![]() Why do nuclear weapons create mushroom clouds? Is climate change making the weather worse? What's the minimum number of people needed to survive an apocalypse? To assess these dangers, the Science and Security Board's members consult with colleagues in their respective fields and with the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors - 11 of whom are Nobel Laureates - before agreeing on the clock's position. ![]() ![]() To decide the clock's time each year, the BAS's Science and Security Board convenes two biannual meetings of 18 experts from backgrounds spanning diplomacy, nuclear science, climate change, disruptive technologies and military history to discuss the changing threats posed to humanity by itself. The scientists who had worked feverishly during World War II to create the bombs soon became their biggest opponents - arguing, first in an internal newsletter, then in a bi-monthly magazine, that to prevent armageddon, atomic weapons had to be dismantled and nuclear power safely monitored. In Hiroshima alone, Little Boy killed an estimated 140,000 people within five months of its detonation and destroyed or severely damaged more than 60,000 of the city's approximately 90,000 buildings. atomic bombs "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 2007, the clock's countdown was expanded to include all human-made existential threats, burdening its hands with the additional representation of climate change, rogue artificial intelligence, war and global pandemics.įounded in 1945 by physicists including Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, who was known as the "father of the atomic bomb", the BAS's formation was inspired by that year's tragic dropping of the U.S. (Image credit: Mark Rightmire/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)Ĭreated for the BAS in 1947 by Martyl Langsdorf (an artist whose husband, Alexander, helped to invent the atomic bomb as a physicist on the Manhattan Project), the Doomsday Clock was first envisioned as a means to plainly signal to the public the dire and growing existential threat posed by nuclear weapons to the world. A 400-acre wildfire burns in the Cleveland National Forest in this view from Orange on Wednesday, March 2, 2022.
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