We’re once again approaching the annual resetting of the Doomsday Clock. Last January, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists – a group of very smart people – moved the hands of their metaphorical clock to 89 seconds to midnight, where midnight represents doomsday, apocalypse, Armageddon, extinction, or whatever you want to call it.

Eighty-nine seconds! That’s the closest to midnight the clock has ever stood. What will the board, looking back at 2025, say on January 27, 2026?

In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at 89 seconds to midnight – the closest it has been to global catastrophe.Credit: Getty Images

You can dismiss this timepiece trope as a gimmick, but you’d do so at your own intellectual risk. The Bulletin and its clock started with Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and the other scientists who were genius enough to invent nuclear weapons and wise enough to regret their invention. To prod citizens and leaders into changing course, they came up with this metaphor of an existential countdown. At the outset, in 1947, they set the hands at seven minutes to midnight.

It would take decades for the board to start factoring in climate change, biotechnology and pandemics, artificial intelligence and disinformation, and all the other dangers that today, underneath and beyond the headlines, menace our species in ways that we barely understand. The new and salient worry at the time was, of course, the use of fission to destroy cities (two were already in ashes), and potentially entire civilisations.

And so the clock began filtering world events, like a scientific fan that winnows substance from trivia. In 1949, after the Soviets joined the US as a nuclear power, the hands moved to three minutes. In 1953, they stood at two, after tests of the first thermonuclear bomb (in which a Hiroshima-style fission blast is “merely” the trigger for a vastly larger fusion burst; in effect, a sun burning on Earth).

Humanity seemed to keep hurtling toward midnight, with more countries getting nukes, and even more pursuing them. In 1962, the world came close to an atomic holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That gaze into the abyss had a positive effect: it stirred........

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