Doomsday Clock to be updated on Jan 24

WASHINGTON: Tick, tick, tick. An update is coming to the Doomsday Clock, representing the judgement of leading science and security experts about the perils to human existence.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announc­ed on Tues­day that they would ann­ounce at 1500 GMT on Jan 24 whether the time of the symbolic clock will change.

The organisation describes the clock as a “metaphor for how close humanity is to self-annihilation”. A decision to reset the hands of the clock is taken annually by the Bulletin’s science and security board and its board of sponsors, which includes 11 Nobel laureates.

For this year, the Bulletin said they would take into account the Russia-Ukraine war, bio-threats, proliferation of nuclear weapons, the continued climate crisis, state-sponsored disinformation campaigns and disruptive technologies.

The hands of the clock are currently at 100 seconds to midnight.

It was originally set at seven minutes to midnight. The furthest it has ever been is 17 minutes, following the end of the Cold War in 1991.

The Bulletin was foun­ded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, Robert Oppen­hei­mer and other scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, which produced the first nuclear weapons.