Doomsday

If you are already feeling hopeless about humanity’s future, you may want to skip this one. It will not make you feel better. It is not designed to make you feel better. What follows, what I believe, is an honest accounting of where we are, how we got here, and what that likely means. There is no silver lining at the end. Read accordingly.

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

— Albert Einstein

I was scrolling through my Google homepage on January 27th when I saw it. The Doomsday Clock had moved to 85 seconds before midnight. The closest it has ever been to annihilation in its entire history. For a moment I thought maybe I was misreading something, some kind of error in the headline. But no. Eighty five seconds. One minute and twenty five seconds between us and what the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describes, with admirable restraint, as “midnight.”

The statement from the Bulletin was blunt. The clock moved forward because of what they called a “global failure of leadership.” Not a miscalculation. Not an accident waiting to happen. A failure of leadership. Which is a polite way of saying that the man with the largest nuclear arsenal is trying to recreate the Soviet empire by force, the man with the second largest is preparing to invade Taiwan, and the man with the third largest is tweeting about Greenland at 3 a.m. while Republican congressional COWARDS pretend not to see. This is who we’ve entrusted with civilization. This is the best we could do.

I sat there reading through the details and feeling that peculiar mix of emotions you get when confronted with overwhelming evidence that things are worse than you thought. Anger mixed with something close to despair. A kind of intellectual nausea. You know the feeling. It’s the moment when the abstract becomes suddenly, unavoidably real.

The reasons the Bulletin cited were depressingly familiar. Russia and the United States allow their last arms control treaty to expire. No replacement in sight. The nuclear powers are growing more “aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic,” which is a way of saying that several countries with enough firepower to vaporize civilization are increasingly viewing each other not as rivals to be managed but as enemies to be defeated. Climate change accelerates while countries abandon their commitments and roll back renewable energy programs. Artificial intelligence evolves faster than anyone can regulate it, which is roughly like trying to negotiate with a tornado. Biological weapons technology advances. And the international institutions designed to manage all this are weakening as nationalism reasserts itself everywhere.

Alexandra Bell, who runs the Bulletin, put it this way: “Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline, and we are running out of time.” You read that and you think, well, at least they’re not sugarcoating it.

But here’s what struck me as I kept reading about what got us to 85 seconds. It’s not that our leaders are stupid. It’s worse than that. They’re trapped in systems and patterns of thinking that make catastrophic failures inevitable, and none of them quite know how to break free.

Start with the basic problem. Our brains evolved for a completely different world. Humans are exquisitely adapted to problems our ancestors faced about two hundred thousand years ago. We detect threats rapidly. We react to immediate danger. We cooperate intensely within our groups and distrust outsiders. All of this was tremendously useful when you were a hunter in a small band competing for resources with neighboring tribes.

It is catastrophically useless when you are managing nuclear weapons and global climate systems.

Our threat detection apparatus runs on the assumption that danger is immediate and visible. A predator. An enemy with a spear. Something you can see and react to. But nuclear war develops slowly over years of escalation. Climate change measured in tenths of a degree per decade. Artificial intelligence improving in ways we don’t fully understand. Our brains haven’t evolved systems to emotionally engage with these kinds of threats. We know intellectually they’re serious. We just can’t quite feel it in the way we feel fear of a snake.

This evolutionary mismatch compounds with cognitive biases. Confirmation bias, where you seek out information that confirms what you already believe. Loss aversion, which means we weigh the pain of losing something much more heavily than the pleasure of gaining something. In group favoritism, where people in your tribe seem reasonable and trustworthy while people in the other tribe seem incomprehensible and hostile. These biases exist in all of us. They’re part of how the human mind works.

What this means is that when a leader of a nuclear power looks at another nuclear power, they don’t see a fellow human in a terrible situation trying to avoid mutual annihilation. They see a threat. An adversary. Someone to outmaneuver. Someone whose intentions must be assumed to be hostile because that’s what the machinery in the brain does automatically.

The Cuban Missile Crisis illustrates this perfectly. In 1962, we came to the edge of nuclear war through a combination of miscommunication, near accidents, and the fact that a Soviet submarine commander named Vasili Arkhipov basically decided not to sink American ships with nuclear weapons. One man. Billions of lives hung on one person deciding not to follow orders. And we didn’t even know how close we’d come until years later.

