The Earth is getting hotter. Wars are raging in the Middle East and Ukraine, and each one raises the risk of nuclear war. AI is creeping into nearly every part of our lives, even though it’s unpredictable and prone to making things up. Scientists in labs are tinkering with new, deadly pathogens that could be worse than Covid. Our ability to handle another pandemic has weakened. The Doomsday Clock—a large, numberless clock—keeps ticking, counting down the seconds until the end of the world. Tick. Tick. Tick. In January, we reached 85 seconds to midnight. Experts say humanity has never been this close to the edge.
“What we’ve seen is a slow, almost sleepwalking march into greater dangers over the last ten years. And these problems are getting worse. Science is advancing faster than we can understand it, let alone control it,” says Alexandra Bell, CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the group that sets the Doomsday Clock. She talks about a “complete failure in leadership” in the US and other countries, which are doing little to address global, catastrophic threats, even as these threats feed into each other. For example, climate change fuels more conflict around the world, and adding AI to nuclear decision-making is, frankly, terrifying.
View image in fullscreen: Alexandra Bell at home in Washington DC. Photograph: Stephen Voss/The Guardian
“The more weapons that exist, for longer periods of time, the more likely it is that something will go wrong.”
Bell speaks over a video call from her office in Washington DC, which is decorated with a huge world map, Day of the Dead cushions, and a framed print of Barbie placed over a mushroom cloud—a gift from a colleague inspired by the Barbenheimer trend, because in this field, a sense of humor helps.
Bell, who has spent most of her career working on nuclear arms control, believes that because nuclear bombs haven’t been used since 1945, the public has developed a false sense of security. We don’t like to think about how much luck has played a part. “We’ve been lucky, because the odds aren’t in our favor. The more weapons that exist, for longer, the more likely it is that something will go wrong,” she says—though she quickly adds that diplomatic disarmament and peace efforts have also been very important.
The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 in response to the threat of nuclear war, by a group of nuclear scientists from the Manhattan Project who wanted to warn the public and politicians about the dangers—the destruction they had helped unleash on humanity. The time is usually set once a year, though the setters say they can change it more often if events call for it. They are members of the Bulletin’s science and security board, a group of leading scientists, academics, and diplomats who aim to reach a consensus each year on where to set the clock’s hands.
The Doomsday Clock is a symbol. It turns complicated conversations about existential threats into something measurable and easy to understand. It’s a wake-up call, designed to push leaders and citizens to take action and stop humanity from destroying itself. It has become a cultural icon. On the Bulletin’s website, you can download a playlist of songs inspired by the clock, from the Clash, Pink Floyd, and the Who to more recent artists like Bright Eyes, Linkin Park, Hozier, and Bastille.
But can the Doomsday Clock help humanity buy more time—and if so, how? And what can the people who set it teach us about how to think about and respond to the risk of global catastrophe?
1947: The first clock is set. It’s seven minutes to midnight.
After the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, many nuclear scientists felt deep shame and guilt over their role in creating the world’s deadliest weapons. That year, a group of 200 scientists connected to the University of Chicago’s cryptically named Met Lab—which had been tasked with studying the structure ofA group of scientists from the Manhattan Project, concerned about uranium, formed an organization called the Atomic Scientists of Chicago to educate the public about the dangers of nuclear energy. In December 1945, they published their first bulletin—a print newsletter—urging Americans to “work unceasingly for the establishment of international control of atomic weapons” and warning that “all we can gain in wealth, economic security or improved health, will be useless if our nation is to live with the continuous dread of sudden annihilation.”
As the group grew to include more Manhattan Project scientists, they dropped “Chicago” from the name and turned the bulletin into a magazine. Early contributors included J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein. The scientists understood that nuclear energy had given humanity the power to destroy itself. They correctly predicted that as science advanced, it would reveal new, potentially apocalyptic technologies, and it was crucial for the public to be well-informed about emerging risks.
The clock itself was a happy accident. It was created by Martyl Langsdorf, an artist and the wife of a Manhattan Project physicist, who was hired in 1947 to design a new cover for the magazine. A clock seemed like a good way to symbolize the scientists’ sense of urgency, and she set it at seven minutes to midnight simply because it looked good on the page.
For the next three decades, the time was set by Eugene Rabinowitch, a former biophysicist at the Met Lab who edited the Bulletin. A 1960s Time magazine profile describes him as a short man with a “jaunty blue beret” and an “ineffaceably cheerful smile” who “bears small resemblance to a prophet of doom.” But Rabinowitch was clearly haunted by his role in developing the bomb. He said he had wondered, in the lead-up to Hiroshima, whether he should leak news of the impending nuclear attack on Japan to the press. In 1971, he told the New York Times he would have been right to do so.
