It’s time to stop paying attention to the pseudo-scientific Doomsday Clock

The Bulletin, founded in the years after World War II, had early involvement from major physicists including Albert Einstein and J Robert Oppenheimer, some of who had worked on the Manhattan Project. Feeling pangs of conscience over what they had wrought, the founders initially sought to educate the public about the risks of nuclear warfare, prevent nuclear proliferation, promote peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and ultimately abolish nuclear weapons.

Over time the Bulletin broadened its mandate to cover such non-nuclear threats as climate change, international warfare, and the misuse of artificial intelligence. The Doomsday Clock was first posted on the cover of the Bulletin in 1947, having been designed by the wife of one of the scientists, a landscape painter, who chose to set it at seven minutes to midnight “simply because it looked good” that way.

The clock is reset each year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board: not its Board of Sponsors, which includes nine Nobel Laureates, though the Board of Sponsors is “consulted”. The Science and Security Board is not limited to atomic scientists, but includes “experts” on topics like diplomacy, climate change, artificial intelligence, and “the widespread corruption of the world’s information ecosystem.”

Since the clock’s inception in 1947, it has never been set to less than seventeen minutes to midnight. Since then, the Board meets annually to discuss how close humanity is to its end, and therefore where to set the clock for the year. Their decisions about the imminence of doomsday are supposed to be based not only on the direct danger of nuclear war, but nowadays on “politics, energy, weapons, diplomacy, and climate science.”

Having reached its most sanguine point in 1991 (at the time the Soviet Union fell), the clock moved in a pessimistic direction in subsequent years, with the additional use of fractions of a minute in 2017 (two and a half minutes) which permitted changes to be made while still remaining very close to midnight.

The image of the clock suggests a misleading impression of scientific consensus on subjects that are really the subject of political judgment (the likelihood of international warfare that may or may not provoke the use of nuclear weapons) or of debate among natural scientists and technological experts themselves (global warming, the potential costs and benefits of artificial intelligence). And in an effort to promote world peace, the clock’s authors sometimes succumb to a false moral equivalence, as they did in 2018. That year, they adjusted the clock to two minutes to midnight, claiming that the risk  of nuclear war had been increased by threats issued by  North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (who has often used threats of nuclear attack to win concessions from the West) and President Trump’s responses, identifying both as sources of “hyperbolic rhetoric and provocative actions,” which had “increased the possibility of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation.”

Had Trump or any other US official ever threatened to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against North Korea? No.

As Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has pointed out, far from reflecting any sort of scientific calculation, the Doomsday Clock is really a political stunt, citing the words of its inventor that its intent was “to preserve civilization by scaring men into rationality.” As an example of the clock’s inconsistency, Pinker notes its having been set farther from midnight in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis than in the far calmer 2007.

More importantly, we might note two politically unfortunate effects of the clock. First, it is antidemocratic, aiming to replace the deliberations and judgments of informed democratic statesmen (we can rest assured that the dictators of Russia, China, and North Korea pay it no heed) with the rule of supposedly objective “experts.” Second, its inventor’s very definition of rationality – which effectively entails frightening Western nations into actions of appeasement towards likely aggressors (say, by foregoing aid to Ukraine in its battle for survival against Vladimir Putin, or preemptively agreeing to China’s forceful seizure of independent, democratic Taiwan).

In the words of the graphic artist who redesigned the clock’s image in 2007, Michael Bierut, it was intended to be “an intuitively tension-building image,” whose brilliance lay in its having reduced the “complex” problem of nuclear proliferation to something “simple and memorable.” 

In addressing major problems from the threat of nuclear war to climate change, simplicity is rarely an advantage (nor is “tension-building”). In fact, contrary to those who wisely advocate enhancing the West’s missile defenses in order to deter nuclear attack or intimidation, in 2019 the Bulletin published an article by two researchers warning that the defenses won’t work, since rather than foregoing their aggressive policies, our adversaries “are more likely to be stimulated to try to beat the defenses to ensure their own deterrent forces remain effective and credible.”

In other words, since the act of improving our defenses would really be perceived as an act of aggression, let’s avoid it. This judgment is hardly scientific.