WASHINGTON – The world needs a wake-up call, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says.

By inching the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock – which symbolizes how close the world is to catastrophe – a minute closer to midnight (or world elimination) Tuesday, board members of the science organization said they hope political leaders will heed this call to action.

The time now is five minutes to midnight, and the need to craft policies and educate the public on the dangers of nuclear proliferation, climate change and the hunt for sustainable, safe sources of energy has heightened, the scientists said at a Washington news conference.

“Unfortunately, Einstein’s statement in 1946 that ‘everything has changed, save the way we think,’ remains true,” Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, said in a statement.

The world has backtracked since 2010, when the hand of the Doomsday Clock, at the University of Chicago, was literally – and metaphorically – wound back from five minutes to six minutes to midnight.

In December 1945, scientists who helped develop the first atomic bomb took a step back and stood in awe at the powerful weapon they had created.

“(They) were frightened to death and wanted governance of the weapons,” Robert Socolow, a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at Princeton University, said in an interview.

That fear was channeled, and the Doomsday Clock was born.

Every year, leaders of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – which works to share information on nuclear weapons, global climate change and new technologies – deliberate on whether to shift the clock’s minute hand.

“We are auditors of the state of the world,” Socolow said.

And with 19,500 nuclear weapons deployed worldwide, the state of the world is in critical condition, board members said.

Board members warned Tuesday that all-out nuclear war could blow up the world several times over. They said leaders of nuclear power-seeking countries – such as the United States, China, Iran, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Israel and North Korea – have failed to act on a treaty to ban all nuclear explosions.

But he group’s members said they found hope in last year’s grass-roots efforts such as the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement in the United States and political protests in Russia.