Brown: Doomsday Clock Now Seconds From Midnight
Sonora, CA – Now one of the keepers of The Doomsday Clock, former California Governor Jerry Brown shared concerns as it advanced to within 100 seconds to midnight.
Thursday, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded after the creation of the atomic bomb in World War II, moved the symbolic countdown to global disaster 20 seconds forward to its closest point to midnight yet in its 73-year history, citing a true emergency and no more margin for error.
The group focuses on the greatest threats to human survival. While last year, The Doomsday Clock did not advance, the keepers cite multiple reasons for this year’s move: nuclear and climate dangers are being compounded with cyber-enabled information warfare as a multiplier, further fueled by world leaders who have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.
Brown, who now serves as The Bulletin’s executive chairman, warns that dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of a nuclear blunder, adding that climate change just compounds the crisis. “If there’s ever a time to wake up, it’s now,” he adds.
As reported here, in October 2018, The Bulletin announced that Brown would take the helm, allowing the former governor to continue bringing focus and outreach towards helping reduce manmade existential threats such as climate change.
In January 2018 The Doomsday Clock had just moved 30 seconds closer to catastrophe and, at two minutes to midnight was as close as it was at the height of the Cold War in 1953, which Brown acknowledged in his final State of the State Address.
He added, “Our world, our way of life, our system of governance — all are at immediate and genuine risk. Endless new weapons systems, growing antagonism among nations, the poison in our politics, climate change. All of this calls out for courage, for imagination, and for generous dialogue.”
