Doomsday Clock

According to Wikipedia:

The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock face that represents a countdown to possible global catastrophe. It has been maintained since 1947 by the members of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board, who are in turn advised by the Governing Board and the Board of Sponsors, including 18 Nobel Laureates. The closer they set the Clock to midnight, the more vulnerable the scientists believe the world is to global disaster.

The clock was first designed to be a reflection of the danger to the world of nuclear disaster. In recent years, in assessing the danger to the world, the scientists have also "reflected climate change, and new developments in the life sciences and technology that could inflict irrevocable harm to humanity." In recognition of the irrevocable harm to humanity that Donald Trump could inflict, the scientists of the Clock have advanced the time by 30 seconds: It now stands at 2.5 minutes to midnight, the closest it has been since 1953, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union detonated their first thermonuclear bombs within a six-month period.



Click here for an article in The New York Times by Lawrence M. Krauss (chairman of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) and David Titley (former chairman of the Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change and a member of the Bulletin's science panel), entitled "Thanks to Trump, the Doomsday Clock Advances Toward Midnight."

Making matters worse, the United States now has a president who has promised to impede progress on both of those fronts. Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the clock largely because of the statements of a single person. But when that person is the new president of the United States, his words matter.

... Mr. Trump’s statements and actions have been unsettling. He has made ill-considered comments about expanding and even deploying the American nuclear arsenal. He has expressed disbelief in the scientific consensus on global warming. He has shown a troubling propensity to discount or reject expert advice related to international security. And his nominees to head the Energy Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Management and the Budget have disputed or questioned climate change.

The Bulletin mentions the following points as reasons for advancing the clock:

• North Korea’s continuing nuclear weapons development, the steady march of arsenal modernization programs in the nuclear weapon states, simmering tension between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, and stagnation in arms control. 
• Doubt over the future of the Iran nuclear deal 
• Deteriorating relations between the United States and Russia, which possess more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.
• Mixed results in global efforts to limit climate change. 

These are all matters in which President Trump has signaled that he would make matters worse either because of a mistaken belief that the threats posed by nuclear weapons and climate can be ignored or that the words of a president of the United States do not matter to the rest of the world.