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Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

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Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

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Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Risk of nuclear catastrophe is worse than ever. We can change that

Editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says the doomsday threat is real — but human goodness will win out

Published June 15, 2026 6:30AM (EDT)

Half a lifetime ago, I had a crappy copyediting job that meant I had to drive for 90 minutes through traffic across the sprawling concrete wasteland of Phoenix. The job itself was boring and soulless, and after spending another 90 minutes getting home in my AC-free beater, I would slam several Miller High Lifes while watching the honeybees gather goodies from the invasive London rocket in my backyard. I liked seeing the fuzzy little pollinators making trips back and forth between those tiny yellow flowers because it made my own problems feel less significant, compared to insects trying to survive on plants that didn’t belong in the desert and were themselves just trying to thrive in our overheated world. If the bees and the weeds were OK, I could be OK too.

Still, for anyone paying even a little attention, this era can feel extra-doomy. It’s not just a byproduct of social media, 24/7 cable news and our shared tendency to drowning in constant updates on the sorrows of the world. War, genocide, fascism and more terrible things seem to be trending upward, while our environment gradually loses the ability to sustain our species. In essence, the threat of global catastrophe has never been higher.

As you can tell, people say I’m really fun at parties. But it’s all true. As much as I like dissociating with the latest season of “Rick and Morty” or more of that beer plus bee-vision, there’s a part of me that always lingers on the growing existential risks that face our world.

The danger of nuclear war isn’t top of mind for most people, but it’s just as alarming, if not more, as climate change, unregulated AI and outbreaks of disease. Last week, a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that we’re moving backward on the issue of nuclear proliferation in pretty much every way.

Nine countries now possess nuclear weapons — the U.S., Russia, the U.K., France, China, Pakistan, India and North Korea — and all of them are expanding and upgrading their nuclear arsenals, which now number approximately 12,187 warheads. Efforts to stop this proliferation are weakening and treaties are expiring. On June 9, the International ​Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons reported that those nine countries spent a collective $119 billion on nukes last year, with the U.S. spending the bulk of that ($69 billion), more than the eight others combined. If even one of those warheads were detonated, it would lead to catastrophe on a scale difficult to imagine and also probably would likely trigger a cascade of missiles and bombs that could make the planet all but uninhabitable.

What can be done about this? I’m not sure gazing at bugs will help, but there could be some value in returning to the roots of the issue. In the wake of the Manhattan Project that birthed the atomic era — and with it, the ever-present threat of nuclear war — people acted immediately to bring attention to this new threat. Out of these efforts came the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit academic journal that tries to raise attention to nuclear risks, climate change, biological threats and disruptive technologies.

The Bulletin is best known for its Doomsday Clock, an attempt to gauge the likelihood of a global catastrophe. In January 2026, the clock was set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest we’ve ever been to a designated zero hour. So the Bulletin’s mission seems more critical than ever. John Mecklin, current editor in chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is retiring after 15 years. I spoke with him recently  about combating despair, the dangers of ongoing conflicts such the Iran war, and what it would take to get our world to give up nuclear weapons.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When the Bulletin was founded, this idea of a global existential threat was fairly new idea, right? We’ve had plagues and climate change before, to some degree, but until the Manhattan Project, humans weren’t really in control of that kind of existential, destructive power. These days it seems like there are more different types of existentialist threat: nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, agricultural collapse, stuff like that. How has the mission of the Bulletin changed in the last eight decades?

Well, when it was founded in 1945 the technology that could end civilization, at least globally, was nuclear atomic weapons, and that’s what the scientists who founded the Bulletin were concerned about. But even early on it wasn’t the only thing they were concerned about. Eugene Rabinowitch, the first editor of the Bulletin, wrote about the Pandora’s box of technology that modern science would open. There would be other technologies that have the same global civilization-ending possibilities, and the Bulletin really began talking about climate change as one of those technology-based existential threats in the late 1950s, really. The first Bulletin cover story on climate change was in 1978 — a long time before anybody else was looking at it.

The Bulletin has always covered a whole range of scientific issues that relate to human society and policy matters. Climate was formally adopted as something we cover, I think, in 2007, as was biotechnology, which back then primarily meant biological warfare. Both the Soviet Union and the United States had some form of biowarfare research, and both always claimed it was defensive. They were making defenses against other evil people who might engage in biological warfare. Later, that biological element was sort of reconfigured into something known as “disruptive technologies.” So the Bulletin now........

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