http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8460324.stm

What do you think, are we safer now than before? Or are you waiting for a sexed-up dossier before you commit?

TBH I find the whole thing a bit pointless.

What does it actually mean?

In 6 minutes the world is going to end?
6 minutes is the amount of time it takes for the world to end when everyone starts fighting?
6 minutes is the ideal length of time to soft boil an egg?

It's good news that it has gone back a minute but why choose a clock? I certainly dont feel like much has changed since 2 years ago.

As a child of the Cold War, the Doomsday Clock was a concept I grew up with. The USA and USSR were able to destroy our world in nuclear armageddon, and we were powerless to do anything about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

It's worth understanding the idea behind it, Oli, even if you don't think it's particularly relevant to today's geopolitical planet.

I understand the idea. It just seems odd to use a clock to represent it. There is no concept of how far along the scale we are.

Given that when a treaty was signed between the Soviet Union and the USA we were still only 17 minutes to midnight it makes me wonder what the utopian "world of peace" setting would be?

Would it be 12 noon? Would it be 11pm (i.e 60 minutes to midnight)?

It all seems very subjective.

It is totally subjective.

Umm... what just happened?

I saw that the latest post was from rustybucket, clicked on the thread and it wasn't there.

Went back and now the latest post is Heather?!

Why are we in more danger now than we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

In the Cold war era people were just prepared to kill other people based on ideology.

Now thanks to the complete f-wits in power we have stirred up a hornets nest of people that are prepared to kill themselves to ensure others are killed and all subsequent actions just seem to be pouring aviation fuel mixed with napalm on the fire!

The war on terror will as successful as the war on drugs.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis the world came within minutes of full-blown nuclear war. As in everything dead except plankton and cockroaches.

The situation now is, with all respect, nothing like as dangerous.

In the CMC,the situation may have come perilously close to the endpoint but both sides didn't want to get there and were looking for a peaceful conclusion and to save face.
The current situation is the opposite.

So narrowly avoiding the deaths of everything - that's billions of people - isn't as dangerous as the deaths of thousands?

Yes that's true it was a really iffy 14 days in history, but the clock is looking at far-reaching events over a much longer period of time, things that have gone on for years, not days. The CMC was really bad, but for a really short length of time and with only a couple of agressors who were still prepared to talk to each other and none of whom wanted anything to happen.

Compared to the number of "unfriendly" nations who now have nuclear weapon technology available to them, are prepared to stop at nothing for their cause and don't respond to any challenge or regulation, the CMC was a storm in a teacup.

You'll note on the clock that the perceived peril was at it's highest in '53 when Russia and America were both testing their nuclear weapons, and the line only dropped so far because of a perception of scientific co-operation and understanding of the dangers of nuclear weapons, right before the blip of the CMC and then the partial test ban treaty in 1963.