Doomsday Clock remains at three minutes to midnight

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has left the “Doomsday Clock” at three minutes to midnight, the time it set it at last year.

“This is not good news,” said ASU professor Lawrence Krauss and the chair of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, a group first formed by Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer after World War II to advise the Bulletin. Even with the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate talks, the board sees this time as still precarious for humanity.

Krauss and other Board of Sponsor members unveiled the clock setting at a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 25.

The Doomsday Clock represents how close the group believes the world is to possible global catastrophe (represented by midnight on the symbolic clock face). Its remaining at three minutes till midnight is an expression of the grave concern about how the global situation remains largely the same as last year. The last time the clock was this close to midnight was in 1984, at the height of the Cold War.

Read more about the setting of the doomsday clock at: http://thebulletin.org/it-still-three-minutes-midnight9107. Read a guest article by Krauss in the New Yorker on why this is important to all of us: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/still-three-minutes-to-midnight.