by Antonio Carioti
A “scientific bulletin” from 1947. Today we would be only 90 seconds away from the apocalypse (midnight) due to the Ukraine conflict. Now global warming is affecting us too
A nuclear war or at least a world catastrophe for all of mankind has never been as close as it is now. At least that is the assessment just formulated by the editors of the “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists”, who use the so-called apocalypse clock to symbolically measure how close the earth is to an irreparable catastrophe every year. Midnight on the dial of this chronometer corresponds to the nuclear holocaust: the closer the minute hand gets to it, the greater the danger. The estimate communicated on January 24th says we are only 90 seconds away from the apocalypse. Of particular concern is the war provoked by Moscow’s aggression against Kyiv, so much so that the press release announcing it was published for the first time in English, Russian and Ukrainian.
The doomsday clock dates from 1947, at the beginning of the Cold War. At that time, the “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” was converted into a magazine, the cover of which shows exactly the condition of the fateful watch. It was designed by an artist, Martyl Langsdorf (wife of physicist Alexander Langsdorf Jr.), at the request of the journal’s co-founder Hyman Goldsmith. The hand position is updated annually by the magazine’s Science and Safety Committee, usually in the second half of January. Since 2007, not only the risk of a nuclear conflict has been considered, but also the threat of climate change. In the same year, the watch was redesigned by Michael Bierut. The clock was originally set for 11:53 p.m., seven minutes before the disaster. And it began to approach midnight with the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949. It came all but two minutes before the 1953 apocalypse with the development of the hydrogen bomb. In the 1960s, the first nuclear arms limitation treaties marked a split, albeit with ups and downs. It returned just three minutes after the fatal hour of 1984 when the Kremlin decided to boycott the Los Angeles Olympics and US President Ronald Reagan branded the Soviet Union “the evil empire.” The maximum distance from nuclear collision was recorded with the breakup of the USSR and the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s: 17 minutes.
Since then, however, the situation between nuclear proliferation and global warming has progressively worsened, breaking all negative records. In 2018, it returned to two minutes to midnight, which corresponded to the moment of greatest tension in the US-USSR confrontation. In 2020, the Apocalypse Clock set a first record at a hundred seconds. And the war in Ukraine, according to nuclear scientists, brought us to the abyss in a minute and a half.
January 24, 2023 (change January 24, 2023 | 22:42)
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