The Death of the Doomsday Clock

For the last few years, the rollout of the clock on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been a flop. This year was the worst. People on my Bluesky timeline didn’t know what it meant, or worse, mocked it. What does a change of 4 seconds mean on a base of 89 seconds? I certainly don’t know.

The clock originally represented the opinion of a group of experts on the probability of nuclear war. It went back and forth over the years, coming closest to midnight (nuclear war) during the Cuban missile crisis. That made a certain kind of sense.

But a few years back, the board dumped a bunch of things into the mix: nuclear weapons threats, the disruption caused by artificial intelligence, biosecurity concerns (deliberate and natural), and climate change. I have no idea how all those things can be put into one measure. Al Mauroni gives it a try and gives more background on the clock. I agree with Al and have an additional concern. It’s time to drop the clock.

This week, the last of the arms control treaties lapses. Arms control is dead. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are killing lots of other things – both human and our expectations of how the world works. I believe we will wrest back control, but it will not be the world in which those treaties were negotiated. We will need new forms, new agreements, new expectations.

Arms control tamed the wild nuclear excesses that bloomed through the first three decades of nuclear weapons. We have eliminated tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and have made the world safer through the attitudes and beliefs those changes fostered. But the world has been different, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and when Trump and Putin are out of power, it will be different from today. I don’t know what that world will look like, and neither do you.

The old appeals to public concern about nuclear weapons have been inoperative since around the time we lost the Soviet Union as the ultimate enemy. The 1990s were a time when people wanted to believe we didn’t have to think about nuclear weapons ever again. The appeals of the 1960s, and even of the 1980s, lost their power. Global warming took their place as the apocalyptic threat.

But the arms control community, the people who publish The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, did not change along with the public. The clock is one indication of this.

The pulse of arms control slackens, the breathing becomes hoarser. We know that the end comes Thursday. There will be something new after that.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner