Putin's War Nudges the Global Risk "Doomsday Clock" Closer to Midnight
The metric has shifted from minutes to seconds. Is it still useful?
Updated, Jan. 24, 2022, 12:30 pm Eastern - The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that its advisory council has moved the “Doomsday Clock” to 90 seconds to midnight after the risk metric was set at 100 seconds since 2020.
Unsurprisingly, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the prime driver of the rise in risk, as the Doomsday Clock statement explains:
“Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks. And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high . . .. Russia has also brought its war to the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor sites, violating international protocols and risking widespread release of radioactive materials. Efforts by the International Atomic Energy Agency to secure these plants so far have been rebuffed.”
Here’s the YouTube stream link:
These are the questions I asked in a Sustain What webcast with organizers last year, the 75th year since the reports and ritual began (watch that fascinating discussion below in the original post):
Is it time to move beyond measuring the probability of doom to something else? If so, what? (Click here for a clue to my thinking.)
Where would you set the clock hands if you think this is a useful gauge?
How would you answer the smart Bulletin of Atomic Scientists "Turn Back The Clock Challenge?
Here’s my Sustain What post from the 2022 Doomsday Clock reveal. I think it’s worth recirculating because so many of you are new to Sustain What since I moved to Substack.
Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists organization has been counting minutes to midnight (and lately seconds) as a gauge of global risk. The effort emerged with the intensifying cold war risk of nuclear catastrophe.
The clock hands have wiggled away from doom or back 24 times since then, with a big wiggle of relief, for instance, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Lately they've ratcheted forward as more threats have emerged or interlaced, including global warming, the online disinformation explosion and anti-democratic zeal.
The particular focus is the threats humanity poses to itself through reckless use of the technologies our species has explosively developed in the past century and which - so far - have helped us thrive in astonishing ways. And that's the tension here. How long does the party last - and for whom? Mutually assured destruction led to sustained peace. Fossil fuels have so far produced vastly more thriving than suffering. So far.
Tick. Tick.
Since the pandemic took hold in 2020, the clock has been stuck at 100 seconds to midnight.
The 2022 setting was determined by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board with input from a Board of Sponsors (an external assemblage of luminaries including more than a dozen Nobel Prize laureates).
Notably, TheBulletin.org website appeared to crash, but the show went on on Facebook and YouTube. The site is live again so please read the analysis, then weigh in below.
Blah, blah, blah, bang
Having written about humanity's "blah, blah, blah, bang" habit of risk management for far too long, I always pay attention, although I do also track critiques and think Steven Pinker and his ilk have made solid points noting the clock's inconsistencies.
As the clock-setting team has long stressed, the hand setting is a metaphor more than a solid metric.
As I'd note, we're all playing on a field fogged by persistent deep uncertainty, allowing a host of interpretations and prescriptions. Response diversity facing big challenges is both desirable and inevitable. The philosopher Phil Torres wrote a helpful exploration of that debate for The Bulletin magazine and also read the anthropologist Dean Falk's great Sapiens essay.
What's the setting on your planetary stress clock?
For the 2022 release, I hosted a Columbia Climate School Sustain What webcast with members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' "Doomsday" team and some remarkable friends who spend all their waking hours focused on how to manage both foreseeable and unforeseeable threats.
Watch and share on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (go to my Twitter account @revkin at showtime).
All of my guests have appeared on previous sessions of my Sustain What webcast and I guarantee you'll find their perspectives invaluable.
I'm asking you the same questions I asked them:
Is it time to move beyond measuring the probability of doom to something else? If so, what? (Click here for a clue to my thinking.)
Where would you set the clock hands if you think this is a useful gauge?
How would you answer the smart Bulletin of Atomic Scientists "Turn Back The Clock Challenge?
Here is the challenge:
"Our belief is that because humans created these problems, we have the obligation and opportunity to fix them. So, in the 75th year of the Doomsday Clock, we’re asking people to share their ideas about what can be done to turn back the Clock."
They ask you to share "positive actions that inspire you, people or groups who are making a difference, how you and your community are helping to make the world safer."
They're looking for art, writing, videos, songs and hoping you'll spread your thoughts on social media using the hashtag #TurnBackTheClock.
Read
The designer Michael Bierut, whose firm Pentagram updated the logo for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2007, wrote a marvelous piece for The Atlantic on the origins of the clock and its iterations - excerpted from his book, How to.
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Parting Shots
The artist John Allen, a neighbor of mine in the Hudson River Valley, created this wonderful, awful piece, called "Pending" - a decade ago.
My mother in law has a microwave oven with a magic button that seems apt.
Good article!
Well, the clock is a PR device, and obviously not a scientific tool. I think it works as a PR device, because well, here we are talking about it.
I recently had the pleasure of a conversation with Lawrence Krauss, a well known scientist who publishes on substack at: https://lawrencekrauss.substack.com/. What makes him even more relevant to this conversation is that he used to be a chair of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, those who run the clock.
I suggested to Krauss that the science community might threaten to go out on strike so as raise alarm and bring additional focus to the important issues the Bulletin addresses. That argument is here: https://www.tannytalk.com/p/nukes-what-new-can-scientists-do
Krauss disagrees, and in doing so I sense he accurately represents the views of the science community at large. But what this mean is that the science community is sending two conflicting messages regarding existential risk, particularly in the case of nuclear weapons. There's what they say, and what they do, each arguing with the other.
