The Clock is Ticking Trivia Quiz

Answer: 7:00 mins to midnight

When the Doomsday Clock was established in 1947, it was chosen as an image of inevitability. A clock relentlessly ticks down the time to an event - in this case a global catastrophe with a high probability to wipe out the human civilization. However, the clock also provides hope because, unlike time itself, it can be adjusted by human action. It was meant as a call for action, for humanity to stop that clock before it runs out.

The German language has an idiom "Es ist fünf vor zwölf" (it's five to midnight) to indicate immediate, last chance, urgency similar to the English "eleventh hour" but even more pressing - by that standard, the five minute mark also becomes a "red line" marker which, back in 1947, was not quite yet reached. It wouldn't be long however before that happened.

Answer: 3:00 mins to midnight

The Soviet RDS-1 was a simple Plutonium fission bomb similar to the "Fat Man" deployed by the United States over Nagasaki four years prior, but its significance wasn't so much the danger of the device itself - it had no greater yield than Fat Man - but the fact that now, for the first time in history, more than one nation had access to nuclear destruction. Dominance was no longer assured by owning a few nuclear weapons, but one needed better, bigger weapons.

The nuclear arms race had started and, correspondingly, the maintainers of the clock took more than half of the remaining time off it: From 7 to midnight, it went all the way to 3.

Answer: 2:00 mins to midnight

The spiraling effect of the arms race was seen just four years later when the first thermonuclear devices were detonated by both of the major players in the Cold War. Whereas the fission bombs of the 1940s merely yielded about one thousand times the destructive power of a large conventional bomb, now the nuclear fusion process increased that by another factor of a thousand and more. The clock was moved forward another minute, to its current record worst value of 2 minutes to disaster.

In terms of yield, the American bomb vastly exceeded the Soviet one - at 10 megatons, it had about 25 times the explosive power and remained near the maximum that Americans would ever test. Designs above 10 megatons proved to have little strategic relevance and nuclear arms development would later concentrate mostly on single-digit megaton yields.

Answer: 12:00 mins to midnight

The clock remained at 2 minutes to twelve for seven years. In 1960, it received an adjustment back to the starting 7 minutes value, not because of a single event, but because of a general trend involving political negotiation as well as scientific cooperation.

The Bay of Pigs event is commonly considered the closest the world ever came to nuclear devastation, but it ultimately lasted so short that it never resulted in an adjustment. The next adjustment would be in the opposite direction: With the 1963 treaty banning atmospheric nuclear testing and relegating all such testing to shielded underground sites, the clock received another adjustment to 12 minutes before midnight - a rather reassuring value at the time.

Answer: 4:00 mins to midnight

The 1960s and 1970s proved to be relatively safe on the clock - while the escalating Vietnam war prompted a move back to 7 minutes in 1968, that assessment was revised back to 10 only a year later due to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to 12 in 1972 due to SALT I, the first strategic nuclear weapon limitation agreement.

Stalls in further disarmament talks in the 1970s gradually brought the clock back to 7 - first to an intermediate stop at 9 in 1974 and then to 7 in 1980.

The next big adjustment keyed to a real world event happened in 1981 when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan massively increased tension and rang in the last phase of the Cold War. The clock moved to 4 minutes - and that assessment was revised a minute further into the red zone in 1984 when the arms race intensified further.

Answer: 10:00 mins to midnight

Just prior to the events that would lead to the end of the Soviet Union, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was the reason for taking the clock out of red-line territory in 1988, back to 6. It was followed in 1990 by another major adjustment into the safe direction when the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification effectively heralded the end of the Cold War.

Answer: 17:00 mins to midnight

1991 was the most hopeful year in recent history according to the clock. It saw an adjustment of seven minutes to its positive all-time best so far, even outside the quarter hour mark after the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was ratified between the Cold War opponents and then, mere months later, the Soviet Union was dissolved.

The optimistic setting of the clock received a small correction to 14 minutes in 1995 after growing concerns over the continuously high military spending and concerns that the vacuum left behind by the Soviet Union might help nuclear proliferation.

Answer: 9:00 mins to midnight

When India and Pakistan both conducted nuclear tests in 1998, the attention of the Doomsday Clock maintainers turned to that region as a possible destabilizing factor. In addition to those tests, the stagnant progress of further arms reduction talks between Russia and the United states led to the new clock setting of 9 minutes to midnight - marking the end of the double-digit years.

This was further corrected to 7 minutes in 2002 over the continued stagnation - reinforcing the concept that inaction makes the clock tick down. 55 years after it was started, the clock was thus back where it began.

Answer: 5:00 mins to midnight

The first nuclear test by North Korea was the main reason for the 2007 clock shift to 5 minutes, but the scientists also added climate change to the list of medium term concerns (which is the time scale the clock looks at) and expressed some worries about Iran's nuclear ambitions and the further stagnation at high level arms reduction talks.

The following five years were relatively calm - 2010 saw an improvement by one minute over the Copenhagen climate agreement and some progress on strategic arms reduction, but it was taken back in 2012 when neither of these yielded tangible results.

Answer: 2:30 mins to midnight

Most recently, the clock has been set to ever more worrisome levels. It began in 2015 when growing concern over the inaction already mentioned in 2012 saw a tick from 5 minutes to 3. In 2017, the commission introduced half-minute steps, citing nationalism, unwillingness (especially from the Unites States) to commit to and achieve climate goals and nuclear modernization as the main factors for the advancement to 2 minutes 30 seconds, just short of the worst setting achieved in 1953.

The last change to the clock so far was made in early 2018 - another 30 seconds were taken off over the ever increasing worry that the many concerns raised were just not being heard.