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The Clock was originally the work of Martyl Langsdorf, an abstract landscape artist whose husband Alexander had been a physicist with the Manhattan Project. It’s one that has been with us for so long that it has receded into the background of our nightmares: nuclear war - and the threat is arguably greater at this moment than it has been since the end of the Cold War. But the Clock still works for the biggest existential threat facing the world right now, the one that the Doomsday Clock was invented to illustrate 75 years ago. The sheer number of factors that now go into Bulletin’s annual decision can obscure the bracing clarity that the Doomsday Clock was meant to evoke. New technologies like artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, even advanced cyberhacking present harder-to-gauge but still very real dangers. Even with increasing efforts to reduce carbon emissions, climate change is worsening year after year. Covid-19 has amply demonstrated just how unprepared the world was to handle a major new infectious virus, and both increasing global interconnectedness and the spread of new biological engineering tools mean that the threat from both natural and human-made pathogens will only grow.

“The Doomsday Clock continues to hover dangerously, reminding us how much work is needed to ensure a safer and healthier planet.”Īs for why the world is supposedly lingering on the edge of Armageddon, take your pick. “The world is no safer than it was last year at this time,” said Rachel Bronson, the president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. That matches the setting in 20, making all three years the closest the Clock has been to midnight in its 75-year history. That’s the latest setting of the Doomsday Clock, unveiled yesterday morning by the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.