The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ famous Doomsday Clock ticked another 30 seconds toward midnight on Thursday, illustrating the organization’s increased fears of global annihilation at the start of the Trump administration.
The minute hand on the 70-year-old metaphor dropped from three minutes to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, closer than the world has been to perceived eradication since 1953, when it was set at two minutes in the wake of the first U.S. and Russian test of hydrogen bombs.
The Bulletin’s board of science and security experts had never before reset the clock by just half a minute, and said the decision was based on the fact that President Donald Trump as of Thursday had been in office less than a week and “has had little time to take official action.”
“Just the same, words matter, and President Trump has had plenty to say over the last year,” the Science and Security Board said in a prepared statement. “Both his statements and his actions as president-elect have broken with historical precedent in unsettling ways. He has made ill-considered comments about expanding the US nuclear arsenal. He has shown a troubling propensity to discount or outright reject expert advice related to international security, including the conclusions of intelligence experts. And his nominees to head the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency dispute the basics of climate science.”
Trump has made a number of attention-getting statements regarding nuclear weapons, including suggesting during his campaign it would be better for nations such as Japan and South Korea to develop their own deterrents rather than relying on U.S. protection. Just before Christmas, he tweeted that the United States would need to significantly augment its nuclear deterrent “until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” He followed that up by reportedly telling MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski that the United States would come out on top of a nuclear arms race.
Still, Thursday’s 30-second tweak is much less than the prior update to the Doomsday Clock, when it went from five minutes to three minutes to midnight in 2015. Dangers at that time included increasing U.S.-Russian tensions, “unchecked nuclear modernization programs” in all nuclear-armed states, and insufficient global action to address climate change, Rachel Bronson, the Bulletin’s executive director and publisher, said Thursday in the clock update event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Once focused solely on nuclear disaster, the Bulletin’s experts now consider the dangers posed by climate change and advances in other technologies in setting the clock. The news in 2016 was mixed at best in all of those areas, they said.
On the nuclear proliferation front, according to the board, North Korea conducted two nuclear tests and a steady of stream of missile launches; the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty still has not entered into force; the future of the Iran nuclear deal is in question; and the United States, Russia, and other nations are advancing major nuclear deterrent modernization programs.
“There are close to 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world. The United States and Russia each have at least 5,000 weapons apiece,” said Lawrence Krauss, chairman of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, at Thursday’s event. “There is no rational reason to need a greater arsenal than 5,000 weapons. Already it’s excessive, far more than the world needs.”
The entry into force of the international Paris Agreement on climate change and seemingly flat greenhouse gas emissions were a good sign, but the global community as of 2016 has still not begun to move toward net-zero emissions that would be necessary to prevent worldwide temperature rise from reaching potentially disastrous levels, the board said.
The report also notes the myriad threats to cybersecurity – highlighted by hacking of the Democratic National Committee during the election, but also development of “autonomous machine systems” that could pose an existential danger if not properly regulated.
Progress in synthetic biology, meanwhile, has the potential to be turned toward development of biological weapons or misuse of genetic material.
Finally, the Bulletin expressed deep worries about world leaders’ willingness to ignore science and expert advice. “There is a troubling propensity to discount or outright reject expert advice related to international security, including the conclusions of intelligence experts,” Bronson said, a clear reference to Trump’s skepticism of U.S. intelligence agencies findings’ that Russia meddled in the presidential election.
There was no primary factor among those varied threats in determining the update to the Doomsday Clock, Thomas Pickering, a veteran U.S. ambassador and member of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, told reporters. “Rather than picking favorites we hope you will pick the lot and tell people that it is the … congregation of this set of activities that put us on the trail of further moving the hands forward.”
To head off that threat, the Bulletin urged people worldwide to demand that their leaders take a number of steps, including: renewed U.S.-Russian nuclear arms reduction talks; engaging with North Korea to reduce the nuclear threat posed by the Kim Jong Un regime; pressing ahead with greenhouse gas reductions to prevent global temperature rise from creeping above 2 degrees Celsius; and establishing entities to consider and deter “potentially malign or catastrophic misuses of new technologies.”
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was established in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. The organization’s Science and Security Board and Board of Sponsors, which includes 15 Nobel Prize recipients, each year determine whether to move the Doomsday Clock’s minute hand.