ALARM: Here's a public statement from Krauss and 1,000 other scientists, which articulately makes the case for alarm: https://lawrencekrauss.substack.com/p/a-statement-from-scientists-on-the
COMPLACENCY: But by declining to even consider a temporary strike by scientists, what the science community is communicating with their ACTIONS is that it's safe for us to continue with the status quo. We want bold changes, but we're not willing to change anything boldly.
I don't mean to pick on scientists here, whom I see as being overwhelmingly people of good intentions. But this conflict between words and deeds sadly does seem to accurately represent our entire culture on the subject of nuclear weapons. We talk the talk, but don't walk the walk. Everything is supposed to change, except for us and how we think.
Andy writes, "we're all playing on a field fogged by persistent deep uncertainty".
On the current course of pervasive nuclear weapons denial, the only thing that is uncertain is the when and how of the coming calamity, not the IF. The argument here is beyond simple.
1) It's simply not credible that we can keep nuclear weapons around forever and they will never be used. To believe this is to completely ignore human history and the human condition.
2) Our society as a whole currently has almost exactly no interest in even discussing nuclear disarmament.
3) Therefore, well, you can figure out this part.
If it's true that we are drifting cluelessly towards a nuclear catastrophe, then questions like this should arise.
Why are we even doing more science? Who is it that we think we'll be passing the knowledge down to?
Krauss is a good guy, and he showed considerable patience in responding to my inconvenient questions for which I continue to thank him. But I'm afraid Krauss has no answer to such inconvenient questions, and I suspect the Bulletin doesn't either. It's not even clear to me that they appreciate the value of inconvenient questions. And to make things even worse....
Krauss and the others at the Bulletin are way, Way, WAY ahead of almost all other intellectual elites on these topics. As example, I've spent years now trying to interest academic philosophers in our relationship with knowledge, the driver of all these technological risks. They couldn't be less interested. https://www.tannytalk.com/p/our-relationship-with-knowledge
So, what to do? How can a person respond constructively to the nuclear weapons threat? What we can do is simple. We can fight against nuclear weapons denial disease by talking about nuclear weapons in any place we can. It doesn't really matter what our opinion on any particular angle is, we don't need to be experts, we need only speak the words.
Nuclear weapons.
If anyone would like to write 426 articles explaining why I'm completely wrong about all of this, that would be great! Just keep talking about nuclear weapons, any way you can.
The challenge: "Our belief is that because humans created these problems, we have the obligation and opportunity to fix them. So, in the 75th year of the Doomsday Clock, we’re asking people to share their ideas about what can be done to turn back the Clock."
1) Let us stop pretending that what we've been doing for 75 years is working. Let us stop doing the same things over and over while expecting different results. Letting go of the well intended, but failed, efforts of the past seems a precondition for a willingness to seriously examine different approaches. New approaches? Like what?
2) Leverage instead of talk. As just one example, instead of scientists making strong statements which nobody listens to, they can go out on strike. And then people will listen, because the scientists have applied leverage. Contacting politicians and telling them they won't get our vote and donations until nuclear weapons is their primary issue is another example. Leverage means taking away some benefit that people want so that they will listen, negotiate, and change behavior. What leverage do we have, and how can we apply it so as to interrupt the sleepy status quo?
3) Prepare for the next detonation. First, let us stop pretending there might not be a next detonation. Just say it plainly, the next detonation is coming. Period. Nuance is the enemy here. Second, what constructive action can we take after the next detonation happens, and consciousness raising about nuclear weapons is no longer needed? How can we prepare today for what is likely to be a coming turning point moment?
4) Shift some focus to the source of all the technology based existential threats, our outdated relationship with knowledge. Example: If we did get rid of nuclear weapons, that's not going to matter that much so long as the knowledge explosion continues to generate new threats of vast scale faster than we can defeat them.
5) Embrace unpopularity. If the things we want to hear could take us where we want to go, we'd already be there. So we need to explore that which we don't want to hear, which is probably going to make us unpopular. We can be good sports and accept this price tag with a smile, while dodging any incoming tomatoes.
6) Keep business out of it. Once any of us become dependent on making a living talking about any existential threat we become prisoners of the status quo. We can't travel too far beyond our audience without losing our customers, and thus we become chained to our audience's limitations. That is, money interferes with real leadership.
7) Get on the climate change bus. Climate change denial is vanishing, which is great. Next step, inform citizens that the most likely outcome of a failure to manage climate change is geopolitical instability leading to war leading to the use of nuclear weapons. Start where people already are, and help them think it through to the end. Climate change and nuclear weapons are not two issues, but one.
8) Create an online discussion forum (NOT social media!) where nuclear weapons experts, activists and regular citizens can have intelligent _in depth_ conversations about existential threats. I would have already created such a forum myself, but I know that intellectual elites won't show up if a non-elite hosts the forum. So if intellectual elites want to be real elites, they'll either have to take the lead here, or get over the notion that their job is to talk at the public and about the public, instead of with the public.
9) As a fall back position, we can give some positive constructive thought to the alternative to success. What if we fail at managing existential threats, and most of us die, what then? What is death? Is there any credible evidence that life is better than death? Have we assumed the worst about death from a position of fear and ignorance? What, if anything, can we learn about death from philosophy, religion, near death experiences, meditation, nature or other modality of our choice? We're all going to die somehow someday anyway, so such an investment in reflection will probably prove useful whatever happens with existential threats.
10) I'm pooped. You do this one for us, ok?