Abstract
In 1947 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists debuted "the doomsday clock" icon as a symbolic representation of how close humanity was to self-annhiliation in the nuclear age. Initially set at 7 minutes to midnight it has been changed 22 times up until the present. There are multiple issues with the "minutes to midnight" framework that are crucial to examine: to what extent a relic of the cold war has relevance today; the ramifications of the "doomsday clock" being a key exemplar of the physics community as public educators across multiple generations; and the presumption that the rhetoric of catastrophism is needed to motivate non-scientists to be cognizant of serious issues raised by scientific research and technological developments. Understanding this history has been made even more urgent today as background to the decisions the scientific community makes about how to communicate with the public about the issue of climate change.
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