Posted below is the short version of the statement by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (issued originally on a background of white upon black rather than black on white background, with all the racism in doing so) on the reading of the Doomsday Clock a few hours ago in Washington DC. There is a much longer statement of over 15 pages too.
It is not what anyone can dismiss with a wave of the hands just as it doesn’t necessarily mean that a nuclear war is inevitable. It is an academic exercise which can be complicit in preventing nuclear war just as it could equally be complicit in normalizing a nuclear conflagration. The Doomsday Clock is a paradoxical effort: it could provoke as much as hinder Armageddon because no two readers would interpret and understand it the same way. Nuclear bomb makers will not understand it the same way as an ordinary citizen across the world. That is why representation can cut both ways.
The point is to savour it and relax!
| Closer to catastrophe than ever before. It is now 85 seconds to midnight |
| A year ago, we warned that the world was perilously close to global disaster and that any delay in reversing course increased the probability of catastrophe. Rather than heed this warning, Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic.
Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers. Far too many leaders have grown complacent and indifferent, in many cases adopting rhetoric and policies that accelerate rather than mitigate these existential risks. Because of this failure of leadership, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board today sets the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe. |
A New York Times’ pix for 2025 reading
Reproduced below is Intervention‘s story last night:
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is reading the Doomsday Clock it has been maintaining for the past 79 years tomorrow (January 27th, 2026). The Doomsday Clock provides an estimated reading of how close to or far away from nuclear Armageddon the world is now.
Estimated to be 89 seconds away from thermonuclear midnight at the last reading, no one knows what it currently is. Judging from the current wrangling in global politics, no one will be surprised if tomorrow’s reading is much, much closer, dangerously so.
The platform has since added climate change, Artificial intelligence and information warfare (mis and dis-information) as additional sources of world-consuming catastrophes.
The members of the Science and Security Board whose opinion decides the reading of the clock do so through their answer to just two questions: (a) Is humanity safer or at greater risk this year than last year? (b) Is humanity safer or at greater risk compared to the 79 years the clock has been set?
Interestingly, the announcement coming up in the morning of January 27th, 2026 (Washington time) will be made in Washington DC where much of the global tumult originates from currently. Just as well, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists itself which came into being from scientists at the University of Chicago who were involved in the Manhattan Project from where the earliest nuclear weapons emerged are also USA based.
So, from whichever angles, the US is at the center of this global fear of Armageddon, from the scientists trying to alert the world on how far or how close to the university where the idea originated to the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace where the announcement will be made to the USA itself as the most nuclear armed power feared to be most likely to provoke a nuclear Armageddon!
Great that January 27th, 2026 is only a few hours away!
