Doomsday clock ticks forward to 89 seconds to midnight for first time

The Doomsday Clock, a symbolic device the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists uses to signify closeness to “global catastrophe,” as of Tuesday is set at the closest it’s ever been to midnight in its 78-year history.

“In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal,” the Manhattan-era science and global security nonprofit said in its 2025 statement about the Clock. “Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster,”

This year, the Bulletin named a number of what it deemed looming nuclear risks. Russia’s war in Ukraine entering its third year and the threat that “the conflict could become nuclear” was one. The conflict in the Middle East where “countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their arsenals” was another. 

The Bulletin also named the two peer plus conundrum wherein “United States, China, and Russia have the collective power to destroy civilization.”

The Bulletin also cites the spread of misinformation, artificial intelligence used for destructive purposes, emerging and re-emerging diseases, and climate change as reasons for the one-second shift.

The Clock had been set at 90 seconds for two years in a row in the years immediately prior due to the war in Ukraine and Israel’s attack on Gaza.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists  was created in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists and nuclear bomb pioneers, Albert Einstein and  J. Robert Oppenheimer. A video on the 2025 Doomsday Clock presentation can be viewed online.