Doomsday Clock Moves to 85 Seconds, the Closest to Midnight Ever

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight on Tuesday, the closest the symbolic timepiece has ever stood to the hour of global catastrophe. The new setting moves the hands four seconds forward from 89 seconds a year ago, which had itself been a record, according to the University of Chicago, where the Bulletin’s science and security board is based, and ABC News.

The clock, created in 1947 by scientists tied to the Manhattan Project, is a warning device rather than a forecast. It stood at 90 seconds in 2023 and 2024, and its farthest point from midnight was 17 minutes in 1991, after the administration of President George H.W. Bush signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union, ABC News reported.

The Bulletin’s board pointed first to nuclear risk. The last remaining treaty limiting U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, known as New START, is set to expire in early February. “For the first time in over half a century, there will be nothing preventing a runaway nuclear arms race,” said Daniel Holz, a University of Chicago physicist who chairs the board, in the university’s account. The university’s report also cited military conflicts between nuclear-armed states.

The board listed other pressures as well. The University of Chicago said they include slow progress on climate change, the rise of what it called nationalistic autocracies, and the unchecked spread of generative artificial intelligence, which can fuel misinformation. ABC News added biological threats and other disruptive technologies to the list.

Maria Ressa, the journalist and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, tied the clock’s movement to the information environment. “We are living through an information armageddon,” she said, according to the University of Chicago. ABC News reported her argument that shared facts are essential if societies are to act together on any of these threats.

Alexandra Bell, the Bulletin’s president and chief executive, framed the change as a call to act rather than a counsel of despair. “Every second counts and we are running out of time,” she said, per ABC News. The university’s account says Bell also stressed that humanity still has time to fix problems it created. Rachel Bronson, a former Bulletin chief executive, said, “We never really want to get there, and we won’t know it when we do,” ABC News reported.

Not everyone treats the clock as a precise instrument. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, called it “an imperfect metaphor” in earlier remarks to CNN, which ABC News cited.

The Bulletin added climate change to its assessment in 2007, according to ABC News, and has since widened its scope to biological threats and disruptive technology. This year’s announcement leaned most heavily on arms control. The expiring treaty is the last remaining U.S.-Russia pact limiting nuclear stockpiles, and the board said its lapse would remove those limits.

The University of Chicago said that last summer it hosted a nuclear risk assembly that drew 13 Nobel laureates and more than 40 nuclear experts.