![]() ![]() After all, if this is about burning fossil fuels, they are about 50 years late to the table. They mention technologies affecting climate change – yet don’t address what exactly that means. Without scientific background, they speak from personal opinion – hardly the solid technical foundation needed to warrant suggesting a further move toward doomsday. Remember, these are nuclear scientists, trained in fusion and fission – what possible training or by what scientific authority can they discuss turbulent weather patterns? Yet, the Looney Left once again has hijacked yet another prestigious scientific body to propagate the Climate Change Gospel. The justification for moving the clock forward, based on the current state of world in weapons of mass destruction is sound enough. The current negotiations with Iran highlight just how precarious the world can be with these weapons in the wrong hands. They intended it to be “ a reminder of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet.” Initially based on the scientists’ concerns about the escalation of nuclear weapons, the Doomsday Clock also now reflects how various technologies could affect climate change or cause other “man-made disasters”. In 1991, with the end of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the first treaty to provide for deep cuts to the two countries’ strategic nuclear weapons arsenals, prompting the Bulletin to set the clock hand to its farthest point – 17 minutes to midnight. Since then, the minute hand has moved 21 times, taking us within 2 minutes of annihilation in 1953, after the United States and the Soviet Union each tested their first thermonuclear weapons within six months of one another. The Doomsday Clock was first set at 7 minutes to midnight simply because it looked good in the initial drawing of it. The introduction of the Doomsday Clock to the world, June 1947 The Clock has now become a universally-recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons and new technologies emerging in other domains. Since 1973, the decision to move forward or backward (or to leave in place) the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock is made every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 17 Nobel laureates. With the recent agreement reached on July 13 between Iran and the major world powers re: their involvement in development of nuclear weapons, one wonders whether or not we have actually moved farther away or closer to the end of all things.įounded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later in June 1947, with “midnight” being symbolic of nuclear apocalypse, and the imagery of mankind “counting down” to zero (as if launching a missile) was to give an easily-understood snapshot of the threats to humanity and the planet at any given time. “The clock ticks now at just three minutes to midnight because international leaders are failing to perform their most important duty-ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization Meanwhile, the United States and Russia have embarked on massive programs to modernize their nuclear triads-thereby undermining existing nuclear weapons treaties. These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth.” Despite some modestly positive developments in the climate change arena, current efforts are entirely insufficient to prevent a catastrophic warming of Earth. “Unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity, and world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. On January 22, 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that they were moving the minute hand of the 68-year old Doomsday Clock from 5 minutes to midnight, up to 3 minutes to midnight, stating as their reasoning: ![]()
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