Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Moves Doomsday Clock to 85 Seconds till Midnight

What Happened?

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the doomsday clock to 85 seconds till midnight, the closest it has ever been since the group’s creation in 1947. According to the Bulletin’s website, ‘Far too many leaders have grown complacent and indifferent, in many cases adopting rhetoric and policies that accelerate rather than mitigate existential risks.’ 

Among the risks scientists cited to humanity were nuclear war, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and climate change. Since the end of the covid pandemic, the doomsday clock has steadily moved closer to midnight than at any time during the Cold War, with midnight representing the onset of global catastrophe. 

Why it Matters

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was founded by Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer to provide a scientific perspective on the risks facing humanity. And during the Cold War, the doomsday clock offered a way to gauge how close the U.S. and Soviet Union were to full-scale nuclear war. Though the Cold War came to an end in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, since then, the organization believes existential threats to humanity have increased, not decreased. 

The latest positioning of the doomsday clock closer than ever to midnight reflects a heightened and diversified global threat environment. During the Cold War, nuclear war was widely regarded as the biggest existential threat to human civilization but also the only one. Today, the scientific consensus has shifted towards the idea that there are multiple existential threats all facing humanity simultaneously. 

Francis Fukuyama’s much-read article ‘The End of History’ convinced many international leaders that the threat of nuclear war ended with the conclusion of the Cold War. But with the number of nations already possessing nuclear weapons growing alongside a major ground war in Asia and the development of new technologies, the Cold War paradigm of mutually assured destruction, or MAD, may no longer hold true.

Under the MAD doctrine, nuclear nations would not attack other nuclear-armed nations for fear of being destroyed themselves by retaliation. Stealth aircraft and drones, which are difficult to track on radar, have given potential attackers the capability to use nuclear weapons without warning, something that did not exist during the Cold War. In addition, regimes ruled by religious fanatics may not have the same reluctance to invite apocalyptic destruction, indeed they may even welcome it as part of the fulfillment of their own extreme belief system.

These factors taken together give the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists a credible basis to argue that the threat of nuclear war is greater today than it was during the Cold War. At the same time, the introduction of AI and biological weapons, along with an increase in extreme weather events, could create conditions more conducive to international conflicts.

Instead of working together to address these challenges, bulletin scientists rightly argue that the leaders of the largest countries in the world have instead opted for increased nationalism and hostility to each other. 

How it Affects You

The resetting of the doomsday clock does not mean the world is literally about to end, but it does indicate that, in the view of some of the world’s top scientific minds, we live in a more dangerous world than ever before. The combination of multiple existential threats and the lack of cooperation to address them means that instead of decreasing global risks, today, major nations are adding to them.