1949: The clock moves. It’s three minutes to midnight.
In 1949, the Soviet Union successfully conducted its first nuclear test, and the nuclear arms race began. Rabinowitch decided to move the clock’s hands for the first time, from seven to three minutes to midnight. Scientists are not “intent on creating public hysteria,” he wrote in an editorial accompanying the change. “We do not advise Americans that doomsday is near and that they can expect atomic bombs to start falling on their heads a month or a year from now; but we think they have reason to be deeply alarmed and to be prepared for grave decisions.”
In the following years, Rabinowitch moved the clock sporadically in response to events. He changed it to two minutes to midnight in 1953 after the development of the hydrogen bomb, and then back to seven minutes to midnight in 1960 to reflect increased cooperation between Cold War powers. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis—the 13 days when humanity came closest to nuclear annihilation—happened between issues of the Bulletin and didn’t prompt an immediate clock change. Instead, Rabinowitch pushed it back to 12 minutes to midnight the following year, in response to the Partial Test Ban Treaty. He moved the clock hands several more times, but in 1972 it was back at 12 minutes after the US and USSR committed to reducing ballistic missiles. Rabinowitch died in 1973, and from then on, the clock was set by a committee.
1991: The Cold War ends. It’s 17 minutes to midnight.
The furthest we have been from midnight was at the end of the Cold War. The Bulletin’s board of directors set the Doomsday Clock at 17 minutes to midnight.It was minutes to midnight, and they argued that “the world has entered a new era.” Humanity had made more progress in reducing the risk of nuclear war than the founders ever thought possible. The original design of the clock didn’t even allow the hand to go back further than 15 minutes.
[Image description: Dr. Leonard Rieser, chairman of the Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, moves the hand of the Doomsday Clock back to 17 minutes before midnight, 1991. Photograph: Chicago Tribune/TNS]
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the Bulletin struggled financially. The fears that drove its founders seemed, for a short time, to belong to an earlier age. But history came roaring back, and the clock kept ticking.
2007: A modern Doomsday Clock. It’s five minutes to midnight.
In 2005, Kennette Benedict was appointed executive director of the Bulletin and tasked with turning the struggling magazine around. Benedict, an academic, had worked for many years at the MacArthur Foundation (best known for its “genius grants”), and she knew many of the Bulletin’s founding members. At the foundation, she had worked with Rabinowitch’s son, Victor, and Ruth Adams, Rabinowitch’s research assistant, who later became editor of the Bulletin. She used to attend the legendary cocktail parties hosted by the artist Langsdorf.
Until then, the Doomsday Clock was updated with little fanfare. Benedict saw that it could become the magazine’s most powerful public communication tool. In 2007, she held a major press conference to announce the decision to move the clock from seven to five minutes to midnight, in response to North Korea’s nuclear tests, Iran’s atomic ambitions, and the growing threat of climate change. She brought in high-profile scientists, including Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees, to take part. “It made a huge splash,” she recalls. “People were hungry for this. They wanted to know.”
[Image description: Kennette Benedict. Photograph: thebulletin.org]
Benedict turned the clock-setting and the press conference into an annual event. She hired renowned designer Michael Bierut to update the clock’s design, which became the Bulletin’s logo. And, most controversially, she broadened its focus. From then on, the Bulletin’s science and security board would not only consider the risk of nuclear meltdown but also other human-made threats, like climate change and disruptive technologies. Critics accused her of “diluting” the Bulletin’s message, and the clock-setters’ debates became more complicated and heated. Benedict recalls one scientist arguing that the irreversible consequences of climate change were so catastrophic that midnight had already passed.
“All science and technology can be used for good or bad. They have dual uses. Starting with fire: it can heat our homes and burn down our houses,” Benedict tells me when we meet in her apartment in downtown Chicago. The Bulletin’s founders understood this. Rabinowitch spoke of the “Pandora’s box of modern science.” The modern Doomsday Clock aims to encourage better protections against the dangers that come with scientific progress. The first step to action is awareness, and true awareness is not just knowledge but feeling.
On a clear day, you can see all the way from Benedict’s apartment to the University of Chicago, where she now teaches a course on nuclear policy. At the start of each course, she asks her students to read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, an account of the bombing told through the stories of survivors. She tells her students: “My basic philosophy is that the truth shall set you free. And I’m going to share as much as I can. But first, it’s going to make you miserable.”
