Doomsday Draws Closer

In the news:

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock to five minutes before midnight — the metaphorical marker of the end of humanity.

Two factors prompted the Bulletin's board to move the clock forward by two minutes: the spread of nuclear weapons and, in a first for the group, climate change.

"The unthinkable seems closer now, in some ways, than it ever was," says Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and a member of the Bulletin's board. . .

The chief reason for the move is the dawn of a "second nuclear age", in which far more countries can acquire nuclear technology. The Bulletin cited North Korea's October test of a nuclear device, the nuclear smuggling network of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan, and the diplomatic failure to halt Iran's nuclear program as examples of the growing threat from proliferation.

It also pointed to the nuclear stockpiles of the United States and Russia, which together possess around 26,000 warheads. Although the threat of global nuclear annihilation has declined, the threat of a regional war that could kill millions has grown, says Martin Rees, an astronomer at Cambridge University, UK: "There is now more chance than ever of a few nuclear weapons going off in a localized conflict."

The Bulletin's second concern, climate change, represents a new direction for the organization, which a group of Manhattan Project scientists started in 1945 to warn of the threat of nuclear annihilation. "When we looked at doomsday, we realized that there were other technologies and trends that we needed to include," says Kennette Benedict, the Bulletin's executive director.

After considering several threats, including nanotechnology and bioterrorism, the group decided that the dangers of climate change are almost as dire as those of nuclear weapons.

That last bit there refers to a series of "Doomsday Reconsidered" meetings held by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 2006 to look at future threats to civilization. In October, CRN's Chris Phoenix took part in a program in Washington DC sponsored by the group. Chris was invited to speak about "Threats to Society from Nanotechnology."

We expect that as time goes by, the reality of the global peril posed by a nano-based arms race will become more apparent, and the Bulletin may well move the hands of the clock even closer to midnight as a result.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog