Essay by Eric Worrall
But if Congress overrides President Trump on renewable energy the world can win a reprieve.
It is now 85 seconds to midnight
2026 Doomsday Clock Statement
Science and Security Board
Bulletin of the Atomic ScientistsEditor, John Mecklin
January 27, 2026
Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes eight Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by man-made technologies.
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It is now 85 seconds to midnight
A year ago, we warned that the world was perilously close to global disaster and that any delay in reversing course increased the probability of catastrophe. Rather than heed this warning, Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic. Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers. Far too many leaders have grown complacent and indifferent, in many cases adopting rhetoric and policies that accelerate rather than mitigate these existential risks. Because of this failure of leadership, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board today sets the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe.
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Even as the hands of the Doomsday Clock move closer to midnight, there are many actions that could pull humanity back from the brink:
- The United States and Russia can resume dialogue about limiting their nuclear arsenals. All nuclear-armed states can avoid destabilizing investments in missile defense and observe the existing moratorium on explosive nuclear testing.
- Through both multilateral agreements and national regulations, the international community can take all feasible steps to prevent the creation of mirror life and cooperate on meaningful measures to reduce the prospect that AI be used to create biological threats.
- The United States Congress can repudiate President Trump’s war on renewable energy, instead providing incentives and investments that will enable rapid reduction in fossil fuel use.
- The United States, Russia, and China can engage in bilateral and multilateral dialogue on meaningful guidelines regarding the incorporation of artificial intelligence in their militaries, particularly in nuclear command and control systems.
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Read more: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2026-statement/
Not all the Manhattan Scientists were on board with the Bulletin’s gloomy view of the world.
Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, very much one of the Manhattan scientists, was an early critic of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ gloomy view of the world. Teller and Bulletin founder Robert Oppenheimer had a serious split, especially after Teller claimed in 1954 testimony that Oppenheimer’s should not have a security clearance, despite Teller also testifying he did not believe Oppenheimer had leaked or was going to leak any secrets. In the 1930s Oppenheimer had significant ties to the academic communist movement, via his stormy relationship with communist radical girlfriend Jean Tatlock, though there is no evidence Oppenheimer ever passed any secrets to the Soviet spies who kept trying to recruit him. Teller also apparently harboured concerns Oppenheimer might be working to undermine progress on Teller’s H-bomb project. The US Department of Energy vacated the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 2022, though by then all of the main players including Oppenheimer were long dead.
Teller also wasn’t a fan of climate alarmism, as PBS discovered to their embarrassment in 2012.
Freeman Dyson, who missed out on being one of the Manhattan team, but was a significant figure in the mid 1900s nuclear science community, also wasn’t a fan of climate alarmism.
But no doubt this “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” charade will continue. After all, one of their founders was Einstein.
My only question, when will they move to advancing by small fractions of a second? After all they’ve already burned through most of 7 minutes, they’ve only got 85 fake doomsday seconds left before we hit midnight, and it would all be terribly embarrassing if they ran out of time before the world ends.
Perhaps they’ll start rationing doomsday predictions, or find embarrassingly weak excuses to wind the clock back a bit.
(Sorry to delete very first comment. This was a triggered rant I don’t want floating around on the Interwebs)
We all make them. 🙂
I like a good rant 🙂
Now you have just left it to our imaginations, and many of us have very vivid ones!
More doom, gloom, and fear. Somehow, despite the clock time bomb, we’ve managed to decrease world hunger, decrease world poverty, increase our standards of living, and increase our lifespans.
Doubtlessly, Macklin will soon tell us that is all because of bad data
Yes – except in the NET_ZERO world leader, the United Kingdom!
The Doomsday Clock is set annually by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ‘Science and Security Board’. I was curious as to its membership, so looked them up. Not an atomic scientist among them. Chaired by failed former California Governor Jerry Brown, whose nickname was ‘Governor Moonbeam’. Applies here also.
Are there any “atomic” scientists left anymore? It’s such a 1940’s description. Maybe Betty Crocker was a member?
It’s all pure speculation anyway.
It is similar to the pure speculation of World Weather Attribution.
Jerry Brown’s opinion of something is not definitive.
Chicken Littles gotta cluck .
BOK ! BOK !
Bunches Of Krap
😉
That Doomsday clock might have had some use during the height of the Cold War. Their partisan attitude first came to my attention when Reagan was elected and they reflexively moved it closer. My recollection is that they never moved it forward when the Moscow elite changed, or European elite, only for the American President. It didn’t take much to write them off as just more partisan one-world-government hacks. Anyone dumb enough to think one world government would not fragment, or that it could rule without coercion, is too damned dumb to pay any heed to. And now they’ve branched out into global warming. What an achievement!