Since then there were false alarms. On November 9, 1979, a test tape containing simulated Soviet attack data was mistakenly loaded into a NORAD computer that was connected to the operational missile alert system. For six minutes, military command centers across the country showed an incoming attack of over 2,000 nuclear missiles. Ten tactical fighter aircraft were launched. Air Force bombers started their engines. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski woke at 3 a.m. to a phone call saying he should prepare to wake the President to authorize retaliation. He didn’t wake his wife, he said later, assuming they would all be dead in thirty minutes.

Then in June 1980, it happened again. A single integrated circuit chip failed in a communication system computer at NORAD. The system constantly tested itself by sending messages showing zero missiles detected. When the chip failed, it started filling in random numbers instead of zeros. On June 3rd at 1:26 a.m., displays showed two submarine launched missiles, then more, then a massive attack. Strategic Air Command bomber crews ran to their aircraft and started engines. Three days later on June 6th, the same failed chip triggered another false alarm. Same scramble. Same preparation to launch a counterstrike that would have killed hundreds of millions of people. All because one tiny piece of silicon stopped working correctly.

In 1983, NATO held a military exercise and the Soviet Union genuinely believed it was preparation for a real attack on Soviet territory. A Norwegian scientific rocket was mistaken for a submarine missile. Each time we came out of it intact, people acted relieved, and then we went back to the systems and policies that made the next accident inevitable.

What’s remarkable is how thin the margin was. How often it came down to someone pausing for a moment and saying wait, maybe we shouldn’t launch nuclear weapons right now. And we’re supposed to rely on that across decades and decades? We’re supposed to bet human civilization on the assumption that the right person is always at the console when the alarm sounds?

That’s not leadership. That’s luck. And luck runs out.

The cognitive bias problem is compounded by structural incentives. Political leaders operate on electoral cycles. Two years, four years, maybe six years if you’re lucky in some other country. Your job is to show immediate visible results that benefit your constituents. Building up nuclear weapons is visible. It appeals to the security instincts of voters. It shows you’re tough. It shows you’re not weak. De escalating tensions is abstract. It’s invisible. Voters don’t come home from work thinking “I’m so glad the President maintained strategic restraint in nuclear negotiations.” They come home thinking about food prices and their jobs.

So there’s this systematic pressure toward the short term. Every leader has a strong incentive to act tougher than the last leader. To appear stronger. To make a show of capability. And of course every other leader is doing the exact same thing. The result is a race to the bottom where you end up building weapons systems you don’t actually want because if you don’t build them, the other side will and then you’ll look weak. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or how much you want to cooperate. The system itself pushes toward mutual catastrophe.

And we’ve turbocharged this with social media. Algorithms that reward engagement push increasingly extreme content. People naturally sort themselves into groups of like minded people. You only see information that confirms what you already believe. So your view of the other side becomes increasingly divorced from reality. Eventually you’re not even inhabiting the same factual universe.

Now imagine that at the level of international relations. Imagine the United States and Russia each genuinely believe that the other side is preparing for war. That the other side is dishonest and dangerous and possibly insane. Now imagine trying to negotiate arms control. Trying to build trust. Trying to get people to agree to constraints on their military capabilities when they believe the other side might use that moment to attack.

You can’t. Not really. What you get instead is what we have now. Both sides building weapons. Both sides viewing the other with suspicion. Both sides convinced that the other side is getting ready to stab them in the back. And the weapons themselves are getting more sophisticated, harder to track, faster to deploy.

The Bulletin’s statement mentioned that in 1991, after the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States and Russia signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the clock moved back to seventeen minutes before midnight. Seventeen minutes. It was the furthest it had ever been from midnight. That was only thirty five years ago. We actually did manage to cooperate. We actually did manage to reduce nuclear arsenals. We actually did manage to step back from the brink.

So it’s not that cooperation is impossible. It’s that we’ve collectively chosen to move in the other direction.

And here’s what makes it worse. Look at what’s actually happening right now. The Trump administration has spent the last year taking a sledgehammer to the international order. They withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement. Again. They’ve threatened to annex Greenland, which belongs to a NATO ally. They’ve questioned NATO commitments and talked openly about withdrawing troops from Europe.

The administration’s own National Security Strategy confirmed what anyone paying attention already knew. The United States and Europe no longer share the same interests or values. Transatlantic trust is at decades low levels. European leaders are seeking strategic autonomy because they can no longer rely on American security guarantees. The credibility of the United States has been hollowed out by threatening tariffs on impulse, flouting international norms, and pursuing what one analysis called “breathtaking bluntness” that destabilizes global diplomacy.

