Democracy in America | Close to midnight

The Doomsday Clock now reads two-and-a-half minutes to midnight

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved its symbolic clock 30 seconds closer to the end of humanity

By O.R. | NEW YORK

THE symbolic clock is ticking. On January 26th, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, in consultation with the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors and its 15 Nobel laureates, unveiled its latest Doomsday Clock. The current time: two-and-a-half minutes to midnight.

The Bulletin, which began in 1945 as a mimeographed newsletter published by Manhattan Project scientists, has been setting the symbolic clock for the past 70 years. Its first one, set in 1947, read 11:53pm—seven minutes to midnight. It was meant to convey to the public and to world leaders the nuclear dangers they faced—dangers sparked, of course, by the Manhattan Project itself. The closer the clock is to midnight, the greater the existential threat. And we haven’t been closer to the bell tolling for over 60 years.

And it’s no longer only nuclear threats that move the clock’s hands. It’s also climate change—which Donald Trump has called a “hoax” and “created by the Chinese”—and “emerging technologies in the life sciences.” (Think, basically, GMO pandemics and killer robots.)

Both Mr Trump’s pre-election comments and his administration’s early manoeuvres featured prominently in the Bulletin’s explanation for the current time. “Both his statements and his actions as president-elect have broken with historical precedent in unsettling ways,” its editor wrote in a statement addressed to “leaders and citizens of the world.” “He has made ill-considered comments about expanding the US nuclear arsenal. He has shown a troubling propensity to discount or outright reject expert advice related to international security, including the conclusions of intelligence experts. And his nominees to head the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency dispute the basics of climate science.”

The furthest the clock has been set from midnight is 17 minutes, in 1991, after the end of the Cold War and the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between America and the USSR. The closest was two minutes, in 1953, as America pursued a hydrogen bomb and tested its first thermonuclear device, and the Soviets tested their own H-bomb nine months later—a time we’re now, apparently, just 30 seconds behind.

The clock, of course, is easy to mock. It’s a bit of macabre public relations for the Bulletin, and the setting of its time is at least quite subjective and at most quite arbitrary. Weighting a number of unlikely but dire threats to our very existence, let alone distilling them into a single clock face, is an incredibly complicated enterprise. It’s fraught with methodological hurdles from the political to the statistical to the psychological.

But the ticking Doomsday Clock may, at least, reflect the zeitgeist. Preparedness and survivalism have become big business, supported with special fervour by the super-rich, as Evan Osnos explored recently in the New Yorker. Many are checking their symbolic watches. Helicopters are kept fuelled and guns loaded, food and gold is stocked, condos in thick cement bunkers are leased, and residency is sought in far-off New Zealand. “Preppers” see it as a wise investment for when, as they say, the S.H.T.F.

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