Citing the dwindling power of arms control agreements and escalating tensions with adversarial nations, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists this week moved the hands of its symbolic Doomsday Clock 20 seconds closer to a metaphorical midnight that symbolizes the extinction of humanity via general thermonuclear war, civilization-altering climate change, or both.
In a press conference webcast from Washington, D.C., the dove-ish, Chicago-based group moved the minute hand of the symbolic clock to 100 seconds, or one minute and forty seconds, to midnight. The clock had sat at two minutes to midnight since 2018.
Increasing tensions between the United States and Iran are partially to blame, as is the failure of the United States and Russia to extend the New START nuclear arms-control treaty that sets hard caps on the number of strategic nuclear weapons those countries may deploy, said Bulletin contributor Sharon Squassoni, a professor at George Washington University whose government service included stints with the Congressional Research Service and the State Department.
The Donald Trump administration in 2018 withdrew the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or Iran deal, which sought to curb the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Subsequent reimposition of U.S. sanctions prompted Iran to increase uranium enrichment: something the old deal, deal finalized in 2015 by the Barack Obama administration, sought to prevent. Some suspect that Iran’s aspirant nuclear power program is a cover for a nuclear weapons program.
Escalating tensions between the longtime foes nearly led to war in January, when Iran fired ballistic missiles at an Iraqi air force base where U.S. military personnel were deployed. Tehran launched the attack in retaliation for the U.S. killing of Iranian special forces chief Qasem Soleimani: a trainer and sponsor of terrorists. The U.S. killed Soleimani in Iraq with a missile launched from a drone.
New START, which entered into force in 2011, will expire in February 2021 failing renewal by the U.S. and Russian presidents. The deal limits each nation to 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons deployed on a mix of 700 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers.
The Trump administration has said it prefers a new trilateral arms control treaty with Russia and China that also limits smaller nuclear weapons, Beijing has said repeatedly — most recently this week in response to an overture from U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood — that it wants no part of such a deal.
Meanwhile, the international community continues to make little progress in addressing the escalating dangers posed by climate change, the Bulletin said.
“At UN climate meetings last year, national delegates made fine speeches but put forward few concrete plans to further limit the carbon dioxide emissions that are disrupting Earth’s climate,” according to the organization’s formal statement on the Doomsday Clock update. “This limited political response came during a year when the effects of manmade climate change were manifested by one of the warmest years on record, extensive wildfires, and quicker-than-expected melting of glacial ice.”
Although it does not claim otherwise, the Bulletin does not set the clock according to a formal empirical model, and its time is not a statistic based on numerical measurements. Rather, the clock is a gut-check from a group of experts, based on current events and worst-case extrapolations of observed trends in international relations.
This year’s mark of 100 seconds to midnight is the closest the Bulletin, which in November will mark its 75th anniversary, has ever set the Doomsday Clock. The group has never set the clock further than 17 minutes from midnight: a mark it hit in 1991 as the Cold War wound down.
The Bulletin only recently started resetting the clock every year. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the U.S. deployed nuclear-armed ballistic missiles deployed in Turkey and Italy and the Soviet Union had ballistic missiles in Cuba, the clock remained where it had been set two years before, at seven minutes to midnight.
The first time the clock hit two minutes to midnight, previously its most urgent mark, was in 1953, after the U.S. and Soviet Union tested their first thermonuclear weapons. Manhattan Project scientists founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1945, the year the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II.
