75 years on, the doomsday clock keeps ticking

in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic satire Dr. Strangelove, it only takes one wrong general in command of a nuclear bomber, combined with the “mutually assured destruction” policy of the US and the Soviet Union, to trigger a global catastrophe. This darkly hilarious film deals with the risks that still exist today, including the possibility of an automatic launch system, or the possibility that a person could access nuclear code that could lead to a deadly mushroom cloud.

For 75 years, Doomsday Clock There has been a constant focus on human existential risks.Developed by researchers and policy experts Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, he also started a magazine of the same name, and the clock started running in 1947, just two years after the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan. It’s not literally a clock. It is a graphic image of a person, a powerful symbol for science overseers and activists. It also had an impact on popular culture.Musicians from Sting to Smashing Pumpkins to Iron Maiden have quoted it, from warder comic book Doctor Who on television. Its original purpose was to highlight the dangers of nuclear war, but it has since expanded to include other major man-made crises that threaten civilization. Originally set at seven minutes to “midnight,” it is now dangerously set at just 100 seconds to midnight, the closest thing to the end of humanity. On Thursday, when Announcement members celebrate the clock’s 75th anniversary, they will update the time again, when it may be slightly closer or farther away from the end of the world.

“The Doomsday Clock has been called the most iconic graphic art piece of the 20th century, and I think it’s proving just as powerful in the 21st. It embodies the power of art and science combined,” said President and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Officer Rachel Bronson said.To mark the anniversary, Bronson and her colleagues also compiled a Spotify playlist, made a doomsday theme Drinking Guidelines, and will publish a book Robert Elder on the design of the clock this spring.

Chicago-based artist Martyl Langsdorf designed the clock after World War II with her husband, Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorff, and other researchers who helped obtain the fledgling. announcement off the ground. Doomsday clock experts have an enviable job of identifying and weighing potential apocalypse and our progress as a society — or lack thereof — in avoiding them.They started the clock, and nuclear conflict was on everyone’s mind after the disasters in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where bombs killed as many as 210,000 Many more have been injured and sickened by cancer-causing radiation. Over the decades, the minute hand of the clock ticked back and forth as the more destructive hydrogen bomb developed, cases of nuclear misreporting, and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis (perhaps the most dangerous standoff in history) unfolded.

The arms race between the United States and the former Soviet Union resulted in the accumulation of the most dangerous weapons of war in these countries, peaking at around 60,000 in the 1980s.Today, there is “only” about 9,000 nuclear weapons left worldwide, but that’s still enough to exterminate humans multiple times.

“The nuclear threat has not disappeared in any form,” said the magazine’s editor-in-chief, John Meckling. announcement“The use of any large number of nuclear weapons would alter civilization in horrific ways. Whether through accident, miscalculation, or terrorist use, the probability of a nuclear explosion is high enough that our Board of Directors considers it very concerning.”