Doomsday Clock: Does nuclear threat outweigh climate catastrophe?
The Doomsday Clock tells us we are now one minute further away from looming eco catastrophe. This comes as a surprise
Leo Hickman | guardian.co.uk | 14 January 2010
Scientists today moved the Doomsday Clock to six minutes to midnight. Photograph: PR
How much time have we got left before catastrophe strikes? It's a question often asked by those environmentalists who fear that humanity is on a slippery, somewhat inevitable, slope to self-destruction.
Today we have an answer. Well, metaphorically at least. Ever since 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Energy, a monthly periodical that originated at the University of Illinois, has sporadically updated its "Doomsday Clock". It explains the clock's purpose thus:
The Doomsday Clock conveys how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction – the figurative midnight – and monitors the means humankind could use to obliterate itself. First and foremost, these include nuclear weapons, but they also encompass climate-changing technologies and new developments in the life sciences that could inflict irrevocable harm.
At 3pm today, the clock was adjusted for the first time since 2007. Duringa live online feed from the New York Academy of Sciences, the clock moved from five minutes to midnight to six minutes to midnight. The furthest away the clock has ever been from midnight was in 1991 following the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty by the US and the Soviet Union, when it was moved to 17 minutes to midnight. And the closest it has ever been was in 1953 when it showed two minutes to midnight following the news that the US and the Soviet Union had tested thermonuclear devices within nine months of each other.
This is how the Bulletin of Atomic Energy justified the adjustment:
It is 6 minutes to midnight. We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons. For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are co-operating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material. And for the first time ever, industrialised and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable. These unprecedented steps are signs of a growing political will to tackle the two gravest threats to civilisation – the terror of nuclear weapons and runaway climate change."
The history of the Doomsday Clock and the drama it produces every time it is changed means that it attracts global attention. But just how useful is it as an aid to raising awareness about the melange of issues it aims to warn us about? Personally, I think it does a good job, even if we do now live in an age where some people seem to be growing ever more weary of the warnings about looming eco catastrophes. There's a very fine line between being seen to cry wolf and to issuing a heartfelt warning in a reasoned, yet urgent voice.
It is possibly a surprise, though, to see the clock being moved back by a minute as opposed to forward. I would have thought that the mood post-Copenhagen was more despondent than it was before it began. The Bulletin of Atomic Energy evidently sees the international moves to disarm us of nuclear weapons as outweighing any need to suffer the Copenhagen blues.
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