New York, January 15: The minute hand of the Doomsday clock was moved back slightly on Thursday, indicating the world has inched away from nuclear or environmental catastrophe, but stressing it was not out of danger.
“We are encouraged by recent developments, but we are mindful of the fact that the clock is ticking,” said Lawrence Krauss, co-chair of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which created the symbolic clock in 1947.
He then nudged the clock’s minute hand back by just one minute at its home in New York.
“We have a unique opportunity right now to begin to free ourselves from the terror of nuclear weapons and to slow drastic changes to our shared global environment. We must take advantage of that opportunity now,” said Krauss.
The panel of scientists, including 19 Nobel laureates, who decide to move the clock’s minute hand either forward or backward, agreed this year to only nudge it back by one minute to show that “much remains to be accomplished,” Krauss said.
“We moved it back by just one minute. What that means is that there’s great potential for it to move again, in either direction.”
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by scientists from the University of Chicago who had helped to develop the first atomic weapons.
The clock is intended to convey what progress, if any, the world has made in moving away from the risk of nuclear or other catastrophe.
Midnight on the clock signifies the apocalypse, and the minute hand symbolises the countdown to a nuclear explosion or climatic disaster.
—Agencies