Doomsday Clock is 85 seconds to midnight

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the world has ever been to global catastrophe in its estimation. The announcement, on January 27 in Washington DC, reflects a darkening security landscape marked by eroding nuclear norms, escalating conflicts in Europe and Asia, climate and biological risks, and a fracturing international order.

The new setting moves the clock forward from its previous position of 89 seconds to midnight from a year ago.

“Last year, we warned that the world was perilously close to catastrophe and that countries needed to change course towards international cooperation and actions on the most critical existential risks,” SSB Chair and University of Chicago professor Daniel Holz said. “Unfortunately, the opposite has happened. Rather than heed this warning, major countries became even more aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic.”

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project. The Doomsday Clock was created two years later, in 1947, as a metaphor for the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe.

The Bulletin’s foremost concern seems to be nuclear weapons. Recent rhetoric from the Trump administration regarding the potential resumption of nuclear testing and the modernisation of atomic stockpiles is already destabilising decades of deterrence strategy, fuelling anxiety among both allies and adversaries.

“The last remaining treaty governing nuclear weapon stockpiles between the U.S. and Russia expires next week. For the first time in over half a century, there will be nothing preventing a runaway nuclear arms race,” Prof. Holz said.

He also cited the worsening consequences of climate change, AI’s effects on mis- and dis-information, and what he called the “rise of nationalistic autocracies” — referring to the recent events in Minnesota and the “erosion of the constitutional rights of American citizens” — to support the Clock being less than a minute and half from midnight. He also expressed concerns about synthetic mirror life, lifeforms whose genetic material is a mirror-image of that of conventional life and which scientists have said can evade natural protections if they escape into the wild.

The Clock was farthest from midnight in 1991, when the end of the Cold War pushed it 17 minutes away. Since then it has drifted closer, with a brief respite in 2010 following the Copenhagen climate summit and Washington and Moscow taking steps towards the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties) agreement. It was 90 seconds to midnight in 2023 and 2024, then 89 and finally 85 seconds today.