Doomsday Clock Moved to 100 Seconds to Midnight Today

January 23, 2020 – The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists today moved the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock twenty seconds closer to midnight. The Clock’s board includes 13 Nobel laureates, former municipal, state and national government figures, scholars from some of the top universities in the world, eminent journalists, and former members of the military. Founded in 1945 at the University of Chicago by scientists who helped to develop the atomic bomb, the Doomsday Clock is reset every year in consultation with its board and attempts to measure the current state of the world’s vulnerability to impending catastrophe, whether it be from war, global arms races, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, disruptive technologies, or climate change.

In today’s announcement the full statement begins as follows:

“Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.”

What surprised me is that it didn’t single out the state actors who are the culprits in this escalation of insecurity that the world faces: No mention of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un, the U.S. Republican Party, Mark Zuckerberg, and a few others of notoriety that have proved to be actors in the global drama that is pushing humanity closer to an existential crisis.

The Doomsday Clock announcement pointed to these eight trends:

1. We are moving closer to a nuclear war started by design, blunder, or miscommunication.
2. Climate change is happening and being largely ignored by those with the power to implement the changes in our economies to mitigate it. The 60 or so countries committed to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions represent only 11% of all global emissions. The rest of the world talks but does little to act. And the energy giants continue to explore for and increase fossil fuel use in pursuit of profit while misinforming the public about the urgency of the climate threat.
3. The truth is being subverted by a new media environment that spreads misinformation without challenge from authorities, which creates fake audio and video recordings almost undetectable from the real thing, and that makes it hard to discern truth from fiction. And leadership increasingly manipulates the truth undermining the public’s belief in national institutions and government.
4. The United States has abrogated arms and nuclear control agreements likely setting off a series of new arms races.
5. The relationship between the most powerful countries and blocks is being eroded by populist leadership in several nations.
6. The arms race is moving into outer space creating a new danger from the high ground and moving away from 70 years of principled and peaceful exploration of the cosmos.
7. The unipolar world that followed the fall of the Soviet Union has gone multipolar with China challenging the U.S. for ascendancy creating potential flashpoints that could start a regional war that could soon escalate to a global and nuclear one. The Doomsday Scientists state: “Any belief that the threat of nuclear war has been vanquished is a mirage.”
8. Advances in technology are disrupting economies and society from the rise of artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, biological weapons, space weapons, hypersonic weapons, autonomous kill drones, and even eugenics.

The anti-science movement in the United States is particularly a problem whether it be anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, or a disdain for facts, what the data shows and the experts in universities and company laboratories. Propaganda, once associated with dictatorships, has now become the means to indulge in prejudice, bias, and ideology, spreading false and manipulative messages to millions.

The twenty-second move toward midnight puts the world nearer to doomsday than at anytime during the Cold War when the United States and Soviet Union faced each other with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.

So what can be done? These are five steps the Atomic Scientists believe need to happen if we are to move the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock further from midnight: