The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists kept their metaphorical Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight on Wednesday, citing development of hypersonic weapons, missile defense systems and dual-use weapons-delivery systems over the past 12 months, the dove-ish, Chicago-based group said during its annual clock unveiling.
“By our estimation, the potential for the world to stumble into nuclear war — an ever-present danger over the last 75 years — increased in 2020,” the group wrote in a press release. “An extremely dangerous global failure to address existential threats—what we called “the new abnormal” in 2019 — tightened its grip in the nuclear realm in the past year, increasing the likelihood of catastrophe.
The group said these assessed dangerous were partially offset by the Joe Biden administration’s decision to seek a five-year extension of the New START nuclear-arms control treaty with Russia. The Russian federation inched toward final approval of the extension Wednesday, though Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, had yet to authorize the move himself at deadline.
While it does not say otherwise, the Doomsday Clock is a long-running gut-check by the Bulletin, not a numerical analysis, intelligence report or probability estimate. The time indicates humanity’s proximity to a metaphorical midnight hour that symbolizes the extinction of humans and the eradication of human civilization due to general thermonuclear war. Since 2007, the Bulletin’s calculation has also included the potential for civilization-alternating climate change.
The Bulletin, which marks its 76th anniversary this year, has never set the clock further than 17 minutes from midnight: a mark it hit in 1991 as the Cold War wound down. This is the second year in a row the group has assessed the time as 100 seconds to midnight: the closest to midnight the clock has ever gotten.
The Bulletin did not always reset the clock annually.
Before nudging the clock to 100 seconds til, the Bulletin had it at two minutes to midnight for 2018 and 2019.
The clock first touched two minutes to midnight in 1953, after the U.S. and the Soviet Union tested thermonuclear weapons. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bulletin did not adjust the clock, which remained at seven minutes to midnight at the brink of nuclear war. By the next year, 1963, the Bulletin had nudged the clock back to 12 minutes to midnight.
