Humanity Is One Minute from Midnight
Print/DownloadFollowing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it may be necessary to move the Doomsday Clock forward to just one minute to midnight. The world needs a new global security architecture to constrain nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles, killer pathogens, and the mounting military capability of artificial intelligence.
AMMAN – Every year since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – founded by Albert Einstein and scientists from the Manhattan Project who helped develop the atomic weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – has set the Doomsday Clock. The clock uses “the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero)” to indicate humanity’s vulnerability to man-made disasters. In January 2022, the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board set the clock for the third consecutive year at 100 seconds to midnight, marking the closest humanity has come to extinction in the last 75 years.
Barely a month after that gloomy prognosis, Russia launched a wide-ranging “special military operation” against Ukraine. Worse still, Russian President Vladimir Putin shortly afterward ordered Russia’s nuclear forces to be put on high alert, and threatened to use this arsenal should the West attempt to intervene militarily in Ukraine.
Given such incendiary rhetoric, the apparent erosion of collective mechanisms to manage conflict and global security risks, and the fact that nine countries possess a total of 13,100 nuclear weapons, it may now be necessary to reset the Doomsday Clock once again. This time, it should move forward to just one minute to midnight.
Support High-Quality Commentary
For more than 25 years, Project Syndicate has been guided by a simple credo: All people deserve access to a broad range of views by the world’s foremost leaders and thinkers on the issues, events, and forces shaping their lives. At a time of unprecedented uncertainty, that mission is more important than ever – and we remain committed to fulfilling it.
But there is no doubt that we, like so many other media organizations nowadays, are under growing strain. If you are in a position to support us, please subscribe now.
As a subscriber, you will enjoy unlimited access to our On Point suite of long reads, book reviews, and insider interviews; Big Picture topical collections; Say More contributor interviews; Opinion Has It podcast features; The Year Ahead magazine, the full PS archive, and much more. You will also directly support our mission of delivering the highest-quality commentary on the world’s most pressing issues to as wide an audience as possible.
By helping us to build a truly open world of ideas, every PS subscriber makes a real difference. Thank you.