The dice is loaded towards doomsday scenarios, always. For a simple reason. There are many more ways of being dead than there are of being alive.
And it take just one slipup to be dead, while staying alive requires eternal vigilance.
amen!
I disagree. There is only one way to be dead. That is to be dead.
There are many ways to be actually dead 🙂
Brain Dead – Al Gore
Walking Dead – Joe Biden
Zombie dead – Mike Mann
Vampire Dead – Lefties
All could be covered under the one descriptor of “Principles Dead”.
Might want to add trans-reality alarmist….
To be is a single state. Lots of ways to get there.
That would be an 8,000,000:1 ratio.
He who controls the hands of the clock actually controls nothing but publicity, like all the other publicity hounds.
The Doomsday Clock holds less meaning than climate models, and that’s actually hard to do.
Kind of like the Pulitzer, the Oscars, and the Nobel Peace Prize.
Even though the DDC can and has moved backward, overall, the trend is forward. Just another Kabuki dance.
The next glacial age will probably cause a lot of civilizational difficulties. The last one iced over everything North of about 38 degrees. Unfortunately, it takes several thousand years for the ice to set in like that. Fortunately, Washington DC is just North of 38 North.
I guess if anyone at the DDC is noticing over the next several thousand years they can advance the clock at a glacial pace
Sweet sarcasm is always a nice morning treat…My insufficiently caffinated frontal lobe says thanks for the chuckle.
With all the hot air generated in D.C. (politics) it is doubtful there will ever be a glacier.
Never mind the Doomsday Clock. We need to be concerned with the Cuckoo Clock. The Climate Caterwaulers and the Climate Industrial Complex, by my estimation have moved us to less than a minute before institution-level insanity.
Also a good chuckle.
Another tipping point that never tips.
Just turn the hands on the d@mn thing to Midnight and see what does or doesn’t happen!
They have somewhat less credibility than Al Gore.
No one can be that bad !!
The real gag would be moving it to 5 after
It’s taken 79 years to advance ~5 ½ minutes (4.17 secs/yr)
Stop panicking, there’s plenty of time, it’s a 24 hr clock.
So we have another 12 hours, 1 minute & 25 sec to go.
At the same rate of advancement, that’s approx 10,380 yrs (Middle of the next full Ice Age)
There were about 528 nuclear weapons detonated in the atmosphere over a period of about 18 years until the practice was stopped in 1963. One of those bombs was the biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated. It was by the Soviets. That’s about 30 per year, yet civilization survived. No doubt John Meklin will claim that if it had been 529, we would all be dead or never born. Some people can’t get over their feeling of overwhelming self-importance, but then I guess it makes a living for him.
Even if the high-end AGW warming scenarios ever did happen, it would be so far into the future that there’s no justification for setting the clock so close to midnight (besides, nuclear winter would cancel out global warming 😉).
I’ll bet someone isn’t happy with The Donald.
Ha – even Greta got bored with climate alarmism, though she did managed to vandalise the city of Venice, Italy a few months ago.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/greta-thunberg-banned-venice-grand-canal-protest-b2871264.html
Oops, for a minute there, I misread the clock to say “Official Bullshit of Moronic Scientists.” My bad.
It was Congress that eliminated the renewable’s subsidies, not Trump.
Do outfits like this serve any useful function? It seems to me their sole purpose for existence is to bother and scare people.
Do outfits like this serve any useful function?
Does anyone even pay attention to it anymore?
85 seconds? Heck with it. Let’s just get it over.
I’m old enough 85 seconds is about the length of time to remember what I was just doing.
So you are in pretty good shape then Randle.
Let’s have the end of the world party first!
Do the clocks tick faster in Minneapolis, Portland, and Chicago?
I checked the Copernicus global temperature for yesterday (27th). It came in 0.4 C cooler than the previous two years. If you believe all the climate hoopla (which these folks clearly do) then the doomsday clock should have increased the time.
I was at a conference with Edward Teller in 1982. Nuclear proliferation was one of the many topics discussed.
He was a VERY opinionated man.
However, when questioned regarding the basis for his opinion, he would go into as much depth and background as you wanted to hear.
No gratuitous “appeals to authority” from him!
It would have taken balls of steel to throw Oppenheimer under a bus at the height of his popularity. But given Oppenheimer’s flirtation with Soviet connected academics I think it was the right thing to do.
Can’t scare the youngers like that, they can only tell time on a digital clock.