2025-08-09
52 分钟The Economist.
It's precisely 1 minute and 29 seconds to midnight.
It's been that time since January.
It will be until next January.
The doomsday clock is set once a year by a non-profit called the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
And this year they set it as close as they ever have to midnight.
The notional time of, like, serious existential world-ending catastrophe.
Look, it's not a precise measure,
but it is saying something that the last time this group of experts moved the clock back was in 2010.
This week, the world is marking the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Our Archive 1945 project has been reliving the end of the war through the coverage The Economist put out at the time.
Our podcast Babbage has been running a whole series on the past,
the present, and the future of atomic weapons.
That future is very real.
Ask those atomic scientists and they'll tell you it's maybe not a distant one.
It's a time to reflect on the first use of that horrible force in war, the only use so far.
History books and dusty photographs are a terrible substitute for the real human stories of that day.
But what happens when the humans behind those stories are gone?
I'm Jason Palmer, and this is The Weekend Intelligence.
My colleague Noah Snyder has been speaking to some of the last witnesses,