What is doomsday

Visit our page for journalists or call Get more with UChicago News delivered to your inbox. The Doomsday Clock is a metaphor that represents how close humanity is to self-destruction, due to nuclear weapons and climate change. The clock hands are set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , a group formed by Manhattan Project scientists at the University of Chicago who helped build the atomic bomb but protested using it against people.

The Doomsday Clock is a symbol that represents how close we are to destroying the world with dangerous technologies of our own making. Set every year by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it is intended to warn the public and inspire action. When it was created in , the placement of the Doomsday Clock was based on the threat posed by nuclear weapons, which Bulletin scientists considered to be the greatest danger to humanity.

In , the Bulletin began including catastrophic disruptions from climate change in its hand-setting deliberations. The furthest the clock has been set was 17 minutes to midnight, in , after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

Until recently, the closest it had ever been set was at two minutes to midnight—first in , when the U. Then, in , the clock moved the closest it has ever been: seconds to midnight. Most of the people who were part of the Manhattan Project, the secret government mission which created the first atomic bomb, did not know what they were building.

But the scientists did, and some of them had misgivings from the start. Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein were the two physicists who wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt in , warning him of the potential of an atomic bomb—and their suspicions that Germany might be able to build one. Six years later, in June , Szilard, along with Nobel laureate James Franck and other fellow Manhattan Project scientists, signed a cautionary document known as the Franck Report, which they sent to the U.

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'doomsday. Send us feedback. See more words from the same century.

Accessed 12 Nov. More Definitions for doomsday. See the full definition for doomsday in the English Language Learners Dictionary. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. New Word List Word List. Save This Word! See synonyms for doomsday on Thesaurus.

We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms. See doom , day. Words nearby doomsday doom palm , dooms , doomsayer , doomscroll , doomscrolling , doomsday , Doomsday Book , doomsdayer , doomsman , doomster , doomwatch.

What about the argument that juxtaposes the doomsday machine with a guard and the guard with the person being guarded? Doomsday environmental predictions have held the media stage for many years; the public impact of these prognostications seems to be wearing thin. That is the doomsday scenario, which may or may not happen. From the Hansard archive. Example from the Hansard archive.

Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3. Given increases that barely match inflation, some would say that we face a doomsday scenario.

We could argue from now until doomsday about how to define an uneconomic pit. But there is no shortage of doomsday projections on which to reflect. All the doomsday predictions about the effects and outcome of the review are premature. We do not know what land will be acquired compulsorily by various authorities between now and doomsday. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.