The Doomsday Clock is now Closest We’ve Ever Been Because of a Failing World Order
✒️:. Ikkz Ikbal
It is now 85 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock, the closest humanity has ever come to symbolic global catastrophe.
The decision announced this week by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was not designed to alarm for effect. It was measured, careful, and quietly disturbing. After reviewing the global security landscape, the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board moved the Clock forward from 89 seconds to 85, concluding that today’s risks are no longer isolated. They are reinforcing one another. Nuclear instability, climate breakdown, unchecked technological power, biological vulnerability, and the erosion of international cooperation are converging into a single, accelerating danger.
The Doomsday Clock is not a prediction of the future. It is a warning system—an attempt to communicate, in simple terms, how close the world is to disaster of its own making. Midnight represents catastrophe. Every second closer suggests that safeguards are weakening while threats intensify. In that context, a four-second shift is not marginal. It signals deterioration.
Just a year ago, the Bulletin warned that the world was already dangerously close to the edge, and that delaying corrective action would increase the probability of catastrophe. That warning, the Board now says, was largely ignored. Instead of stepping back, major powers—including the United States, Russia, and China—have grown more aggressive and more inward-looking. Long-standing agreements and shared understandings are unraveling, replaced by a winner-takes-all competition that leaves little room for restraint.
At the center of this regression is renewed nuclear danger. The arms-control architecture that once helped prevent escalation has steadily eroded. Treaties have collapsed or been abandoned. Military doctrines are shifting. Nuclear weapons are no longer discussed only as deterrents of last resort, but increasingly as tools of pressure and strategic signaling.
This normalization is deeply dangerous. Deterrence depends on clarity, communication, and rational calculation—conditions that are eroding. History offers no reassurance. Misjudgment, accident, and escalation have repeatedly brought the world to the brink. Today’s geopolitical environment, marked by weakened diplomacy and hardened rivalries, leaves even less room for error.
Running alongside nuclear risk is the accelerating climate crisis. Despite decades of scientific warnings, global action remains fragmented and insufficient. Record temperatures, extreme weather events, water stress, food insecurity, and climate-driven displacement are no longer distant possibilities; they are reshaping societies in real time.
Climate change has become a threat multiplier. It deepens inequality, intensifies conflict, and strains already fragile political systems. Yet international cooperation remains hostage to short-term political interests. What science demands and what politics delivers continue to drift dangerously apart.
Biological risks form another pillar of the Clock’s assessment. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed serious weaknesses in global preparedness—failures in surveillance, coordination, and trust. While the immediate crisis has passed, many of the underlying problems remain unresolved. Investment in public health is uneven, misinformation persists, and systems for early warning and collective response remain fragile.
The Bulletin cautions that future biological threats—whether naturally emerging or deliberately engineered—could prove even more destabilizing. In an interconnected world, pathogens move faster than politics, yet responses remain largely national and reactive.
Compounding these dangers is the rapid advance of disruptive technologies. Artificial intelligence, cyber warfare, and digital misinformation are evolving faster than ethical norms or regulatory frameworks. These tools are increasingly embedded in military systems, political processes, and information ecosystems. Deepfakes corrode public trust. Cyber operations blur the line between war and peace. Technological progress, when left unguided, is becoming a destabilizing force.
Hovering over these threats is a broader political decay. Multilateral institutions are weakening. Dialogue is giving way to confrontation. Cooperation is increasingly framed as weakness, while nationalistic autocracies gain ground.
The Science and Security Board is clear: the primary responsibility for reversing this trajectory lies with the world’s most powerful states. Their military, economic, and technological dominance gives them disproportionate influence over global risk. Their choices matter more than anyone else’s.
The Clock’s history shows that it has moved backward before. Eight times to be precise. when arms control agreements were signed, tensions reduced, and international cooperation strengthened. These shifts were not acts of benevolence; they were responses to sustained public pressure, civic engagement, and political accountability.
This is where ordinary citizens matter. Public indifference enables recklessness. Public demand restrains it. Voters influence priorities. Civil society shapes debate. Media scrutiny imposes limits. When citizens disengage, short-termism thrives.
For conflict-affected regions like Kashmir, the warning carries particular urgency. Militarization, instability, and uncertainty are not abstract global trends here; they are lived realities. The forces identified by the Bulletin—arms racing, climate stress, institutional failure—translate directly into local vulnerability.
Eighty-five seconds to midnight is not a declaration of inevitability. It is a measure of direction.
Turning the Clock back will require difficult choices: rebuilding arms-control regimes, treating climate action as security policy, strengthening public health systems, governing emerging technologies, and restoring faith in multilateral cooperation.
The Doomsday Clock does not ask for panic.
It asks for attention.
And until leadership aligns with scientific warning—and public pressure forces accountability—the message remains unmistakable:
It is 85 seconds to midnight.
The author is a prominent Columnist and Education advocate based in Kashmir. He X’s @IkkzIkbal and can be reached at ikkzikbal@gmail.com.
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