The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a U.S. NGO, has just re-set its ‘Doomsday Clock’ from two minutes before midnight to 100 seconds to midnight.
Read about the Doomsday Clock and the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction
In 1953, when first the United States and then the Soviet Union began
testing thermonuclear weapons, the Science and Security Board created the ‘Doomsday Clock’ as a measure of existential risk and set it at two minutes to midnight.
Since then the Board has judged the threat to human survival from nuclear weapons to have fallen, then risen and then fallen again – only to have risen once more in recent years and to be now closer to midnight than ever before.