"Doomsday Clock" reaches record-short "85 seconds to midnight" — U.S. scientists warn of growing risks from climate change and nuclear war

The hands of the "Doomsday Clock," which has long served as a conceptual measure of how close humanity is to "its final day" (introduced in 1947) have moved to "85 seconds to midnight." The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the U.S. publication that manages the Clock, announced this on January 27. The reading is four seconds shorter than last year's record, setting a new all-time record. The publication warned that accelerating great-power competition is increasing threats from climate change and nuclear war, and that there are increasing risks posed by the spread of artificial intelligence (AI), and they expressed serious concern that international cooperation to reduce these risks is being undermined.

The Clock's setting is determined by the Bulletin's "Science and Security Board (SASB)," composed of prominent American scientists, working together with a separate board that includes eight Nobel laureates, who analyze international developments over the previous year. At an online press conference, prominent scientists and Bulletin officials criticized President Trump and other major-power leaders for turning their backs on global challenges. They insisted that "the Clock's hands can be moved back" and called for citizens and scientists across national borders to unite and act.

Statement expresses concern over great-power competition

At its press conference and in press releases, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cited the ongoing climate crisis driven by global warming, the growing threat of nuclear weapons use, and the slow response to the potential risks of rapid AI advances as the factors behind this year's setting, explaining why the Clock has moved four seconds closer to midnight compared with last year's "89 seconds."

Alongside the press conference, the publication released its "2026 Doomsday Clock Statement." The statement noted: "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."

The statement further expressed a deep sense of alarm, noting that "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."

Alexandra Bell, President and CEO of the Bulletin, who announced this year's setting, said: "We are running out of time. It is a hard truth, but this is our reality. The world is in more peril than ever before."

In the Year Marking 50 Years Since the Atomic Bombings, Nuclear Threat Took Center Stage

In 1995, when the author was covering the "Doomsday Clock" at the University of Chicago, the first Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP1) was being held in Berlin, Germany. International cooperation on climate change was beginning to take shape-yet the Bulletin's sense of crisis on this issue was still limited. That year also marked 50 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Continuing nuclear threat after the end of the Cold War" was given priority; the Clock stood at "14 minutes to midnight." The then-editor of the Bulletin set it at "14 minutes" with the reasoning that "despite 50 years having passed since the atomic bombings, we assumed the risk that nuclear weapons could be used again somewhere on Earth."

In the late 1990s, global warming was becoming a major international concern, but the sense of urgency was not yet enough to move the Clock's hands forward. By the latter half of the 2000s, however, climate change came to be seen as a threat to human survival on par with nuclear proliferation. From the 2010s onward, damage from extreme weather events increasingly linked to warming began to materialize.

International forums such as the COP convened regularly under frameworks premised on international cooperation, but greenhouse gas emissions-particularly among developed nations-continued to rise while national-level efforts stalled. A sense of crisis grew worldwide. Damage from extreme weather caused by atmospheric and ocean warming has escalated, and the Doomsday Clock has increasingly reflected this deepening concern in recent years.

The climate change crisis has also intensified

On January 27, the same day that the 2026 Doomsday Clock setting was announced, the United States-the world's second-largest greenhouse gas emitter-formally withdrew from the "Paris Agreement," the international framework for addressing global warming. The Trump administration had notified the United Nations one year earlier, shortly after the President took office, and the withdrawal took effect as stipulated under the treaty's rules. President Trump has called climate change measures "the biggest con job ever perpetrated" and is openly hostile to renewable energy policies such as wind and solar power. He has also indicated plans to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which underpins the Paris Agreement, and concern is growing in the international community about significant setbacks to global climate action.

Regarding the climate crisis, the statement cited specific impacts: "The level of atmospheric carbon dioxide... reached a new high, rising to 150 percent of preindustrial levels. Global average temperature in 2024 was the warmest in the 175-year record, and temperatures in 2025 were similar... Energized by warm temperatures, the hydrologic cycle became more erratic, with deluges and droughts hopscotching around the globe... For the third time in the last four years Europe experienced more than 60,000 heat-related deaths....Record rainfall in southeast Brazil displaced over half a million."

The statement further criticized: "The national and international responses to the climate emergency went from wholly insufficient to profoundly destructive. None of the three most recent UN climate summits emphasized phasing out fossil fuels or monitoring carbon dioxide emissions. In the United States, the Trump administration has essentially declared war on renewable energy and sensible climate policies, relentlessly gutting efforts of a number of countries to combat climate change."

Concerns also raised over space arms race and the downsides of AI

This year's Doomsday Clock statement also emphasized concerns about the arms race among major powers and the negative aspects of rapidly proliferating AI.

The statement noted that "competition among major powers has become a full-blown arms race, as evidenced by increasing numbers of nuclear warheads and platforms in China, and the modernization of nuclear delivery systems in the United States, Russia, and China. The United States plans to deploy a new, multilayered missile defense system, Golden Dome, that will include space-based interceptors, increasing the probability of conflict in space and likely fueling a new space-based arms race." The statement also expressed concern that with the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) on February 5, the nuclear deterrence efforts between the two largest nuclear-armed states-the United States and Russia-have come to an end.

Regarding AI, the statement cited the spread of misinformation and disinformation enabled by increasingly sophisticated large language models, the integration of AI into the military sector, and biological threats arising from AI-designed new pathogens. It also criticized the Trump administration for revoking a previous executive order on AI safety, calling it "a dangerous prioritization of innovation over safety."

The Bulletin was founded in 1945 by figures including physicist Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had led the "Manhattan Project" that developed the atomic bomb. The Doomsday Clock was introduced in 1947 at "7 minutes to midnight," with the goal of calling attention to threats to human survival. It reached its then-closest point of "2 minutes (120 seconds) to midnight" in 1953, when the Soviet Union successfully tested a hydrogen bomb ahead of the United States and the United States followed suit.

"Unite and act to turn back the Clock"

Alongside the announcement of this year's Doomsday Clock setting, the Bulletin held an online press conference.

Professor Daniel Holz at the University of Chicago who serves as Chair of the SASB and was involved in setting the Clock's time, said: "We're also concerned about the increasing rise of nationalistic autocracies... These autocratic trends impede international cooperation... and serve as a threat multiplier, making it even less likely that the world will address the existential threats at its doorstep."

Maria Ressa, a Filipino journalist, 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and currently a professor at Columbia University in the United States, pointed out: "Nuclear arsenals growing, climate records shattering, biological risks multiplying. AI racing ahead of our ability to govern it. These are new triggers on top of the old problems which have been there, which the Sustainable Development Goals tried to address. (The SDGs and all that) now is a dream, and it's gotten much worse (than when those goals were set)."

She further stated: "We can't cooperate across borders when we can't share the (correct) facts." These remarks were clearly directed at President Trump, who denies even scientifically proven "facts" such as global warming and puts his country's interests first.

She went on to urge: "Nuclear arsenals grow while arms control collapses... The very cooperation we need to survive on AI, on pandemics, on the planet, becomes impossible-but it (the Clock) can be turned back... Now is the time to act."

The Bulletin's Bell also stressed: "The Clock has turned back before and it can again. People around the world must demand that their leaders combat the risks that threaten us all."

It has become increasingly common to describe the United States as a country that has made clear its diplomatic stance of putting its own interests ahead of international cooperation and multilateral negotiations. This is primarily a result of the current Trump administration's policies, which tend to be indifferent to global challenges and dismissive of the international legal order. Yet even in these circumstances, the prominent scientists who confronted their own government and again called for unity in the international community left a powerful impression-facing harsh realities without yielding to pessimism and placing their faith in humanity's collective wisdom.