The Doomsday Clock warns the world about catastrophe – here's why it stands at 90 seconds to midnight

By Rod Thornton, Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer in International Studies, Defense and Security., King's College London

The Doomsday Clock, with its hands hovering close to midnight (“doomsday”), is a symbolic device that is designed to warn the world how close it is to catastrophe. Midnight is said to represent the point at which the Earth becomes uninhabitable by humanity.

The clock dates back to the early days of the cold war. It was set up as an integral feature of a journal called the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. This was established in 1947 by those Manhattan…

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