How close do we sit to complete world destruction? According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, six minutes. While the figure might seem ominous, it’s actually an improvement on where our position was one month ago. On Jan. 14, citing a more “hopeful state of world affairs,” the BAS moved the minute hand of their figurative Doomsday Clock backwards, from its previous position of five minutes to midnight.

One minute may seem insignificant but, in the history of the Doomsday Clock, time has only moved within a range of fifteen minutes. Created in 1947 at the start of the Cold War as a means of measuring our proximity to world destruction, the clock started at just seven minutes to midnight.

After its inception, the clock moved quickly to two minutes to midnight in 1953 as tensions escalated between the US and USSR. The hand moved back again as the Cold War slowly thawed. When the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1991, the clock reached 17 minutes to midnight, its earliest and most cheerful setting.

Unfortunately, nuclear weapons persevered in both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. Soon India, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea increased their respective nuclear ambitions and in recent years U.S. policy gravitated toward favoring nuclear weapons for military purposes. Compounding the world’s woes, climate change’s growing impact forced scientists to incorporate it into the Doomsday Clock. By 2007 the minute hand sat at five minutes until mass destruction.

The BAS cited the election of President Obama as a critical component of a safer world. Could it be that WMD-fearing Bush himself was one of the most dangerous weapons of mass destruction? Unless the scientists foresee enormous potential in Obama, one must conclude that the demise of the Bush administration unloaded a monumental burden from the minds of atomic scientists and Nobel Laureates alike (19 of said laureates help in determining the position of the clock).

The board also credited increased world cooperation in reducing nuclear weapons and slowing climate change as factors in the time change. The fact that time moved only one minute indicates that significant progress obviously remains – but one wonders if the world is really safer than it was last year.
Security is hard to measure from the privileged position of an American. It’s easy to feel jaded about the continuous conflicts in the Middle East, North Korea and elsewhere. Throughout our lives we have always been aware that nuclear weapons threaten our existence, yet, unlike our parents and grandparents, few of us practiced air raid drills at school or stocked bomb shelters in the backyard. We’ve been lulled into a sense of stasis where nuclear warfare is more a dated tagline of the Bush administration than a constant fear.

More pressing, for us, is the climate challenge. The recent U.N. Climate Change Conference and Copenhagen Accord did little to solidify a strategy for fighting climate change, making the BAS board’s positive assessment of world cooperation questionable. Yes, the Accord recognized climate change as a scientifically valid problem, but they did little in terms of assertive action. The non-legally binding agreement fails to set concrete goals for emissions reductions and has since been criticized by the E.U., African nations, and numerous large and small actors as dangerously inefficient.

The Chinese Foreign Minister, on the other hand, called the Accord “significant and positive,” wholly unsurprising considering China’s interest in blocking any environmental limits on its expansion.