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PROMPT:
On January 20, 2022, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an international organization formed of scientists, policy makers, and intellectuals formed to help discourage world destruction through careless use of human technologies, published their annual Doomsday Clock Statement.
As you are aware from reading Watchmen, which uses the icon of the Doomsday Clock as a motif to indicate a rapidly-approaching disaster within the story’s world, “Midnight” on the Doomsday Clock is meant to convey the destructive end of the world. When the world’s first hydrogen bomb was detonated in 1953, the Doomsday Clock was set at 2 minutes to Midnight.
The most recent “set” of the Doomsday Clock is a time of 100 seconds to Midnight
The Doomsday Clock Statement for 2022 (Links to an external site.) in its concluding remarks reads as follows:
“Last year, despite laudable efforts by some leaders and the public, negative trends in nuclear and biological weapons, climate change, and a variety of disruptive technologies—all exacerbated by a corrupted information ecosphere that undermines rational decision making—kept the world within a stone’s throw of apocalypse. Global leaders and the public are not moving with anywhere near the speed or unity needed to prevent disaster.
Leaders around the world must immediately commit themselves to renewed cooperation in the many ways and venues available for reducing existential risk. Citizens of the world

can and should organize to demand that their leaders do so—and quickly. The doorstep of doom is no place to loiter.”
While the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists does have a number of practical suggestions written out for international government action and for edification of civilians, a dearth of useful information does not necessarily still the kind of panic that the imminent end of the world tends to produce.
So, using your critical thinking skills and your research, develop a thesis-centered argument that answers the following three questions in detail:
1. How do we ethically stay grounded in the face of these threats to the world?
2. What imaginative resources (works of fiction) can we use for the purpose of highlighting the dire nature of these threats or to envision potential solutions? What critical theory helps guide such an interpretation of these imaginative resources?
3. Though ideally all the world-ending threats should be dealt with at the same time, what world-ending threat is shown by experts to be the current highest priority?
You will choose a fictional work apart from Watchmen (though you may of course also make use of the novel for this purpose) that will serve as your “primary source,” something closely related to your argument that will inform what you argue, and you will choose a number of “secondary sources” that will provide additional support within the body paragraphs of your essay for your overall argument.