Citing “unprecedented danger” arising from Russia’s nearly year-long war against Ukraine, the peace-advocating Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on Tuesday set its Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds until midnight.
It is the closest the long-running, metaphorical clock — a consensus gut-check among dove-like experts — has ever been to the symbolic midnight hour that marks the extinction of humanity, either due to general thermonuclear war, civilization-altering effects of climate change or both.
“We are living in a time of unprecedented danger, and the Doomsday Clock time reflects that reality,” Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said in a statement on Tuesday. Ninety seconds to midnight “is the closest the Clock has ever been set to midnight, and it’s a decision our experts do not take lightly. The US government, its NATO allies and Ukraine have a multitude of channels for dialogue; we urge leaders to explore all of them to their fullest ability to turn back the Clock.”
The clock had been set at 100 seconds to midnight since 2020. Its previous high was two minute to midnight, which it touched in 2018 and 2019. In 1984, when the heavy metal band Iron Maiden released their single “Two Minutes to Midnight,” the Doomsday Clock was set at three minutes to midnight.
The last time the clocked touched two minutes to midnight before the turn of the century was in 1952, not long after the U.S. and the Soviet Union tested thermonuclear weapons for the first time.
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. The clock wound back as far as 17 minutes to midnight in 1991, near the end of the Cold War.
