90 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT (=Doomsday)!

A week ago (on Jan. 23), the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced the setting of what they call the Doomsday Clock. Contrary to my expectation, the clock was set the same as last year: 90 seconds to midnight (with midnight representing “doomsday”).

For 75 years now, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been announcing the setting of the Doomsday Clock. That nonprofit organization was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and former Manhattan Project scientists. They introduced the Doomsday Clock two years later.

The first setting of the Clock was seven minutes to midnight. In 1949, with the explosion of a nuclear device by the Soviet Union and the beginning of the arms race, it was reset to three minutes before midnight.

The testing of the hydrogen bomb in 1952 led to resetting the Clock in the following January to just two minutes before doomsday. Relations between the U.S. and the USSR improved over the next few years, though, and in 1960 the hands on the Clock were moved back to seven minutes.

Over the next decades, the Doomsday Clock kept going up and down, reaching the farthest from midnight, 17 minutes, in 1991. But in 2002 it was back to seven minutes and has never been further since. In 2015 it was back down to three minutes where it started in 1947.

In January last year, the Clock was set at 90 seconds. the closest to midnight it had ever been, and it was kept at that setting last week. I expected it to be set even closer to “doomsday” because of the threat of expanding, and perhaps nuclear, war in the Levant.*

The threat of nuclear war was the main basis for setting the Doomsday Clock for the first 60 years. In 2007, however, climate change was added to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as another portentous threat to humankind, and the hands on the Clock were set at five minutes to midnight.

The announcement regarding this year’s setting of the Clock stated that there were four main considerations for determining that setting: 1) the many dimensions of nuclear threat, 2) an ominous climate change outlook, 3) evolving biological threats, and 4) the dangers of AI.**

How should we respond to the current setting of the Doomsday Clock? This question surely demands our thoughtful attention. Let me suggest three things:

1) Don’t ignore the Doomsday Clock. It would be easy to shrug off the Clock’s warning because of denial, indifference, or the unwillingness to face seriously the present predicament the world is in—or even just due to the pressure of meeting the demands of our everyday lives.

2) Don’t let the Doomsday Clock get you down. Depression, of course, is the result of feeling “down” for whatever reason. Too much attention to the Clock can certainly cause depression. Just as we shouldn’t ignore the clock, neither should we think about it “all the time.”

3) Work actively to elect candidates of the better political party, that is, the party working more consistently to deal with the dire problems besetting the whole world.

On the website linked to in the second footnote, we are told that the threats the world is currently facing “are of such a character and magnitude that no one nation or leader can bring them under control.”

They go on to state that “three of the world’s leading powers—the United States, China, and Russia—should commence serious dialogue about each of the global threats.”

Further, they contend that those three countries “need to take responsibility for the existential danger the world now faces. They have the capacity to pull the world back from the brink of catastrophe. They should do so, with clarity and courage, and without delay.”

I am not at all optimistic, though, that the three countries mentioned will even begin to do most of what is necessary to move the hands on the Doomsday Clock farther from midnight.

But I am quite sure there is much more possibility of that being done under the Democratic Party in the U.S. rather than by the MAGA party, which includes so many xenophobic people who, among other things, are also global warming and pandemic deniers--as well as deniers of the clear results of the 2020 presidential election. 

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  * I previously wrote about the Doomsday Clock in August 2020 (see here) and mentioned it briefly (here) in March 2018. Some things now are much the same, but there are some distinct differences also.

Note too that the Doomsday Clock elicits attention from around the world. See, for example, this Jan. 17 article from the Hindustan Times, an Indian English-language daily newspaper based in Delhi.

** See here for the official “2024 Doomsday Day Clock Statement” and related information.