The Doomsday Clock will be set for 2024 today, symbolically measuring how close the world is to a human-made catastrophe.
Determined by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the clock is described on its website as a “design that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making. It is a metaphor, a reminder of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet”.
When it was first created in 1947 the main threat which the clock sought to address was that of nuclear warfare. But 60 years later in 2007, the Bulletin for the first time included the catastrophic threat of climate change into its calculations.
READ MORE: US producing first new type of nuclear warhead since 1980s in response to Russian threat
With wars having erupted around the world over the past two years, it is currently set at 90 seconds to midnight - the closest that the Bulletin has ever predicted us to be to man-made catastrophe. The Mirror takes a look at the devastating events going on around the world over the last year.
Israel-Gaza War
Dominating the news agenda for the past three months is the ongoing violence in Gaza, where Israel continues to wage an unrelenting war on Hamas - with consequences which appear to be spreading throughout the Middle East. So far, around 25,105 Palestinians have been killed according to the Gaza Health Ministry, with 70 percent of these deaths believed to be women and children. 62,681 have also been injured since the war started on October 7, and around 85 percent of the Gazan population displaced from their homes.
Israel showed no signs of letting up the onslaught, a response to the October 7 attacks by Hamas - the worst Israel has ever suffered - in which the Palestinian militants killed 1,139 people, including 695 civilians, 36 children and 71 foreigners, according to France 24. President Joe Biden has since stated a desire to prevent the conflict from spreading - something which has proven difficult as conflict has erupted between Israel and Lebanon.
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It includes fears that Iran - believed to be one of the MIddle East’s only nuclear powers, alongside Israel - could become more heavily involved. But in October, charge d'affaires at the Iranian embassy in London Mehdi Hosseini Matin said Iran's "first priority is stopping the war, not escalation”.
Russia-Ukraine war
Things are looking a little more bleak for Ukraine than this time one year ago, after their counteroffensive in summer 2023, which aimed to breach the front lines of the conflict, moved more slowly than had been hoped. Meanwhile, Russia has shown no intentions to slow down their attempts to take over Ukraine.
Ukraine also faces the issue of aid, both humanitarian and military, potentially being diverted towards Gaza. Whatever the extent to which aid has been diverted, there has been an undeniable reduction in international attention on the Russian invasion since the violence erupted in the Middle East.
Before the Bulletin put the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight, Putin had issued threatening statements including that he was putting his nuclear forces on a "special mode of combat duty". Following the successful test of a new inter-continental ballistic missile, Putin issued a warning to countries he said are threatening Russia to “think twice”, claiming the ICBM could defeat any nuclear missile defences.
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Due to the threat, the US last year began designing the first new type of nuclear warhead - the actual explosive device which goes inside a missile - since the 1980s. The chief of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Robert Oppenheimer designed the first nuclear weapon in the 1940s, said the US was having to prepare for a “new set of military requirements” due to “Russia and its unprovoked invasion in Ukraine” and with “ China rapidly expanding its arsenal”.
But Putin slightly dialled down the rhetoric after a strongly negative reaction to his comments from the international community. Pavel Podvig, a Russian nuclear weapons expert who was involved in setting the clock for a decade, said: “There is a very good argument for setting [the clock] back. We’ve seen that the opposition to the idea of threatening nuclear weapons is very strong and it is universal. And I think that must be reflected. The clock is a very powerful instrument to send that message.”
US and UK retaliatory strikes
Western countries haven’t been entirely hands off in the Middle East, despite having no intention in directly involving themselves militarily in Israel’s war on Gaza. With strikes both in Yemen and Syria over the last year, the countries have been drawn into battles they perhaps would have rather avoided.
After attacks on the US bases in Syria and Iraq by groups linked with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, US forces struck a weapons storage facility and an ammunition plant in eastern Syria. Two F-16 fighter jets were sent on the mission reportedly directly ordered by Biden - but the Pentagon denied there was any connection between the strikes and the Israel-Hamas war.
In more of a direct link to the Israel-Gaza war, and evidence of how violence has spread through the region, the US and UK issued joint strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen earlier this month. It came after Houthis, who are fighting a civil war against the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, attacked British and American trade ships which they claimed were shipping assistance to Israel. Ships are now being majorly diverted away from the Red Sea, with experts warning that the strikes on Houthi targets won’t stop the attacks.
The Climate Crisis in 2023
2023 was a truly frightening year regarding the climate crisis, with the levels of extreme weather seen around the globe ramping up to record severity. In the 2023 State of the Climate Report, it was stated: “As scientists, we are increasingly being asked to tell the public the truth about the crises we face in simple and direct terms. The truth is that we are shocked by the ferocity of the extreme weather events in 2023. We are afraid of the uncharted territory that we have now entered.”
In 2023 there were over 38 days this year that were over 1.5C hotter than average, which is higher than any other year recorded. Such a temperature is set to become the norm over the next five years and by the mid-2030s will be permanent.
Sea surface temperatures reached record highs for four months as the ocean continues to warm up, reaching nearly 1C hotter than was normal for that time of year. This led to Antarctic sea ice shrinking dramatically to a historic low in 2023, around a million square kilometres smaller than it was in 1986.
A freeze in Afghanistan, floods in California, Cyclone Freddy in southern Africa, floods and landslides in Brazil and wildfires in Canada are barely a handful of the severe natural weather events which occurred throughout last year. Countless more wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes and other forms of extreme weather took place around the globe.