No quarrel with their directional moves ... now or at any other time. But they've ended up in the incongruous situation of saying that 2017 at this very moment is already more risky than the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, or Barry Goldwater's mutterings about nuclear options in Vietnam in 1964, or the China-Russia border war of 1969.
No. Simply no. They missed the chance in the early 1990s to move the clock back to about 3 p.m., giving themselves much more room to create carefully graduated increments of alarm as fresh stresses arose. The current state of play in the USA deserves much more than a 30-second adjustment, and somewhat less than a declaration that it's 2 1/2 minutes before midnight. I can think of at least a dozen ways things could get worse before we're at imminent risk of breathing radioactive isotopes for the (annoyingly short) rest of our lives. Some of those perils already popped up in the 1950s/1960s, and we made our way through them.
The current clock settings hardly do justice to the scientific method, or the rightful role of subject experts in public debate.