The Doomsday Clock Is Running on Politics, Not Science
With great fanfare last week, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists — the keepers of the Doomsday Clock — inched their symbolic hand to 85 seconds before midnight. Once again, we are told to brace for catastrophe. For those of us who have grown weary of the warnings over the past five decades, it increasingly feels like a political performance, calibrated to advance a familiar progressive narrative of crisis and control.
In an alarmist statement released by the Bulletin, we are warned that Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have 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.”
What was once a measure maintained by leading nuclear scientists has drifted into an advocacy project that routinely casts the United States as the chief source of global instability.
The latest shift of the Doomsday Clock owes less to objective scientific analysis than to the Bulletin’s increasingly ideological reading of world events. What was once a measure maintained by leading nuclear scientists has drifted into an advocacy project that routinely casts the United States as the chief source of global instability. By framing U.S. deterrence efforts as destabilizing, the Bulletin advances a narrative that pushes the clock forward regardless of actual risk. Critical of the proposed Golden Dome — a missile defense system designed to protect the United States — the Bulletin issued a statement warning that: “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.” (RELATED: From Alligator Alleys to Fallout Shelters)
If anything, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists should have moved the hands away from midnight rather than forward, as the successful peacekeeping decisions made by President Trump have made the world safer. U.S. intelligence assessments acknowledged that the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities significantly damaged key enrichment sites and pushed the program backward by “up to two years.” Officials acknowledged that the U.S. strikes destroyed the key facilities in Arak, Natanz, and Isfahan and “obliterated the underground enrichment site in Fordo.” If the Doomsday Clock were truly a neutral measure of global nuclear danger, such a setback in Iran’s capabilities should have moved the hands backwards, yet the Bulletin chose to interpret the moment as further proof of impending catastrophe. (RELATED: Trump’s Declawing of Iran Is Reshaping the Middle East)
It is difficult to ignore how much of the Bulletin’s escalating rhetoric mirrors the broader hostility toward President Trump that continues to define so many elite institutions. The group’s assessments routinely attribute global instability to his policies. When every action taken by the United States — even the proposed Golden Dome defensive system — is cast as reckless, the Doomsday Clock becomes a vehicle for political grievance rather than scientific judgment. The result is a symbolic warning stripped of scientific neutrality and repurposed to reinforce a liberal storyline of perpetual crisis.
It should be noted that former California Governor Jerry Brown — a non-scientist — is the executive chair of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Under his progressive direction, the Bulletin has appeared to have become even more political.
In January 2020 — a presidential election year and the last year of the Trump presidency — the Bulletin issued dire warnings that the clock was inching closer to midnight because of what Bulletin “scientists” called his lack of progress on a nuclear agreement with North Korea — despite the fact that Pyongyang had not conducted a nuclear test in more than two years. Yet, as a report issued by the Heritage Foundation revealed in February 2020, the Bulletin made no comparable move in 2016, when North Korea detonated two nuclear devices and publicly claimed to have developed a hydrogen bomb while President Obama was in office. That selective alarmism, Heritage argues, reveals far more about the Bulletin’s ideological commitments than about any objective measure of nuclear risk.
In the end, the Doomsday Clock no longer functions as a neutral barometer of global peril but as a stage prop for a political narrative that reliably casts the United States as the chief architect of global instability. A tool once grounded in scientific assessment has been repurposed into a symbolic cudgel, advancing a storyline of perpetual crisis that bears little resemblance to the actual strategic landscape. Until the Bulletin abandons its selective outrage and returns to objective analysis, its annual warnings will remain less a measure of danger than a reflection of its own ideological preoccupations. A clock that always points to doom eventually tells us nothing at all.
READ MORE from Anne Hendershott:
The President Who Delivered Dobbs Deserves Better From the Pro-Life Movement
Who’s Paying for the Minneapolis Protesters?
A Feminized Police Culture Revealed by a Chief in Tears
Anne Hendershott is a professor of sociology and director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH. She is the author of The Politics of Envy (Crisis Books).