The Doomsday Clock Moves 90 Seconds to Midnight

VIVA – The doomsday clock has moved to its closest point to midnight, breaking records compared to the previous years. As the clock gets closer to midnight, experts from the Science and Security Board (SSB) believe that the world is coming to an end.

SSB has moved the Doomsday Clock hand 90 seconds closer to midnight. The Russia-Ukraine war and worsening climate disasters have alarmed scientists, who make annual predictions faster and faster by moving the clock hands every January.

The clock was created back in 1947 to warn humanity of the dangers of nuclear weapons. Still used today, scientists encompass all kinds of threats they believe are posing a risk to human existence. The panel is made up of experts in the fields of nuclear risk, climate change, disruptive technologies, and bioterrorism.

The SSB meets twice a year to discuss current threats and whether a clock reset is necessary. On January 23, 2020, scientists decided to move the clocks back 100 seconds to midnight amid two concurrent existential dangers of nuclear war and climate change.

Russia's illegal war in Ukraine has led President Vladimir Putin to make dire nuclear threats. According to the International Campaign to Abolish nuclear weapons (ICAN), this year's Doomsday Clock announcement is an indication that urgent action must be taken to avoid a nuclear holocaust.

It calls on the world's nuclear powers to begin eliminating their arsenals. It comes months before G7 leaders are scheduled to meet in the city of Hiroshima in May 2023.

Chosen deliberately by Japanese Prime Minister Kishida, this was the first city to experience a nuclear attack to put international peace and security at the center of its agenda.

The group has laid out a roadmap to push the globe on a path to being free from nuclear weapons. It started with the Treaty on the Prohibition of nuclear weapons two years ago, which 92 countries signed and 68 ratified, in a huge show of force against the existence of these lethal bombs.

The group says that the next step is setting up a round table conversation among the world’s nuclear powers in which they will discuss how they can disarm.

Following the end of the Cuban missile crisis and the close shaves back in the early 1980s amid the US Cold War with the Soviet Union, there was significant action to stop proliferation and reductions in nuclear arsenals. Now, the ICAN is urging world leaders to finish the job.

ICAN’s Executive Director, Beatrice Fihn says it’s high time to act: “We have had enough of the Doomsday Clock warnings being followed by inaction. The leaders of the nuclear-armed states must urgently negotiate nuclear disarmament, and the G7 meeting in Hiroshima in May 2023 is the perfect place to outline such a plan.

"The leaders of the G7 countries must now step up and seize the moment of their meeting in the first city to have been devastated by an atomic bomb at the huge human cost to tell us how they will work with Russia, China, and other nuclear-armed states to end this grave threat to humanity.” Beatrice Fihn explained.