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Way back in 1947, the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago wanted to indicate how close the human race was to annihilating itself via a symbol on the cover of its publication.

The Board chose a clockface – the L.E.D. countdown clock had not yet been invented – showing 'minutes to midnight' where midnight represents world destruction by nuclear war.

Artist Martyl Langsdorf came up with the clock idea and she reportedly placed the minute hand at seven minutes to midnight purely for design reasons.

The idea of moving the minute hand came two years later and every couple of years since the Board has moved it backwards or forwards reflecting on how likely someone was going to start The Big One.

The clockface is worked in to the cover design of its magazine each issue.

On January 17th, 2007 the Board announced it moved the clock two minutes forward to 11:55 p.m.

The Board said fears over "a second nuclear age" prompted largely by standoffs with Iran and North Korea and urgent warnings of climate change played a role in their placement of the hand.

"The dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons," said Kennette Benedict, director of the Bulletin.

Stephen Hawking, the renowned cosmologist and mathematician, said that global warming has eclipsed other threats to the planet, such as terrorism.

"Terror only kills hundreds or thousands of people," Hawking said. "Global warming could kill millions. We should have a war on global warming rather than the war on terror."

The clock last moved – to seven minutes to midnight from nine – in February 2002 in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the anthrax scare in the United States, nuclear proliferation issues and a U.S. foreign policy favouring unilateral action over international diplomacy.

It seems all those issues had one thing in common.

While the Board is citing today's times as the "most perilous period since Hiroshima and Nagasaki," here at the Last Link we can't but feel all this was an over-reaction to new standards set for the implementation of Daylight Savings Time.

In the spring of 2007 clocks were changed in North America on the second Sunday in March – three weeks earlier than in the previous forty years.

Trouble is, not everybody in the world was in synch when the morning rooster came crowing in spring 2007, and perhaps those wacky atomic scientists felt the resulting sixty minutes of mass confusion would have provided opportunity for ne'er-do-wells to take advantage of sleepy-headed defence folk the world over.

Yes, moving the Doomsday clock was a wake up call, and an early reminder to re-set clocks and upgrade operating systems pronto.

And hopefully it was a strong enough message to Washington to wake up and smell the coffee, where the flavour of what's been brewing has been one of discontent.

For more about this alarming method of keeping time, visit the Wikipedia Doomsday Clock entry.

For more about Daylight Savings Time and the mini-Y2K problem, visit the CBC News In Depth: Daylight Time entry.

web watch 2007 - the times they are a changing