At the dawn of the nuclear age, scientists created the doomsday clock as a symbolic representation of how close humanity is to destroying the world. On Tuesday, nearly eight decades later, the clock was set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the timepiece has ever been to midnight, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic scientists, which established the clock in 1947.
Midnight represents the moment at which people will have made Earth uninhabitable. Last year, the Bulletin set the clock at 89 seconds to midnight, which was, at that point, the closest the world had ever been to that hour. After setting the clock at 90 seconds to midnight in 2023 and 2024, the scientists made the 2025 change due to insufficient progress in combatting or regulating global challenges such as nuclear risk, the climate crisis, biological threats, and advances in ‘’disruptive technologies,’’ such as artificial intelligence. Bulletin scientists also cited the spread of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories as other existential threats to humanity.
The Doomsday clock is a tool for communicating how close we are to destroying the world with technologies of our own making. The risks we face from nuclear weapons, climate change and disruptive technologies are all growing. Last year, the Bulletin scientists warned that countries needed to change course toward international cooperation and action on the most critical existential risks. ’’Rather than heed this warning, major countries became even more aggressive, adversarial and nationalistic,’’ said Holz, another professor in the department of physics, astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago.
Conflicts intensified in 2025, with multiple military operations involving nuclear-armed states. The last remaining treaty governing nuclear weapons stockpiles between the US and Russia will soon expire on February 4. For the first time in over half a century, there will be nothing preventing a runaway nuclear arms race. Additionally, grave dangers perssist in the life sciences, particularly in emerging areas such as the development of synthetic mirror life, despite repeated warnings from scientists worldwide. The international community has no coordinated plan, and the world remains unprepared for potentially devastating biological threats.
What is the Doomsday Clock?
A group of scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, the code name for the development of the atomic bomb during World War 2, established the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as a nonprofit in 1945. The organization’s original purpose was to measure nuclear threats, but in 2007, the Bulletin decided to also include the climate crisis in its calculation. Annually over the past 79 years, Bulletin scientists have changed the clock’s time according to how close they believe the human race is to total annihilation. Some years the time changes, and some years it doesn’t. The time is set by experts on the Bulletin’s science and security board in consultation with its board of sponsors, which was formed by Albert Einstein in December 1948, with J. Robert Oppenheimer as its first chair. The board currently includes eight Nobel Laureates, many of them in physics or chemistry.