And yet, like many of the people I speak to, Benedict says her work on the Doomsday Clock has left her optimistic. She is reminded that humanity has pulled itself back from the edge before. “The historyThe history of nuclear weapons, at least since the end of the Cold War, is actually pretty hopeful: we used to have 70,000 nuclear weapons, and now we have around 10,000 or 12,000. That’s proof of concept, right?” she observes.
2020: The clock starts counting in seconds. It’s 100 seconds to midnight.
Six years ago, the Doomsday Clock moved from two minutes to 100 seconds to midnight. The Bulletin pointed to insufficient arms control, lack of action on climate change, the rise of misinformation, and the threats posed by AI. At the time, Rachel Bronson, Benedict’s successor, compared the clock’s new time to the two-minute warning in American football: “The world has entered the realm of the two-minute warning, a period when danger is high and the margin for error is low.” The doomsday time has stayed so close to midnight that it’s been measured in seconds ever since.
“The question often is: how do you go to work every day?” Bronson says, when we meet for coffee in Chicago. But her time leading the Bulletin didn’t leave her feeling hopeless. “I think, like anything, the more involved you are, the more optimistic you can be, just knowing that there are really good people working on these issues and amazing innovations happening.” Bronson noticed during regular science and security board briefings that people were always more worried about the dangers they hadn’t studied. “Whatever your expertise is, you think someone else’s is scarier, partly because it’s always scarier when it’s unknown,” she says.
While working on this article, I saw how easy it is to tune out of conversations about how the world might end. Apocalyptic scenarios are so frightening that it can feel easier to ignore them, or to bury your knowledge and anxiety somewhere out of reach. But those who have spent their careers studying doomsday futures seem to find courage in facing the terrifying facts, thinking about them long enough to start seeing possible solutions. It’s another reason, if you need one, to avoid the head-in-the-sand approach.
There are, understandably, limits to Bronson’s optimism. She talks about how scientists and the public keep being let down by politicians, who fail to take decisive action or follow expert advice. “I’m so bullish on the science, but I’m so pessimistic on the politics,” she says.
2026: Inching toward doomsday. It’s 85 seconds to midnight.
In January, the clock was set to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. Within four weeks, AI expert Gary Marcus argued on the Bulletin’s website that humanity was already “significantly closer to the brink,” after a showdown between AI developer Anthropic and the White House revealed Trump’s determination to give the military unrestricted access to AI. A recent study found that in simulated war games, leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google chose to use nuclear weapons 95% of the time.
Two days later, the US and Israel began bombing Iran, raising the risk of nuclear war. “Further escalation or expansion of the conflict could lead to actions driven by miscalculation, misperception, or madness, as President Kennedy once said,” warned Alexandra Bell, who succeeded Bronson as president of the Bulletin in 2025. From the start, she worried about the lack of a plan to secure Iran’s nuclear materials, and that other countries would conclude that having nuclear weapons is the only way to stay safe.
“If we get the bigger issues wrong – especially if we get the nuclear problem wrong – nothing else matters.”
I ask Bell about what drives her work. As a child growing up in a small town in North Carolina, she remembers being very concerned about the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, and she wrote…She wrote to then-US President George H. W. Bush, accusing him of paying too little attention to the environmental disaster. She received a reply from the White House that said something like, “Thanks for your letter, keep reading books.” “And I was like, ‘This is unacceptable!’ That lack of response has really driven me over the years,” she says. Many people feel powerless when facing big, geopolitical problems like climate change or nuclear war, but Bell believes they underestimate themselves.
“I can assure you, elected leaders care about what their constituents call them about. So, the idea that people don’t have agency is not true,” Bell says. The history of nuclear arms control was shaped by public action, and only public pressure will encourage global leaders to act decisively and together to address the threats facing humanity. Bell says she understands that voters have many other pressing concerns, like the cost of living, healthcare, or crime. But in an almost-perfect echo of the Bulletin’s first public statement, she says: “The message we’re trying to get out is you’re going to have to care about these bigger issues, too. Because if we get them wrong – particularly if we get the nuclear problem wrong – nothing else matters.”
The future: Learning to think in atomic time
One wet Chicago evening, I meet Daniel Holz, the University of Chicago astrophysicist who chairs the Bulletin’s science and security board. The board meets at least twice a year and stays in regular contact in between; Holz has the tricky job of making sure the experts can agree on where to set the clock. He feels that with each passing year, the work feels more urgent. One senses the work can become all-consuming. He booked a family holiday in Japan for the spring – and found himself including official meetings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Among certain academics and Silicon Valley doomsayers, it has become popular in recent years to talk about one’s p(doom) value – the probability one assigns to the world ending. Most people find it hard to think in probabilistic terms, though, and the clock provides a simpler, more symbolic way to express the dangers facing humankind. Because it is a symbol rather than a scientific measurement, Holz says the clock-setters need to consider the psychology of how the time will be interpreted. “If people feel powerless and so petrified that they can’t engage, then we’re making things worse. That’s something I think about a lot,” he says.
Earth is this tiny, irrelevant speck. If we blow ourselves up, the universe is not going to save us. Which means it’s up to us, right?
It strikes me then that the clock’s usefulness lies partly in its ability to bypass our deepest fears and the limits of our imagination. You can track the clock’s hands and feel moved to action, even if you find it hard to truly contemplate the end of the world. The scenarios the Bulletin’s board discusses – a nuclear winter, the lab leak that kills all biological life – can be so awful that most people need help to accept they could really happen. They need to learn how to shift their perspective. Holz says that his day job, studying black holes, has helped him grasp the importance of working on existential risk. “Cosmology is very good at giving perspective. When you study this stuff, you definitely get a strong sense of how insignificant we are here on Earth, which sounds bad but is actually very empowering. The timescales, the length scales, are so vast, and here we are, this super tiny, little irrelevant speck. You quickly realise the universe is not going to save us … If we blow ourselves up, no one will notice or care,” he says. “Which means it’s up to us, right?” A nuclear winter is about the biggest disaster most humans can imagine – and yet, from the perspective of the universe, it is practically a non-event. “I taughtIn a class yesterday, someone asked: if we blow ourselves up in a nuclear war, would anyone else in the galaxy notice? And the truth is, it would be really hard to notice. You’d have to be very close,” he says.
I haven’t quite learned how to think about humanity’s future from a cosmic perspective, but the next morning I meet a scientist who helps change my outlook. It’s a damp, gray early spring day, and I travel to a Chicago suburb to meet Dieter Gruen. In his early twenties, he worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and later joined other scientists in calling for action to protect the world from nuclear conflict. Gruen is 103 years old, still working—he’s involved in efforts to build more efficient solar panels—and remarkably energetic. His long life gives him a unique view on today’s political problems, and I wonder (or maybe hope) that outliving other global crises might make him more optimistic than most. It’s a week after the US declared war on Iran. Gruen keeps a copy of the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Bulletin magazine on the side table next to his leather armchair, and he looks serious. This morning, he read media reports that Iran claims to have enriched enough uranium to build about 10 nuclear bombs. Does he agree with the Bulletin that the world is in greater danger than ever? “I feel like I’ve never felt before,” he says gravely. What about during the Cuban missile crisis? “Well, that was pretty bad,” he admits. But somehow, this feels worse.
What do you think, he asks me then, are you worried? I tell him that while it’s not rational, the idea of a nuclear apocalypse is so terrible that my brain just won’t hold onto it. Global, existential risks rarely make it onto my long and anxious list of daily worries. He looks at me with some confusion. “Yes,” he says. “That’s not rational.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the phrase The odds are not in our favor and the topic of the Doomsday Clock
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What does The odds are not in our favor mean in this context
It means that based on current global threats humanity is facing a higher risk of catastrophe than a safe outcome The Doomsday Clock is a visual way of showing those bad odds
2 What is the Doomsday Clock
Its a symbolic clock created by scientists to show how close humanity is to destroying itself Midnight represents global catastrophe
3 Who decides where the hands of the Doomsday Clock are set
A group of scientists and experts called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board They consult with a board of sponsors that includes Nobel laureates
4 Is the Doomsday Clock a real clock that tells time
No Its a metaphor It doesnt tell the time of day it shows a threat level The closer the hand is to midnight the greater the danger
5 What does it mean if the clock is set to 90 seconds to midnight
It means the experts believe humanity is facing an unprecedented level of danger Its the closest the clock has ever been to midnight signaling that the odds of a global disaster are very high
6 What are the main factors that move the clock closer to midnight
The biggest factors are the risk of nuclear war climate change disruptive technologies and the spread of misinformation
Intermediate Advanced Questions
7 Why was the Doomsday Clock created in the first place
It was created in 1947 by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project They wanted to warn the public about the existential dangers of nuclear weapons
8 Can the clock move away from midnight
Yes The clock has been moved backward several times For example it was moved to 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 after the Cold War ended and the US and Soviet Union signed major nuclear arms reduction treaties
9 How do climate change and misinformation affect the odds
