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, 2023, 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.
