The Crisis

In 1991, the Doomsday Clock reached a point far from midnight when a new global nuclear arms treaty was signed – 17 minutes. In 2002, however, a few months after 9/11 and the USA's withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, it advanced a full 10 minutes. Then, in 2007, it moved forwards again to 5 minutes before the fateful hour.

Sixty years after the hands of the Doomsday Clock were first set by a group of atomic scientists the threat of climate change was brought into their calculations. They called the threat of global warming a ‘second nuclear age’, asserting that the dangers posed by climate change were ‘nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons’. They continued: ‘The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause irremediable harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.’ They concluded: ‘Not since the first atomic bombs has the world faced such perilous choices’.

Early in 2007, a group of American politicians previously supportive of nuclear weapons – Henry A. Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William J. Perry and George P. Shultz – endorsed the Reykjavik vision shared by presidents Gorbachev and Reagan for a nuclear-free world, asserting: