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Doomsday Clock set at five minutes til midnight

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The Doomsday Clock is set at five minutes to apocalypse. Didn’t we already live through the end of the world?

Before you run off to tell your family you love them, it’s not an actual five minutes, but rather a figurative warning that we as an earthly population are far too close to all-out nuclear disaster and other deadly cataclysms.

“I can’t tell you what happens in the room, but I can tell you it’s a spirited and extremely deep discussion,” John Mecklin, editor in chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday about how the doomsday minute decision is made.

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According to the Bulletin, the group “created the Doomsday Clock … using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet,” adding that the clock has become an indicator of just how vulnerable the world is to nuclear catastrophe, climate change and new, potentially dangerous, technologies.

As of today, the group of experts brought together by the Bulletin decided that the world is at a figurative five minutes away from nuclear zero, meaning it has not improved over last year’s time.

When asked how close we were to backing up to six minutes until doom Mecklin would not say, but he did add that “one could reasonably infer from the statement that the board is not happy with the state of things.”

In the group’s annual letter -- this year sent to the United Nations due to its international implications -- they say the world’s biggest threat is the “potentially civilization-ending” outsized nuclear stockpiles of the United States and Russia, along with the growing arsenals in India, Pakistan and China.

“People don’t actually understand, the nuclear weapons situation is remarkably dangerous,” Mecklin noted, adding that not enough happened at the end of the Cold War to make the world safer.

Beyond the nuclear threat, the group also notes that world leaders have hit a stalemate on efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions that have made oceans more acidic, and even note that there are emerging dangers like cyber-weapons and “killer robots.”

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In its letter the group implores world leaders to take action on all of these threats.

The good news? At least we didn’t come closer to midnight this year. The closest the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has ever set the clock is two minutes to midnight in 1953.

But five minutes is close enough for Mecklin who said that five minutes is “really close, and really bad.”

@Sleasca

stacey.oleasca@latimes.com

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