And it was so since in 1945 the international race for nuclear weapons experienced its darkest episode with the launching by the United States of the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Then, a group of scientists from the Manhattan Project, including Albert Einstein and twelve other Nobel Prize winners, began publishing a magazine about the challenges of the apocalypse in the face of the nuclear threat.
Two years later, the symbolic but agonizing clock was activated, to which since 2007 the deterioration of the planet due to global warming, the climate crisis and the lack of action on the part of the powers was added to its assessments.
Start the count down.
At the time of its creation, the clock was set at 11:53 p.m., that is, seven minutes from midnight, the time that was metaphorically established as lethal or apocalyptic.
Since then, the minute hand of the clock has moved further away from or closer to 00:00 depending on the decisions made by the world’s politicians regarding the increase or decrease in the risk for humanity.
The moment in which the needle was furthest from midnight was in 1991, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the official end of the Cold War, when the clock’s hands moved back to a margin of 17 minutes. A record that has never been recovered.
On the other hand, the moment closest to the end has been recently. It was in January 2024, when the planet was, for the second consecutive year, just 90 seconds from midnight. On this occasion, Russia’s war against Ukraine, the climate crisis or the possibility of other pandemics, such as covid-19, were included in the temporal assessments.
Closer to the end.
Since the Soviet Union carried out its first nuclear test in 1949, the clock has not stopped moving towards the end.
Since then the minute hand has been adjusted on more than twenty occasions, with ranges from 17 minutes to 90 seconds, according to the various developments in nuclear proliferation.
Thus, in January 2007, for the fourth time since the Cold War, atomic scientists advanced the clock to 11:55 p.m., five minutes before the catastrophe, due to “growing concerns about a Second Nuclear Age marked by serious threats,” they said at the time. in the statement the experts, who in turn warned that “the dangers posed by climate change are almost as serious as those of nuclear weapons.”
And the bad times when the clock’s hands have moved dangerously have not diminished.
Return to a 20th century schedule.
In 2018 the clock returned for the first time to times from the last century when it was set to two minutes before midnight. The reason, the arrogant rhetoric of the American president, Donald Trump, and the exchange of threats between North Korea and his country.
Precisely in 2017, after Trump’s victory in the presidential elections, scientists, who always moved the clock hands by full minutes, decided, by surprise, to adjust the clock by 30 seconds and place it at two and a half minutes from 00:00 .
And the ticking continues to be “adjusted” with that formula since then, but always referring to the supposed end, and not so far from January 2020, when the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists placed the clock at 23:58:20 and warned that international security was at that time more dangerous than ever.
“Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers: nuclear war and climate change, which are aggravated by a threat multiplier, a cyber information war, which undermines society’s ability to respond,” the statement said at the time.
We ran out of time.
“We are running out of time and a critical decade is coming to face it,” American atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon said in 2019 and did so two years before the last adjustment in January 2024, just 90 seconds away from facing the hypothetical disaster.
Currently, experts warn that international security is at the same level of alarm as in “the worst moments of the Cold War,” when it seemed that the nuclear threat was plunging the world into the abyss. This was called “the new abnormality,” and it was defined as a scenario “in constant change, where conflicts simmer” and the possibilities of military conflicts breaking out multiply.
“We would very much like to turn the clock back, but we have to respond to what is happening in the world,” physicist Daniel Holz, co-president of the board that each year decides the position of the hands, explained to EFE in January 2023, which required “If you look at what is happening in Ukraine, the climate disasters… it is very difficult to say that things are getting better.”
M. Ángeles Martínez.
EFE REPORTS
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