By Bharat Dogra
The Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has become a widely recognized symbol of the threats to life and life-nurturing conditions of our planet. The closer this gets to midnight, the greater the threat of catastrophe. In 2025 this was placed at 89 seconds to midnight and in a very recently released statement in year 2026 this has been placed at 85 seconds to midnight. In other words, the world came closer to catastrophe in year 2025 by 4 seconds. In our opinion, this seriously underestimates the new dangers that were created in 2025 by the breakdown of whatever international rules based order existed earlier in poor health and in fragments, and by a series of highly aggressive and arbitrary actions taken by the Trump administration in the USA. This is far from fully captured with all its serious implications in the Doomsday Clock Statement (DCS) 2026. Despite this failure, the DMC nevertheless remains a very useful document drawing attention to several serious problems albeit with a western bias that generally exists in DCS.
The DCS says, “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.”
Further the DCS warns, “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, multi-layered missile defence system, Golden Dome, that will include space-based interceptors, increasing the probability of conflict in space and likely fuelling a new space-based arms race. As these worrying trends continued, countries with nuclear weapons failed to talk about strategic stability or arms control, much less nuclear disarmament, and questions about US extended deterrence commitments to traditional allies in Europe and Asia led some countries without nuclear weapons to consider acquiring them. As we publish this statement, the last major agreement limiting the numbers of strategic nuclear weapons deployed by the United States and Russia, New START, is set to expire, ending nearly 60 years of efforts to constrain nuclear competition between the world’s two largest nuclear countries. In addition, the US administration may be considering the resumption of explosive nuclear testing, further accelerating a renewed nuclear arms race.”
Coming to climate change and disasters this report says, “An array of adverse trends also dominated the climate change outlook in the past year. The level of atmospheric carbon dioxide—the greenhouse gas most responsible for human-caused climate change—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. With the addition of freshwater from melting glaciers and thermal expansion, global average sea level reached a record high. Energized by warm temperatures, the hydrologic cycle became more erratic, with deluges and droughts hopscotching around the globe. Large swaths of Peru, the Amazon, southern Africa, and northwest Africa experienced droughts. For the third time in the last four years Europe experienced more than 60,000 heat-related deaths. Floods in the Congo River Basin displaced 350,000 people, and record rainfall in southeast Brazil displaced over half a million.”
Speaking about a new risk this report tells us, “In December 2024, scientists from nine countries announced the recognition of a potentially existential threat to all life on Earth: the laboratory synthesis of so-called “mirror life.” Those scientists urged that mirror bacteria and other mirror cells—composed of chemically-synthesized molecules that are mirror-images of those found on Earth, much as a left hand mirrors a right hand—not be created, because a self-replicating mirror cell could plausibly evade normal controls on growth, spread throughout all ecosystems, and eventually cause the widespread death of humans, other animals, and plants, potentially disrupting all life on Earth. So far, however, the international community has not arrived at a plan to address this risk.”
“At the same time, the accelerating evolution of artificial intelligence poses a different sort of biological threat: the potential for the AI-aided design of new pathogens to which humans have no effective defences. Also, concerns about state-sponsored biological weapons programs have deepened due to the weakening during this past year of international norms and mechanisms for productive engagement.”
On other aspects of AI related threats the DCS states, “The United States, Russia and China are incorporating AI across their defence sectors, despite the potential dangers of such moves. In the United States, the Trump administration has revoked a previous executive order on AI safety, reflecting a dangerous prioritization of innovation over safety. And the AI revolution has the potential to accelerate the existing chaos and dysfunction in the world’s information ecosystem, supercharging mis- and disinformation campaigns and undermining the fact-based public discussions required to address urgent major threats like nuclear war, pandemics, and climate change.”
The DCS has made a number of important recommendations–
- The United States and Russia can resume dialogue about limiting their nuclear arsenals. All nuclear-armed states can avoid destabilizing investments in missile defence and observe the existing moratorium on explosive nuclear testing.
- Through both multilateral agreements and national regulations, the international community can take all feasible steps to prevent the creation of mirror life and cooperate on meaningful measures to reduce the prospect of AI being used to create biological threats.
- The United States Congress can repudiate President Trump’s war on renewable energy, instead providing incentives and investments that will enable rapid reduction in fossil fuel use.
- The United States, Russia, and China can engage in bilateral and multilateral dialogue on meaningful guidelines regarding the incorporation of artificial intelligence in their militaries, particularly in nuclear command and control systems.
There should be more such efforts to draw attention to the survival crisis as the most serious challenge facing humanity. In particular a specific campaign demand for which this writer has been working for several years is that the next decade should be declared by the UN as the Decade for Saving Earth and all its life-forms within a framework of justice and peace. More wide-ranging world governance system changes should be considered seriously to protect the life-nurturing conditions of our planet. Some of these possibilities are discussed by this writer in his book Earth without Borders. The youth in particular should get many more opportunities for creating a new protective world based on peace, justice and protection of environment, instead of merely carrying the burden of the mess that ruling elites of the present and the preceding generation have created.
Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now.
29 January 2026
Source: countercurrents.org