On Jan. 24, after a few years of quiescence, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock forward. It now stands at 90 seconds to midnight.
As it was getting more intense around the world in the last decade, the hands were slowly crawling to the vertical position. The clock was moved from three to 2 1/2 minutes to midnight in 2017. Then forward again to two minutes to midnight in 2018. The time remained unchanged in 2019, but the first signs of the pandemic and other global tensions pushed the hands to 100 seconds, or one minute 40 seconds before midnight, in 2020.
The symbolic time remained unchanged in 2021 and 2022. But this year, the war in Ukraine, with its mounting dangers and Russian threats to use nuclear weapons, along with other factors, pushed the hands forward again.
Ninety seconds or 1 1/2 minutes to midnight is the closest to the global catastrophe the Doomsday Clock has ever been, which suggests that the world hasn’t been in such danger as we are now.
The idea of this symbolic measurement was born in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, consisting of those who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, created the Doomsday Clock in 1947. The image of the apocalypse in the project was represented by midnight, and the contemporary idiom of a nuclear explosion with its countdown to zero expresses the level of threat to humanity and the planet.
Since the inception of the project, every year the Bulletin's Science and Security Board, in consultation with the board of sponsors, which includes 10 Nobel laureates, has been assessing the global situation, especially focusing on three areas: nuclear threat, climate change and disruptive technologies. And every January they'd announce the new time left until the apocalypse.
Over the past 70 years, through the times of the Cold War and other conflicts and cataclysms, the clock served as an indicator of our vulnerability to a global catastrophe caused by manmade technology.
So, when I heard the latest "time", the first thought I had was "Congratulations! We almost made it to a complete hell, and we did it all ourselves!" (with a very sour feeling). I don’t mean every individual, but us as humanity with our leaders, our priorities and our choices.
It'd be nice if we had just one party to blame for all of our problems. Usually, it's more complicated than that, but this year there actually was an outstanding actor.
Jan. 24 marked one month short of a full year for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I don't know if anyone in the world could have thought we'd still be there, comes January 2023. The 11 months of warfare took hundreds of thousands of lives, displaced millions, pushed even more into poverty, destroyed beautiful cities, and affected the well-being of the rest of the world.
It also resulted in a great deal of instability, impacting the established international relationships protocols that were helping to maintain relative global safety for a while.
War and nuclear threats slacken the global system, which directly affects the global nuclear danger index reflected by the Doomsday Clock. The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists also says that the Russian disinformation about Ukrainian plans on using biological and chemical weapons and radiological dispersal devices, which was quite widespread during the first months of the war, may indicate that the aggressor itself might be working on such technologies, which may add another layer to the global danger equation.
Not only have the conflict and the changes in international affairs shaken our little planet quite well, but they also take the focus away from other issues. They take resources away from global efforts to combat climate change, which pushes countries back or even forces them to return to old practices in order to make it through this tough time of changes, dangers and risks. But protraction now may mean even more problems tomorrow.
Unfortunately, the list of problems that probably every single country has to deal with has swollen this past year, and there are no easy or obvious solutions. We need to de-escalate the conflict, we need to get back on track with climate efforts before things go worse, we need to reconsider the approach to nuclear weapons, and we eventually may need to reconsider the entire international relationships system. As of the end of January, it didn't seem to me that we are at least moving in the right direction. And the Doomsday Clock hints that we'd better find a way that works sooner rather than later, otherwise, we'll be indeed doomed pretty soon.
