We’re once again approaching the annual resetting of the Doomsday Clock. Last January, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a group of very smart people, moved the hands of their metaphorical clock to 89 seconds to midnight, where midnight represents doomsday, apocalypse, Armageddon, extinction, or whatever you want to call it.
89 seconds! That’s the closest to midnight the clock has ever stood. What will the board, looking back at 2025, say on Jan. 27, 2026?
You can dismiss this timepiece trope as a gimmick, but you’d do so at your own intellectual risk.
The Bulletin and its clock started with Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and the other scientists who were genius enough to invent nuclear weapons and wise enough to regret their invention. To prod citizens and leaders into changing course, they came up with this metaphor of an existential countdown. At the outset, in 1947, they set the hands at 7 minutes to midnight.
It would take decades for the board to start factoring in climate change, biotechnology and pandemics, artificial intelligence and disinformation, and all the other dangers that today, underneath and beyond the headlines, menace our species in ways that we barely understand.
The new and salient worry at the time was of course the use of fission to destroy entire cities (two were already in ashes), and potentially whole civilizations.
And so the clock began filtering world events, like a scientific fan that winnows substance from trivia. In 1949, after the Soviets joined the U.S. as a nuclear power, the hands moved to 3 minutes. In 1953 they stood at 2, after tests of the first thermonuclear bomb (in which a Hiroshima-style fission blast is “merely” the trigger for a vastly larger fusion burst, in effect a sun burning on earth).
Humanity seemed to keep hurtling toward midnight, with more countries getting nukes, and even more pursuing them. In 1962, the world came close to atomic holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That gaze into the abyss, though, had a positive effect: It stirred world leaders into action.
During the 1960s, the Partial Test Ban Treaty ended most nuclear testing above ground. Almost all countries adopted the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, under which nations without nukes pledged never to make them, and the five “legitimate” nuclear powers (1) promised to start disarming.
In the early 1970s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union inked the first bilateral treaties to limit their two-way arms race. Between 1963 and 1972, the clock’s hands moved between 12 and 10 minutes to midnight — not great, but better.
But world affairs went in the wrong direction again. India got the bomb, and Pakistan would later follow suit. The two superpowers, far from disarming as the NPT obliged them to do, kept upgrading their arsenals, with demonic innovations such as MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles). Detente gave way to confrontation, and by 1984, the clock stood at 3 minutes.
Then the Cold War began thawing. In 1988, the clock went back to 6 minutes, after the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed the first treaty ever to ban an entire category of nuclear weapons (those mounted on intermediate-range missiles). In 1990, it hit 10 minutes, after the Berlin Wall crumbled, and with it the Iron Curtain.
In 1991, the clock touched 17 minutes, the farthest from midnight it has ever been. Intellectuals celebrated the “end of history” and the apparent dawn of pacific and liberal democracy for all humanity. At long last, the superpowers junked thousands of their nukes, as they had implicitly promised in the NPT. And they stopped all explosive testing of nukes, even underground.
The era of good feelings didn’t last long, though. By the late 1990s, both India and Pakistan tested fission bombs. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, caused anxiety that “loose nukes” might fall into the hands of non-state actors with nothing to lose. North Korea tested its first warhead, becoming the ninth nuclear power.
And climate change joined the board’s, and world’s, worry list. It threatens catastrophe first gradually, then suddenly: by damaging ecosystems; causing floods, storms and droughts (and thus famines); and seeding more pestilence, as species come into contact with new organisms and the thawing permafrost burps out pathogens frozen for millennia. By 2007, the clock was at 5 minutes to midnight; in 2015 at 3.
