When the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—a group whose founders included Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein—reset its famous Doomsday Clock earlier this year, it issued a dire warning: “Ominous trends continue to indicate that the world is heading toward global catastrophe.”
The Bulletin’s board, which lists nine Nobel Prize winners, set the clock at 90 seconds to midnight, the theoretical deadline for an apocalypse. It was unchanged from the previous year but was the closest point to midnight since the Bulletin first issued a Doomsday Clock.
This happened in 1947, two years after the end of World War II and the first and so far only use of nuclear weapons – the American bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki.
In 1947, the Doomsday Clock stood at seven minutes to midnight. Two years later, after the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb, triggering the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the clock was set back to three minutes. The farthest it was from midnight – 17 minutes – was in 1991, when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed.
What prompted nuclear scientists to move the clock’s minute hand closer to 12? They listed a range of threats, including Russia’s deliberate choice of war against Ukraine, the decline of nuclear arms reduction agreements, the climate crisis and advances in artificial intelligence that could change the nature of future wars and amplify disinformation that could complicate solving the world’s existential challenges.
Since the annual presentation of the doomsday scenario at the beginning of the year, the clouds over the future have grown darker. Israel’s war on Gaza has devastated large parts of the enclave and killed an estimated 40,000 Palestinians. Negotiations with Hamas, the group that started the war with a massacre in October 2023, have so far been fruitless.
Tensions in the Middle East have sparked fears of a wider war involving Iran, following the assassination of the Hamas leader who had been leading negotiations during a visit to Iran. Ismail Haniyeh was killed in a government guesthouse in Tehran, just hours after attending the inauguration of Iran’s new president. The Iranian government blamed Israel and vowed retaliation.
Haniyeh died in July. A few weeks later, the situation worsened at another hotspot of geopolitical confrontation.
In the first week of August, Ukrainian tanks and infantry stormed the Russian border and captured territory in the Kursk region. It was the first
This was a Ukrainian border operation and the first time since World War II that a foreign army had entered Russia. Within a few days, the Ukrainians advanced 30 kilometers and the Russian authorities ordered the evacuation of 76,000 civilians.
The attack shocked the Kremlin. Videos showing the surrender of Russian troops angered Russian President Vladimir Putin. The unexpected Ukrainian action would surely make a bloody war even bloodier.
The Kremlin has issued dire warnings about the possible use of nuclear weapons in the conflict with Ukraine. This prospect is causing great concern not only among Western governments but also among the most authoritative public source on the state of the world’s nuclear arsenals – the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI).
SIPRI publishes an annual assessment of international security, the state of arms and disarmament. The institute’s yearbooks are usually published a few months after the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The latest yearbook, in June, paints a grim picture of the dangers facing the world.
SIPRI’s assessment of the nuclear situation can be found in the introduction to its yearbook. “The nine nuclear powers – the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel – continued to modernise their nuclear arsenals in 2023 and several of them have deployed new nuclear or nuclear-capable weapons systems.”
Particular emphasis was placed on India, Pakistan and North Korea, which are seeking the ability to equip ballistic missiles with multiple warheads to catch up with countries that already possess such weapons – the US, Russia, France, the UK and, most recently, China, which reportedly plans to double its nuclear arsenal to 1,000 over the next five years.
The push for more lethal weapons comes against the backdrop of serious setbacks in arms control in 2023. Russia has suspended its participation in the 2010 Treaty on Measures for Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START), the last remaining arms control treaty limiting Russia’s and the United States’ strategic nuclear forces.
The New START agreement expires in February 2026. From that point on, there will no longer be any major contractual restrictions on the number of strategic weapons deployed by the United States and Russia. Even now, the two countries share virtually no information about their arsenals with each other.
“Not since the Cold War have nuclear weapons played such a prominent role in international relations,” said Wilfred Wan, head of SIPRI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme. “It is hard to believe that barely two years have passed since the heads of state and government of the five largest nuclear powers jointly reaffirmed that nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
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During the Cold War, the then Soviet Union and the United States, which possessed by far the largest nuclear arsenals, supported the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD), which recognized that a nuclear strike that destroyed one superpower would trigger a counterstrike that would wipe out the other.
Just weeks after the SIPRI commentary on the important role of nuclear weapons in international relations, China said it had broken off talks with Washington on nuclear arms control in protest against American arms sales to Taiwan, a self-governing democratic island that Beijing considers a renegade province.
China has not ruled out using military force to control the island, which is 100 miles from mainland China. The Chinese leadership’s decision to break off talks with Washington and join Russia underscores the increasingly close relations between China and Russia.
This is reminiscent of an observation by the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama, who rose to fame with his book “The End of History”. In it he argued that with the spread of Western liberal democracy, humanity had reached the end of history.
The publication came after the end of the Cold War, at a time when Western leaders were fond of talking about the “peace dividend” that would allow them to spend less on the military and more on social programs.
History took a different course, and three decades after the “end of history,” Fukuyama, now a professor at Stanford, predicts a combination of geopolitical forces that could lead to the “ultimate nightmare.”
In a 2022 interview, he listed the main elements of this nightmare: 1) China supports Russia’s war against Ukraine and 2) Beijing invades Taiwan. One of these elements became reality on February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and, according to Western officials, China began supplying Russia with machine tools, semiconductors and “dual-use” parts that have become essential to the Russian defense industry.
China’s role was branded as a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war at a NATO meeting in Washington in July, but the Kremlin calmly dismissed the criticism.
The only part missing from “The Ultimate Nightmare” is a Chinese invasion of U.S.-backed Taiwan. If the United States and the rest of the West can’t stop that, Fukuyama said, “then that’s really the end of the story.”
(Disclaimer: The views of the author do not reflect the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor do WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the author.)
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