The group of scientists who monitor the "Doomsday Clock" moved its time forward 30 seconds earlier today, which has now seen a particularly distressing one minute advancement since 2016. Rachel Bronson, the president and CEO of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has announced that "as of today, it is two minutes to midnight."
The Doomsday Clock was first established at the beginning of the Cold War in 1945 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which is used to address and predict the impending threat of a nuclear war during 1947, as relations between the US and the Soviet Union were particularly temperamental. However, as the Cold War officially ended in 1991, the clock has been used to signify other global calamities, such as climate change, artificial intelligence, and cyberwarfare.
Bronson warns that "this year, the nuclear issue took center-stage yet again," advising the public that "to call the world nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger, and its immediacy."
The clock made this significant movement forward mostly because of the threat of nuclear warfare under Donald Trump, who has been pushing for a cataclysmic battle with these highly destructive explosives. This prediction comes off the leaked draft of President Trump's 2018 Nuclear Posture review, which does suggest that he intends to act on his word.
The panel in charge of the clock told Business Insider that the "Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review appears likely to increase the types and roles of nuclear weapons in US defense plans and lower the threshold to nuclear use."
However, warfare and security risks from nations such as North Korea, Pakistan, India and Russia, as well as Trump's lack of support in monitoring Iran's nuclear program, act as crucial other catalysts for this alarming change.
