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Is humanity safer or at greater risk this year than in 2021?
The symbolic measure known as the Doomsday Clock continues to hover at 100 seconds to midnight, unmoved from last year and 2020, when COVID-19 first spread. The reading matches the closest distance to midnight, meaning the most worrisome, in the report’s 75-year history.
Each year, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists decides whether to nudge the clock closer to midnight, or the hour of “doom.” The panel of mostly scientists, risk and security experts asks whether humanity is safer or at greater risk compared with a year earlier. Focus tends to be on nuclear and other conflict risk, climate change and the impact of disruptive technologies.
Last year, the clock stood at at 100 seconds to midnight, matching the level of risk assigned in 2020 when the globe saw its first signs that a devastating pandemic was taking shape. That’s the closest to midnight in the history of this symbol.
A mutating COVID-19 was a key point of worry to these risk-watchers in 2021, as was the the early-January attack on the U.S. Capitol and any threat of violence associated with it.
“Steady is not good news,” said Sharon Squassoni, the panel’s science and security board co-chair.
“In climate change, rhetorical progress is not yet matched with swift actions,” she added.
“In the current environment where we have neither arms race stability, nor tension stability, tensions over Ukraine are ominous, and with China, efforts to craft a strategic stability are in their infancy,” she said.
But the Bulletin is optimistic about technological advances to mitigate existential risks and push toward common good, she said.
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For 75 years, the annual Doomsday Clock has acted as a metaphor for how close humanity is to self-annihilation. but since 1947, it has also served as a call-to-action to reverse the hands, which have moved backwards before.
Songs by The Who, Iron Maiden, Hozier and others have mentioned the Doomsday Clock.
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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which includes 13 Nobel laureates and is based in Chicago, was founded in 1945 by Manhattan Project scientists.
The clock stood 17 minutes away from midnight at the end of the Cold War, its greatest distance to date.
