Reflecting this, the doomsday clock was recently moved to 2 minutes 30 seconds, the closest it has been to doomsday in decades. That sounds ominous, but what is the doomsday clock? The doomsday clock was created by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a journal founded as a response to atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the founding editors were scientists who helped to develop atomic weapons in the first place. The clock first appeared on the Bulletinâs cover in 1947, and has appeared in the table of contents