Right Now It's 89 Seconds to Midnight Everywhere in the World!

“This clock is a stark diagnosis of our reality. At 89 seconds (to midnight) the clock stands closer to catastrophe than at any moment in its history.” —Juan Manuel Santos (recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 and today’s keynote speaker at the Doomsday Clock announcement)

The hands on the Doomsday Clock have been set again as they have annually for nearly eight decades and by definition this act signifies that in the view of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists the world has edged either further away from or closer to oblivion.

I was born in 1947, the same year the Clock was created, and remember when I was five watching a nuclear test in the Nevada desert and its mushroom cloud on television. If we ever had a “duck and cover” drill in school I don’t recall but I do remember being puzzled by a sign in front of the only public bomb shelter in the city where I grew up. It stated the maximum number of people who could fit in it was 50. At the time the population of Reading, Pennsylvania was over 100,000.

The founders did not intend for the Doomsday Clock to be seen as a prediction for how close the world might be to an apocalypse and our annihilation. No, at that time their concerns were primarily about the advent of the atomic age and specifically, the development and potential of further use of the atom bomb and that threat to humanity.

By moving the clock closer to midnight today by only one second from where it has been for the past two years, I doubt this adjustment which represents 1/86,400th of a day will set off many, if any, alarms or lead to real and significant progress toward solving the challenges our species and our planet face in 2025.

Their Doomsday Clock was originally more like a metaphor, like a string of worry beads for its originators and the rest of us to hold physically and move between our fingers while contemplating the risks that the splitting of the atom might hold existentially for our planet.

Midnight straight up on the clock represents a cataclysmic event like a nuclear holocaust actually happening and initially, 78 years ago the hands on the Doomsday Clock were set at 11:53— 7 minutes to midnight. Since then the clock has been set forward or closer to doomsday 17 times and backward and away from it 8 times. The clock is either reset or remains unchanged every January.

The year 1991 marked the furthest from midnight the Doomsday Clock has ever been set— 11:43 — and I bet with a little contemplation you can guess what happened in the world that year to warrant that adjustment. If not, I’ll tell you at the bottom of this post.

The closest the clock has been to midnight before today was in 2023 when it was set to 11:59:30. Again, I think you might come up with the event that occurred two years ago that was the reason for the second hand on the clock being moved ahead by 10 seconds.

So, who created the Doomsday Clock in 1947? Before any mention of them I think their motivation for why they did can be described with words like conscience, fear and guilt. The three creators after all had a role in creating something else first.

Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and Eugene Rabinovitch all made major contributions to America’s building the world’s first atom bomb, although only Oppenheimer and Rabinovitch actually worked on the Manhattan Project. Einstein, whose famous equation E=mc² provided the theoretical foundation for understanding the energy released in a nuclear reaction, was denied a security clearance to be with them. We humans can be oddly funny that way. Einstein was excluded from the project but if there had been no Einstein would there have been a bomb?

The first and only atom bombs ever used were dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. Their blasts caused massive destruction and the deaths of nearly 200,000 people. Almost immediately the detonations brought an end to World War II.

I guess it’s ironic as well as somewhat logical that the people who conceived what was at the time and still is the ultimate doomsday weapon would afterward be the ones to remind us that it was they who let the atomic genie out of the bottle to begin with and maybe regretted they had.

Right after the war the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was founded by Einstein and a group of others who had worked on the Manhattan Project and two years later in 1947 the Bulletin devised a measure to show how close to catastrophe it thought things might be. The concept for using a clock was the idea of the artist wife of a Project physicist.

Rabinowitch was majorly involved in shepherding the creation of the Doomsday Clock and became the individual who personally decided at what time it was to be set from its inception and for the first 26 years. His determinations were made on the basis of consulting with other scientists and conferring with political leaders around the world which he did until his death in 1973. Now, the yearly judgment is made by committee as happened today.

At its outset the primary factor in determining the clock’s setting was the perceived threat of nuclear war and nuclear proliferation but over time other dangers to the future of civilization have become apparent. That list has become longer in recent decades. Climate change was the next ominous development after nuclear obliteration to be considered and, according to the Bulletin, climate change’s increasingly dire impacts have now been joined by a new category of peril called “disruptive technologies.”

These newer dangers include the potential risks from biological weapons and cyber warfare and the spread of mis and disinformation via the internet. Most recently— Surprise! — the growth and implementation of artificial intelligence is considered a potentially ominous development.

We have witnessed the internet become a nefarious tool for the spread of untruth, hate and fraud and how drones, which were going to be a delivery air force for pizzas, have instead turned into lethal weapons of war. Artificial Intelligence is racing ahead with no barriers to its use. Will AI eventually evolve into the savior of mankind or will it create the greatest challenge to life as we know it since the invention of nuclear weapons?

Yes, I wrote this post myself but I admit that AI was helpful in my research! Years ago I would have gone to the library and made phone calls and likely taken several days instead of a couple of hours to accomplish it. But despite the benefits of AI, I fear the likelihood of it being misused and its leading to devastating consequences could outweigh them.

One statement stood out for me as I watched today’s Doomsday announcement;

“I used to believe that we believed in reason and reality as the foundations of discourse. That you could make an argument with somebody, that you could reason with… We’re moving into an environment in which reason and reality are replaced by rage and fantasy… We can’t even agree on a set of facts let alone a solution.” —Herb Lin (Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University)

We may think that our world’s end might occur because of nuclear war or climate transformation that makes the earth uninhabitable or technology that creates chaos and Frankensteins. Turning back the Doomsday Clock appears to require that we examine and even discard things we have created and grown accustomed to. And above all we have to agree we need to do it at a time when so many of us hardly agree on anything.

Oh, and those two years with events that moved the second and minute hands so dramatically on the Doomsday Clock?

1. When the Doomsday Clock was set back to 17 minutes before midnight in 1991 it marked the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union dissolved into 15 independent states and the Persian Gulf War began and ended.

2. In 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine after the Clock had been set earlier. By 2023 the war had been going on for nearly a year and concern over Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons and the increased evidence of the effects of climate change prompted the Bulletin to advance the clock to 11:58:30.