And through all of this, the Republican Congress has done nothing. They have the constitutional power to check executive overreach. They have the authority to demand accountability, to hold hearings, to refuse funding, to impeach. They have chosen not to use any of it. Fifty two senators and two hundred twenty representatives who swore an oath to the Constitution and then watched as the administration torched alliances and institutions that have kept the peace since 1945. They could have turned back the clock. They chose their careers instead. History (if there is a future) will remember them as cowards, and history will be right.

Meanwhile Russia continues its war in Ukraine. China expands its nuclear arsenal and conducts live fire drills around Taiwan. The great powers view cooperation as weakness and confrontation as strength. And the people nominally in charge seem either incapable of understanding the danger or indifferent to it.

Reading all of this, I kept coming back to a simple thought. Are we flawed animals? And the answer is yes. Not in some abstract philosophical sense but in a concrete, measurable, catastrophic sense. We’re animals that evolved to solve problems in small groups and now we’re trying to manage global catastrophic risks. We’re creatures driven by short term incentives competing over resources that require long term cooperation to preserve. We’re tribal beings living in a tribalized world where tribalism is, quite literally, suicidal.

The problem is not that humans are inherently evil or stupid. The problem is that we have cognitive architecture mismatched to modern threats, systematic biases that corrupt decision making under stress, tribal instincts that prevent cooperation, short term incentives that override long term survival, and information environments that overwhelm our processing capacity. And we’ve built political systems that amplify every one of these flaws instead of compensating for them.

I think about that failed computer chip in 1980. One piece of silicon. Random numbers instead of zeros. Bomber crews starting their engines. Brzezinski preparing to wake the President to authorize the end of the world. And I think about how we’re now adding artificial intelligence to these systems. Faster decision loops. Less time for humans to pause and question. More complexity. More room for error.

I think about leaders who view international cooperation as a con game. Who gut the institutions designed to prevent catastrophe. Who stoke nationalism and treat allies as adversaries and prioritize personal advantage over collective survival. And I think about how the voters who put them in power will do it again because the cognitive biases and tribal instincts and short term thinking that produced this disaster are not going away.

Eighty five seconds to midnight. The closest we have ever been. And we’re still walking toward it.

Here is the hardest truth I know. You can’t fix fucked. (My original title… but I changed it, as I need to stop with the damn profanity…)

When systems have degraded past a certain point, when the rot has spread through the institutions and the culture and the very patterns of thought that shape how people see the world, there is no reform that saves them. There is no election that turns it around. There is no policy paper or international agreement or moment of collective awakening that reverses the trajectory. The system continues on its path until it doesn’t. Until something breaks so catastrophically that the old way of doing things becomes impossible.

This is not pessimism. This is history.

The founders of the United States understood this. They didn’t fix the British Empire. They didn’t reform colonial governance from within. They fought a war. People died. Farms burned. Families were torn apart. And out of that destruction, a small group of people who happened to have an extraordinary combination of philosophical education and practical experience built something new. Something that encoded different assumptions about human nature and political power. Something that, for all its flaws, represented a genuine break from what came before.

But notice what that required. It required the old system to fail so completely that there was space for something new. It required people willing to risk everything, including their lives, on an uncertain outcome. It required years of violence and suffering. And even then, success was not guaranteed. If the British had won, the founders would have been hanged as traitors and their experiment would have been a footnote in imperial history.

The uncomfortable reality is that the systems we have built to manage existential risk are probably not going to reform themselves in time. The cognitive biases are too deep. The structural incentives are too strong. The tribalism is too powerful. We are watching institutions designed for a different era try to manage threats they were never built to handle, operated by people whose brains were never evolved to perceive them clearly.

Which means that if humanity survives what’s coming, it will likely be because someone, somewhere, builds something better from the wreckage. Not because we prevented the catastrophe but because we emerged from it with hard won wisdom about what not to do. The way the founders emerged from colonial oppression understanding viscerally, in ways their descendants would slowly forget, why concentrated power without accountability leads to tyranny.

This is cold comfort. It means that the people reading this article will probably not see the better world. It means that millions, maybe billions, of people may suffer and die in the transition between what we have and what might come after. It means that success, if it comes at all, will be purchased with a currency of human misery that no one would willingly pay if they understood the price in advance.

But it is also the only honest comfort available. The alternative is pretending that if we just elect the right leaders, pass the right laws, have the right conversations, we can steer this ship away from the rocks. And I no longer believe that. The ship is going where it’s going. The rocks are where they are. The only question is whether anyone survives the wreck, and whether they have the wisdom to build better boats.

Eighty five seconds to midnight. And somewhere out there, I have to believe, are the people who will walk out of the rubble and start again.