The hands of the Doomsday Clock have moved once again, and the news is grim. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has officially set the time to 89 seconds to midnight. This is the closest the Clock has ever been to the hour of the apocalypse since its creation.
For nearly eight decades, this symbolic timepiece has served as a warning lamp for humanity, gauging how close we are to destroying our own world with dangerous technologies. To understand why this shift is so terrifying, we must look back 78 years to the start of the nuclear age, when the scientists who built the atomic bomb first realised the horror of what they had created.
