The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Introduces the Doomsday Dashboard

Lasrick writes You probably know the hand on the Doomsday Clock now rests at 3 minutes to midnight. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has launched a pretty cool little interactive Dashboard that lets you see data that the Bulletin's Science and Security Board considers when making the decision on the Clock's time each year. There are interactive graphs that show global nuclear arsenals, nuclear material security breaches, and how much weapons-grade plutonium and uranium is stored (and where). The climate change section features graphs of global sea level rise over time, Arctic sea ice minimums. atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and differences in global temperature. There's also a section for research on biosecurity and emerging technologies.

Comments

3 minutes

[bugs2squash]

Have you ever seen a movie where the bomb was defused with 3 minutes left on the clock. No-one will be interested until its in single digits of seconds to midnight.

spring forward

[turkeydance]

it's an HOUR and 3 minutes until midnight.

Clock you say?

[danbert8]

So if the earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old and this clock is representing a day between creation and doomsday... Hmm, 1440 minutes in a day, 3 minutes till midnight... Carry the two...

We can expect the Earth to exist for another 9.5 million years!

Whew... I was about to panic.

What's with the inclusion of "climate change"?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

OK, if they want to guess how far we are from disaster caused by nuclear weapons, that's fine. But why co-mingle "climate change" - is this just a "we need funding" thing?

Nuclear Material Incidents

[Thanshin]

7 - Unknown.

I wonder how these come to happen.

"Captain Johnson! Where the fuck are the two tons of plutonium you left the base with!"
*shrugs* "No idea."
"WHAT!"
"NO IDEA. SIR!"
"Ok, that's better. Try to be more careful with the next plutonium truck. Shit ain't growing on trees, you know?"

Re:Not comprehensive

[davester666]

Typically, the citizens wind up spending all their time messaging each other on their cell phones, and ninja's sneak up behind them and kill them.

Haven't you seen ANY documentaries on the fall of the roman empire?

Re:Dumbest comment ever

[Greyfox]

You sound like someone who's old. Or irrelevant. Were you one of those people protesting in front of air force bases in the 70's? Sure, a nuclear-armed Iran is a convenient boogeyman to wave around to scare the US public. Who's doing that? John McCain mostly. Let's apply our criteria to him. Old? Yup. He's practically yelling at the rest of Congress to get off his lawn. And irrelevant? Yep, pretty much. No one cares what John McCain thinks, except maybe some old people in Florida and Arizona and some irrelevant people at Fox News.

Nuclear weapons were a convenient boogeyman to wave around when you were a hippie in the 70's. "Oh, they're going to blow the world up unless we pour this goat's blood on the gate of the air force base!" Discounting the fact that making a nuclear bomb is really hard (Iran and North Korea have been trying for as long as I've been alive, despite the fact that the general concepts are simple enough for a teenager to grasp,) and making something to deliver it is also really hard. By the time you get done doing all that stuff, you may as well have just leveled a city with conventional weapons. We did a lot more to Japan with conventional weapons than we did with nuclear ones in WWII, by the way. But after all that, some very interesting politics come into play, which is why India and Pakistan haven't nuked each other. And you know, the longer a nuclear device sits, the less likely it is that it's going to work. Your nice pure plutonium core starts getting crapped up with hydrogen bubbles. And those things are already very finicky as Iran and North Korea are finding out.

So yeah, on a scale of things that are likely to kill you, nuclear war is simply not one of them. You're significantly more likely to be shot by a disgruntled co-worker or a road-raging jackass in a giant penis truck. His truck is very very big, his penis is very very small and he's angry! In fact if you asked 1000 random people if they worry more about dying in a nuclear war or to zombies, I'd be willing to bet most of them would say zombies. Which are fictional.