United States and Russian Federation, which remain “at levels reminiscent of the Cold War”, will be the main factors influencing the decision to adjust the Doomsday Clock or not.
Scientists behind a “Doomsday Clock” that measures the likelihood of a global cataclysm say the world is still under grave threat. The clock reflects how vulnerable the world is to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change and new technologies, with midnight symbolizing apocalypse. They created the clock two years later, and update its minute hand each year.
How close, far have we been to midnight? The reasoning for its move there past year: rampant climate change and an ongoing threat of nuclear weapons.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who helped to develop the first atomic weapons.
1981 – The clock moves to four minutes-to-midnight after the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan and U.S. President Jimmy Carter pulls the U.S. from the Olympics in Moscow.
Perry raised concerns about rhetoric from Russian Federation about the use of nuclear weapons and said the threat of nuclear disaster was greater today than during the Cold War.
Advertisement
It’s 3 minutes to midnight (1984): The United States and Soviet Union had drifted miles apart by then. So while climate change remains by and large unchecked, there is an argument to be made that the type of political leadership needed to avert catastrophe-which many scientists consider to be limiting warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius-has started to show through. Two years later, following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the BAS designed the Doomsday Clock to alert the public to the dangers of nuclear proliferation.
