“Doomsday Clock” Moves Two Minutes Closer. Since 1947, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has graphically gauged the world’s proximity to nuclear devastation with its famous clock, which edged as close as 3 minutes to midnight during the era of US and Soviet arms development and testing; and as far away as 15 minutes to the hour, after the nuclear test ban treaty. Now the clock edges two minutes closer to doomsday. “Reflecting global failures to solve the problems posed by nuclear weapons and the climate crisis, the decision by the BAS Board of Directors was made in consultation with the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates.”

Interesting broadening of their considerations to include the dangers posed by climate change, another global catastrophe paralleling the effects of a thermonuclear exchange, but not as far afield as it might seem, given that the devastating changes of ‘nuclear winter’ would envelop the earth after a nuclear war. Here’s a timeline of the advances and retreats of the minute hand over the past 60 years of the nuclear era.

Interestingly, the propagandistic Voice of America covers the BAS announcement. I suppose it is because the BAS decision focuses heavily on the nuclear threats posed by those the U.S. so needs to demonize, Iran and North Korea as well as the extant Soviet arsenal, thus allowing obliviousness to the fact that the US has always represented the preeminent nuclear threat to the world.