‘Unprecedented danger’: Doomsday clock moved closest ever to midnight’s Armageddon

The Doomsday Clock has been set at ‘90 seconds to midnight’, the worst reading in its history as the spectre of nuclear war over Ukraine looms.

The 2023 Doomsday Clock is displayed before of a live-streamed event with members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Picture: Getty Images

The Doomsday Clock, a symbolic timepiece founded by Albert Einstein in the 1940s to gauge the risk of nuclear Armageddon, has been set at “90 seconds to midnight”, the worst reading in its history as the spectre of nuclear war over Ukraine looms.

With European and US governments poised to send tanks to Ukraine, and Russia weighing further offensives in the embattled former Soviet republic, scientists shifted the clock to 90 seconds to midnight from 100 seconds, where it had been registered since 2020.

Rachel Bronson, the president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which oversees the clock along with 10 Nobel prize winning scientists, said the world faced “unprecedented danger” and urged the US, NATO and Ukraine to “explore a multitude of channels for dialogue … to turn back the clock”.

“Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict — by accident, intention, or miscalculation — is a terrible risk,” the scientists said in a statement on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT).

“The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high … Russia has also brought its war to the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor sites, violating international protocols”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in December said Moscow would use its nuclear umbrella to defend its territorial acquisitions in eastern Ukraine, conceding his “special military operation” would “take a while, perhaps” after earlier setbacks that saw Ukrainian forces repel Russian troops from around Kyiv.

Members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists unveil the Doomsday Clock during an announcement in Washington. Picture: AFP

The scientists’ announcement came as Washington, in a potential flashpoint of future escalation, privately warned Beijing against helping Russia, claiming it had evidence Chinese state owned enterprises were “knowingly assisting Russia in its war effort”, according to Bloomberg.

Beijing entered a “no limits” alliance with Moscow in February last year but Chinese leader Xi Jinping has resisted helping Russia, while at the same time refraining from criticising it.

The US was poised to send “a significant number” of battle tanks to Ukraine, according to the Wall Street Journal, in a bit to coax Germany and other European nations to contribute tanks of their own.

Rumtin Sepasspour, an Australian researcher at the UK-based Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, said Australia, which has contributed armoured vehicles to Ukraine, “can, and should, lead on reducing global catastrophic risk”, but had instead been “an active hindrance”.

“Over the past two decades, successive Australian governments have stepped back from historical leadership on nuclear non-proliferation, pushed back on a treaty to ban nuclear weapons and blocked international negotiations seeking to limit the spread of lethal autonomous weapons,” he told The Australian.

The Doomsday Clock was set at 2 minutes to midnight in 1953 when the US tested the first hydrogen bomb, before dropping to 12 minutes in 1963 after the US and the former USSR signed a test-ban treaty, and then to a low of 17 minutes in 1991 after the break-up of the USSR.

Since then, the time gap has steady shrunk, amid mounting threats of nuclear war, climate change and pandemics.

Mary Robinson, former Irish president, and Ban Ki-moon, former UN secretary-general, said “extreme weather” and a lack of “pandemic preparedness” were also to blame for the growing risk of global doom.

“We are facing multiple existential crises,” Ms Robinson said in a statement.

The Clock was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists who worked in the US Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bombs, weapons that were used on Japan in 1945, where two bombs killed around 200,000 people within days.