The group, which makes up the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, raised its nuclear-danger warning Wednesday, citing the lack of progress on nuclear disarmament and the efforts of terrorists to acquire nuclear and biological weapons.

"The vector is certainly moving in the wrong direction from our point of view in a post-Cold War world," said George Lopez, chairman of the Bulletin's board of directors.

"The record since 1991 is a record of systematic disappointment," he continued, adding: "We are maybe less close to cataclysm, but we are no closer to global security with regards to weapons of mass destruction."

In a symbolic representation of the danger level, the Bulletin moved the hands of the so-called "Doomsday Clock" two minutes forward, to seven minutes before midnight.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman did the honours in a ceremony at the University of Chicago.

The clock was created by scientists at the University of Chicago in 1947 and has been adjusted periodically since then to reflect the waxing and waning threat to the human race from weapons of mass destruction.

Midnight, originally conceived of as nuclear Armageddon, has now come to represent a more limited threat that would create "midnight on Earth" in one place, according to Stephen Schwartz, the journal's publisher.

On this occasion, the Bulletin's board decided to reset the clock because of a number of concerns -- chief among them the United States' decision to act unilaterally in some recent moves rather than in concert with its allies, Lopez told reporters.

The board pointed to the US government's decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia and President George W. Bush's reference to an "axis of evil" -- made up of Iran, Iraq and North Korea -- in his January 29 State of the Union address.

In particular, the board members regretted the administration's decision to abandon negotiations with North Korea.

"Clearly there is a great deal of concern about many of the things that the Bush administration has said and that the Bush administration has done," said Schwartz.

Other considerations included the increasing tensions between the nuclear powers of India and Pakistan in the wake of the December 13 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, and evidence that the al-Qaeda network was trying to acquire fissile materials to make dirty bombs.

Wednesday's action marks just the third time the clock -- a legacy of the Manhattan Project -- has been reset since the end of the Cold War in 1991.

It was reset in 1998 after India and Pakistan went public with their nuclear tests.

The Bulletin was established in 1945 by scientists who worked on the US government's top-secret Manhattan Project, which resulted in the creation of the world's first atomic bomb.

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