2026 prediction amid countdown to the next apocalypse
Andreas Kluth
We are once again approaching the annual reset of the Doomsday Clock. Last January, the Science and Safety Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a group of very smart people, moved the hands of their metaphorical clock to 89 seconds to midnight; here midnight represents doomsday, apocalypse, apocalypse, extinction, or whatever you want to call it.
Eighty-nine seconds! This is the closest the clock has ever been to midnight. So what will the board say on January 27, 2026, when it looks back to 2025?
You can dismiss this clock trope as a gimmick, but you do so at your own intellectual risk. The newsletter and its watch began with Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and other scientists who were geniuses enough to invent nuclear weapons and smart enough to regret their inventions. They introduced the existential countdown metaphor to encourage citizens and leaders to change course. Originally, in 1947, they set the hands at seven minutes to midnight.
It will be decades before the board begins to reckon with climate change, biotechnology and pandemics, artificial intelligence and disinformation, and all the other dangers that threaten our species today, below and beyond the headlines, in ways we barely understand. The new and salient concern of the time, of course, was the use of fission to destroy cities (two of which had already been reduced to ashes) and potentially entire civilizations.
And so the clock began filtering world events like a scientific fan extracting matter from trivialities. After the Soviets joined the United States as a nuclear power in 1949, the hands moved to three minutes. By 1953, after tests of the first thermonuclear bomb (in which a Hiroshima-style fission explosion was “merely” the trigger for a much larger fusion explosion; essentially burning the sun on Earth), the number was at two.
Humanity seemed to continue hurtling towards midnight; More countries are acquiring nuclear weapons, and even more are pursuing them. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world came to the brink of atomic holocaust.
Gazing into the abyss had a positive effect: it galvanized world leaders into action. In the 1960s, the Partial Test Ban Treaty ended most above-ground nuclear testing. Nearly all countries have adopted the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; Accordingly, non-nuclear-weapon countries pledged to never produce nuclear weapons, and the five “legitimate” nuclear powers also pledged to begin disarmament. In the early 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the first bilateral agreements to limit the two-way arms race. Between 1963 and 1972, the clock hands advanced between 12 and 10 minutes to midnight; Even though it’s not very good, it’s better.
However, world affairs went in the opposite direction again. India took the bomb and later Pakistan would do the same. Far from disarmament as mandated by the NPT, the two superpowers continued to enhance their arsenals with diabolical innovations such as MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles). Detente gave way to confrontation and in 1984 the time was three minutes.
Then the Cold War began to melt away. In 1988, after the United States and the Soviet Union signed the first treaty banning all categories of nuclear weapons (those mounted on intermediate-range missiles), the time returned to six minutes. It hit 10 minutes after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with it the Iron Curtain in 1990.
In 1991, the hour reached 17 minutes; this was the farthest midnight had ever been reached. Intellectuals celebrated the “end of history” and the apparent dawn of peaceful and liberal democracy for all humanity. In the end, the superpowers scrapped their thousands of nuclear weapons, as they had implicitly promised in the NPT. And they stopped all explosive testing of nuclear weapons, even underground.
But the period of good feelings did not last long. In the late 1990s, both India and Pakistan tested fission bombs. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led to concerns that “free nuclear weapons” could fall into the hands of non-state actors who have nothing to lose. North Korea became the ninth nuclear power by testing its first warhead.
Climate change has also been added to the board’s and the world’s list of concerns. It threatens catastrophe, first slowly, then suddenly: damaging ecosystems, causing floods, storms, and droughts (and thus famines), sowing more epidemics as species come into contact with new organisms and melting permafrost brings out pathogens frozen for millennia. In 2007, it was five minutes to midnight; in three in 2015.
In 2020, during Donald Trump’s first administration and a pandemic, the board switched to stating time in seconds: from 100 to midnight. It identified another threat in the form of “cyber-enabled information warfare.” Memes, disinformation and conspiracy theories are now spreading like viruses, confusing, distracting and polarizing societies, leaving them “unable to respond” to the existential challenges posed by nuclear weapons and the climate.
In 2023, the clocks increased to 90 seconds to midnight after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and broke the biggest taboo of the nuclear age by threatening to use nuclear weapons.
And this year it went a second further. Trump wasn’t the reason; he had taken office just a week before the announcement. Instead, it was the immediacy of all current threats and the specter of hidden feedback loops and possible “cascades” associated with our emerging “multiple crises.”
And now, a year later? It seems to me that every threat the Bulletin describes in 2025 has become more dire.
Nuclear risk, which was relatively easy to understand during the Cold War, has now become widespread. The latest arms control agreement between the United States and Russia expires in February, and both countries are “modernizing” their arsenals with new warheads, bombers, missiles and submarines.
China is increasing its stocks to catch up with the big two. North Korea is arming; Pakistan and India are always close to war and sometimes they do. Worse still, AI threatens to make many types of weapons “autonomous” and reduce decision-making time in a nuclear crisis to minutes; The frenzy of resulting psychological stresses has even reached Hollywood.
Trump has probably cured part of the problem, albeit temporarily: He has disrupted efforts to make a bomb by bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. But it has also increased the overall risk of nuclear proliferation (and the slow death of the NPT) by underestimating America’s traditional allies and making them suspicious of the US “nuclear umbrella” that allegedly protects them. From Europe to Asia to the Middle East, more countries are now considering switching to nuclear energy, as experts advise.
Trump also appears close to breaking another nuclear taboo, the moratorium on explosives testing. If the United States were to detonate a nuclear bomb again, China, Russia and other countries would do the same. And as all the major nuclear powers look to space as the next arena of war, they are designing new, more maneuverable and faster missiles that will bring death to earth.
Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and weather conditions become even more destructive. But still, America, historically the world’s largest emitter and currently the second largest emitter (after China), has officially lost interest.
As the new National Security Strategy states: “We reject the catastrophic ideologies of ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’.” The Trump administration boycotted the United Nations’ 30th climate conference in 2025 and will formally withdraw from the Paris Agreement, an agreement aimed at curbing global warming, on January 27, 2026, the day the Doomsday Clock will reset.
Also in January, the United States will officially leave the World Health Organization, whose mission is, in part, to protect and save us from the next pandemic. Domestically, Trump put anti-vaxxers and charlatans in charge of public health.
This is a continuation of the other threat the Bulletin worried about last time: misinformation and disinformation. Editor John Mecklin wrote that these are “powerful threat multipliers” because they “blur the line between truth and lies.”
Since he said that, it seems like the blur has nearly blinded us all. The board of directors will make its own decision regarding the time. Sounds like a minute to midnight if you ask me, or less.
Bloomberg
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