![]() ![]() For the clock’s first 40 years or so, it concentrated entirely on the nuclear threat: two minutes to midnight in 1953, after the US and USSR had exploded thermonuclear weapons 12 minutes in 1972, after the superpowers had signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty back to three minutes in 1984 as Ronald Reagan intensified the arms race and finally a full 17 minutes in 1991, when the USSR was disbanded and the Cold War ended. That danger is certainly more complex now than it has ever been before. The twin elements of a launch countdown and an apocalypse informed Langsdorf’s design of a clock nearing midnight and that iconography – simple, powerful and transcending language – has burned a hole in the public consciousness ever since. Robert Oppenheimer as the first chairman who had, upon seeing the first successful nuclear test, quoted a line from the from Hindu sacred text the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Albert Einstein himself established the Bulletin’s board of sponsors and appointed J. The Bulletin was founded in 1945 by scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project and were concerned that the nuclear technology they had developed could be disastrous if used improperly. The clock is also designed to tell us how well humanity is responding to those risks. It is not designed simply to be an assessment of the risks facing the world and it doesn’t respond to every short-term fluctuation and international crisis in real time (indeed, it didn’t even shift during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world ever came to Cold War nuclear annihilation, because the crisis was resolved before the Bulletin’s board could meet to discuss its ramifications). The Doomsday Clock is one of the most famous symbols in international politics and science, but also one of the most misunderstood. The doorstep of doom is no place to loiter.” “Citizens of the world can and should organise to demand that their leaders do so – and quickly. “Leaders around the world must immediately commit themselves to renewed co-operation in the many ways and venues available for reducing existential risk,” the Bulletin announced yesterday. That’s the stark message from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who have kept the Doomsday Clock’s annual setting unchanged at 100 seconds to midnight – the nearest it has been in the 75 years since American artist Martyl Langsdorf created it in 1947. ![]() Humanity remains closer to global catastrophe than ever before. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |