5 minutes to midnight

Doomsday Clock
moves forward 2 minutes

Based here in the city at the University of Chicago, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced the change yesterday at an unprecedented joint news conference. It made the statement in Washington, DC at The American Association for the Advancement of Science and in London at The Royal Society.

For the first time it changed the Doomsday Clock because of two major sources of catastrophe. It declared that the world was entering a Second Nuclear Age with the perils of 27,000 nuclear weapons, 2000 of them ready to launch within minutes. And it warned that human habitats are now threatened by global warming.

[t]he Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock conveys how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction--the figurative midnight--and monitors the means humankind could use to obliterate itself. First and foremost, these include nuclear weapons, but they also encompass climate-changing technologies and new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology that could inflict irrevocable harm.