The Importance Of The Doomsday Clocks

Clocks. Such simple things that we come across every day. Depending on our preferences and needs, they can be of any kind: a sundial or hourglass for the decor, mechanical or digital ones for daily use, and atomic clocks for making precise calculations. Whatever their form is, the main purpose is to measure time.
Tick-tock. The second hand of the clock is moving forward inexorably. It’s not surprising, is it? The familiar sound, the familiar passage of time. Tick-tock. Before you know it, the clock says it's two and a half minutes to midnight. Only two and a half minutes till a nuclear catastrophe strikes.
Today’s world is full of hazards. It's the highly tense international situation, and the quick development of nuclear weapons, and the

The Doomsday Clock was a project initiated by the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists journal in 1947. They were the creators of the first American atomic bomb. That year the Clock showed 7 minutes to midnight. Since then the clock has been set backward and forward 22 times. The closest the world has ever been to a global catastrophe was 2 minutes, which happened in 1953, when the USA and the USSR started their atomic bomb testing programs and the farthest was 17 minutes to midnight after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The decision of adjusting the time on the Clock is annually made by a group of visiting experts, among whom there are 18 Nobel laureates. It was they who set the Сlock 30 seconds ahead in 2017. As a result, it was the second time in history the Clock had been this close to midnight.

No matter how hard today’s politicians are trying to ignore this problem, the signs of global warming are obvious. Thus, Cape Town could soon become the first metropolis to have run out of fresh water because of persistent drought. At present, the water level in its reservoirs has dropped below 30% and when it reaches 13,5%, the government will disconnect the water supply to every building in the city except hospitals and the most important infrastructure. So, while the entire regions are suffering from drought and other natural disasters, glaciers are melting, the level of the World Ocean is increasing, and carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere, the USA keeps investing billions of dollars into advancing their nuclear weapons.