The Doomsday Clock Is Running Out of Room

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists changed the time on its iconic Doomsday Clock this week for the first time since 2023, and, well, there may be some diminishing returns at this point. They set the clock at 89 seconds to midnight, one second closer than previously. What does one second represent on a symbolic clock designed to warn people of existential threats to humanity? Who can say.

“Our fervent hope is that leaders will recognize the world’s existential predicament and take bold action to reduce the threats posed by nuclear weapons, climate change, and the potential misuse of biological science and a variety of emerging technologies,” wrote the group’s Science and Security Board, who are responsible for assessing our collective proximity to apocalypse. This is the closest the clock has ever been to midnight — closer than in 1947 when it was first unveiled (seven minutes), closer than in 1953 when both the US and the Soviet Union began testing hydrogen bombs (two minutes), closer than 1984 when the Bulletin says US-Soviet relations “reached their iciest point in decades” (three minutes), closer than 2007 when climate change was much more clear and North Korea tested its own nuke (five minutes).

It is starting to get a bit hard, then, to take much meaning from this. The group set the clock’s hands at 90 seconds to midnight in 2023, moving it up 10 seconds thanks largely to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; the spread of state-based armed conflict is certainly top of mind for the global risk assessors out there — just last week the cadre of Haves at Davos pinpointed it as the primary risk facing the world this year. But longer-term risks like climate change don’t have quite the same Nukes of Damocles feel to them, as evidenced by, well, the ongoing global failure to do much about it. I’m not sure there’s much rhetorical space between “we are 90 seconds from midnight” and “we are 89 seconds from midnight” — does that extra second spur any particular sort of action?

To be fair, the Bulletin isn’t claiming a substantive difference, as it includes biological threats and disinformation, among other things, with the nuclear and climate risks they have been highlighting for a while. “Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster,” they wrote. Okay, sure — though I think your hands might be tied for the foreseeable future, then. I suppose you could move it a second closer each year, frog-marching us toward extinction, as a sort of reprimand for those ongoing global failures, but at a certain point you might get tuned out. And looking around, it seems like that point may already have passed.