GLOBAL APOCALYPSE GLOSS* : MASTER ESSAY

'' DOOMSDAY clock ticks closer to catastrophe.'' The Doomsday Clock, a metaphorical timepiece showing how close humanity is to destruction, is now 85 seconds from midnight. 

It is the grimmest outlook yet on our future rom the clock's creators, a nonprofit organisation and publication called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Tensions between nuclear powers, failures in climate action, disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence and the rise of autocracy are among the reasons that the Bulletin's experts in global security, climate and nuclear science cited for advancing it four seconds from last year.

'' Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline, and we are running out of time, '' said Alexandra Bell, president and chief executive of Bulletin. '' Change is both necessary and possible, but the global community must demand swift action.''

Antinuclear activists were paying attention to the Doomsday Clock - especially those working with the survivors of the atomic bombings in Japan at the end of World War II.

'' This is a warning that we need to take urgent action to avoid global catastrophe,'' Hideo Asano,  coordinator of the Japan Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in Tokyo, said in an interview.

'' We should know that the risk of nuclear war is the highest since the end of the Cold War.''

The nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union was the primary concern when the clock was invented in 1947.

At the time, the people involved with the Bulletin included Albert Einstein and some of the scientists who made the first nuclear weapons, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The clock was first set at seven minutes to midnight, and it has fluctuated throughout its history.

Critics have dismissed the clock as a stunt based on subjective assessments. Others have said that its repeated warnings of total annihilation could become the public policy equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.

When the Cold War's tensions rose, the clock's hands moved forward. Intermittently it was wound back - when the two nuclear armed superpowers showed signs of cooperation in the 1960s and when they signed a major arms control treaty in 1991, a few months before the Soviet Union collapsed.

This Master Essay Publishing continues. The World Students Society thanks John Yoon.