“As of today,” said Rachel Bronson, the president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “it is two minutes to midnight.”

On Thursday, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock—a symbolic assessment of how close the world stands to total destruction—as close to midnight as it has ever been, reflecting the expert group’s “grim assessment” that the world is now “as dangerous as it has been since World War II.”
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“Ultimately, governments and international institutions—and, to some extent, the media—are not dealing adequately together with the serious global problems we face,” said Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University and the chair of the Bulletin’s board of scientific sponsors.

“We therefore return again to our plea to the people of the world: If governments are not acting to protect you as they should, you need to take the lead,” he said. “You need to demand action.”

“It’s easier to understand and follow and have opinions about the Kardashians than some of the issues that we’re talking about,” Bronson added. “That in many ways is the power of the Doomsday Clock, in that it gives us a way to talk about whether the world is safer or at greater risk than it was last year ... It gives us a way to talk about these enormously complicated issues in a way that real people can have real conversations.”