Doomsday Clock To Move Forward?

The Doomsday Clock was created by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1947 to chart how close the world is to Armegeddon, i.e. Armegeddon is midnight.

It was two minutes to midnight in 1953 following U.S. and Soviet hydrogen bomb tests ... and 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 after the collapse of the USSR and an agreement on nuclear arms reductions.

The clock moved from nine minutes to seven minutes in 2002 (amid concerns about the proliferation of nuclear, biological and other weapons and the threat of terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11).

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have announced they will change the hands next Wednesday.

The hints are that it will move two minutes closer to midnight.

Iran and North Korea get the attention, but there are no shortage of additional reasons for moving the clock forward:

- the continuing 'launch-ready' status of 2,000 of the 25,000 nuclear weapons held by the US and Russia
- unsecured nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere
- the turn to nuclear power in the face of climate change by unstable states – leading to the potential for nuclear fuel ending up in the hands of terrorists.