Murky truth behind Doomsday Clock - bleak origins, backlash, scary Russia claims
As the Doomsday Clock makes its latest terrifying prediction for the end of the world, what is the truth behind it and why are some calling for it to be stopped completely?
The Doomsday Clock has been ticking away and scaring the life out of us for decades now as it makes its yearly calculations for when the world will end. But do you really know what it is, who came up with the bleak idea and why there are a growing number of critics who dismiss it as nothing but a publicity stunt?
The concept was dreamt up in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which was founded two years previously by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists, who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project.
Because of the danger to humanity these catastrophic weapons posed, the clock was intended to be a symbol and warning about how close we were to ending the world through our own dangerous nuclear technologies.
The Manhattan Project was a secret government mission and most of the people involved weren’t aware what they were building, although the scientists were said to be dubious from the start. Their warnings about the bombs getting into the wrong hands and to only be used as a demonstration weren’t heeded and in 1945 the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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In its early years the clock was purely based on the danger that nuclear weapons posed to humanity and was intended to act as a warning and a call to action for the public and policymakers. But as threats to our existence expanded, other factors were introduced.
In 2007, the bulletin began considering climate change catastrophes and now factors in more recent developments such as artificial intelligence when it decides how close to midnight the hands are.
The furthest from midnight it has been set was in 1991 when it was 17 minutes away. This was after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of an arms reduction treaty. Last year it was moved forward 10 seconds and reached two minutes to midnight - the closest it’s been to the end of the world - following the Russian-Ukraine war and the nuclear weapon threat in China and North Korea.
Computer generated image of a nuclear blast (@historyinmemes/Twitter)While this time of “unprecedented danger” will give many nightmares, there are those who say the clock has had its day and the hands should be stopped completely because it is nothing but a PR stunt and based on guesswork, not scientific evidence.
Some point to inconsistencies in how it is calculated and how it has changed over the years to include other issues the world is facing. Why some events move it closer than others is never properly revealed and they say changing methods during studies means the results don’t make sense.
Stuart Ritchie, Science writer for inews, emphasises this point and believes time is up for the clock: "The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists can’t have it both ways: they’re either scientists, and work to keep their measures consistent and interpretable, or they’re activists, willing to say outrageous things to grab publicity for a cause," he says.
"Lumping together very different kinds of risks into one highly subjective, inconsistent measure and press-releasing it to the world isn’t very useful, or very scientific. It’s time to stop the clock."
American columnist and editor-in-chief at The Dispatch, Jonah Goldberg, agrees that there's nothing truly scientific about the clock and it’s based mainly on opinion. He says they can’t predict when or even if Vladimir Putin will use an atomic bomb or how the world will react.
"There’s nothing particularly "scientific" about the clock. There’s no complicated risk-assessment algorithm or anything resembling the scientific method involved. It’s just a bunch of experts expressing an opinion and boiling it down to a dopey clock intended to scare the bejeebus out of people," he says.
He says the fact they hold a press conference every year that attracts massive media attention and hundreds of headlines just makes the people behind it the masters of spin and the Doomsday Clock the most successful PR event since the radio.
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Jonah also believes its success at PR could be dangerous and highlights how they actually gave Putin a positive publicity push when they moved the clock's hands because of war with Ukraine.
"Russiawants everyone to be terrified of nuclear war, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists gave them a huge PR coup by lending "scientific" credibility to their threats," he writes.
What do you think of the Doomsday clock? Let us know in the comments below.
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