“The threshold of doom is no place to linger,” wrote the Bulletin on the decision to keep the hands of the clock in the same position as a year earlier. Never before have the hands been so close to the symbolic apocalypse.
President Rachel Bronson of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists stated in unveiling the clock that the world is no safer now than it was in 2020 when the hands were moved to the current position. “If humanity wants to avoid an existential catastrophe — one that dwarfs everything it has seen so far — national leaders need to do much better to counter disinformation, heed the science and work together,” she told reporters on the 75th anniversary of the event.
Introduced in 1947, the Doomsday Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to disasters from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains over the years.