US & Canada News Doomsday Clock stays at 90 seconds to midnight

The Doomsday Clock - which shows how symbolically close the world is to nuclear Armageddon - is to remain at 90 seconds to midnight.

Scientists have listed reasons for keeping its hands the closest they have ever been to "Doomsday" - but stopped short of nudging it further forward.

The threat of a new nuclear arms race, the Ukraine war and climate change concerns were all factors, they said.
The clock is set annually by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Since 2007, members have considered the impact of new man-made risks such as AI and climate change, as well as the greatest threat - nuclear war.

In its 2024 announcement on Tuesday, the Bulletin said that China, Russia and the US were all spending huge sums to "expand or modernise their nuclear arsenals" - which added to the "ever-present danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation".

The war in Ukraine had also created an "ever-present risk of nuclear escalation", it said.

A lack of action on climate change and risks linked to "misusing" emerging biological technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools were also cited.



The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by J Robert Oppenheimer and fellow US scientists who had developed the atomic bomb.

They had seen its devastating effects two years earlier, at the end of World War Two, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They wanted to warn the public and put pressure on world leaders to make sure nuclear weapons were never used again.

The hands of the clock have moved 25 times. In 1947, they started at seven minutes to midnight. At the end of the Cold War, in 1991, they had fallen back to 17 minutes to midnight.

Bulletin president Rachel Bronson told the BBC that "every major country, including the UK, is investing in their nuclear arsenal as if nuclear weapons are usable for a very long time. This is a very dangerous time… leaders are not acting responsibly."