THE (DOOMSDAY) CLOCK IS TICKING

Maia Lomelino (she/they) - Writer Lucy Benson - Illustrator

Almost forty years after Iron Maiden sang Two Minutes to Midnight to protest nuclear war, 2023 began with the alarming news that humanity is currently at 90 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock - midnight representing annihilation on a civilizational scale. This is the closest the Doomsday Clock has ever been to midnight — but what does that mean for us?

The Doomsday Clock is one of the many leftovers from the Cold War. It was created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a consortium of scientists involved in nuclear weapons and climate science. The clock is a metaphorical and visual representation of how close humanity is to a human-driven global catastrophe, in the Bulletin’s opinion. At the time of its creation, the clock marked 7 minutes to midnight. By the end of the Cold War in 1991, however, the clock was set back to 17 minutes to midnight; the safest humanity had ever been since the Clock’s creation. New wars and climate change, however, have pushed the minute hand ever closer to possible self-annihilation. Notably, the creation of the Doomsday Clock as a measurement of humanity’s ability to self-destruct only became necessary after the atomic bomb’s invention and first use. Arguably, before that, there was no known way in which humanity could easily cause their own extinction as a species.

In the early days of its creation, the editor of the Bulletin would be the one defining the movement of the clock; however, since 1973, the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board has met twice a year to discuss global events and set the clock accordingly. On this board, scientists and experts in the fields of nuclear technology and climate consult with colleagues in other disciplines and even Nobel Prize laureates before deciding how to set the Clock. Throughout the Clock’s history, reports on its position were released concurrently with global events, rather than once a year. Since 2015, however, the Bulletin has released annual reports on the clock’s status, with or without movement. The complete reports are available on the Bulletin’s website.

One of the many issues taken into consideration when the decision was made to move the clock 10 seconds closer to midnight early this year is the war in Ukraine.

The risk of the conflict escalating to a nuclear war presents possibly the largest threat of nuclear annihilation since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. According to the official report, “Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high.”

Critics of the Clock maintain that it should be considered more of a cultural phenomenon than an actual measurement that the world community takes seriously. Although the predictions do not seem enough to bring the world to total nuclear disarmament, at least it generates debates and hopefully some awareness of how serious things can get if world leaders decide to flip the nuclear switch.

The scientists who maintain the clock hope that keeping its predictions as a piece of mediatic news draws attention to not to how imminent our doom is but to how world organizations respond to the possible threat of nuclear war. According to Bulletin Board member Prof. Robert Rosner, the clock is “the canary in the coal mine.”

(Louise Lerner, UChicago News) What is the world ready to do if it happens, and more importantly, how can it be prevented?

The answer, of course, is highly complex, as are humans and international relations. Perhaps it is necessary to bring the clock’s meaning back into the mainstream as more than a cultural parameter if there is a wish to gather global opinions on the complexity of the contemporary world and its conflicts. Moreover, the Doomsday Clock is a reminder that we are all in the same pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan used to say, and everything that happens on the planet pertains to all humans. The official report also states: “Finding a path to serious peace negotiations could go a long way toward reducing the risk of escalation. In this time of unprecedented global danger, concerted action is required, and every second counts.” So, here is no isolation from global climate collapse, as there is no escaping the “shards” that war, be it in Ukraine, Syria, or any other country, spreads throughout the globe.