Editor’s note: On January 27, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the clock is now set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been.
On a warm day in mid-July, a roomful of Nobel laureates and nuclear security experts, some 80 pairs of eyes, gaze out of the expansive windows of a 10th floor University of Chicago conference room, imagining their deaths by nuclear explosion. A presenter directs the group’s attention past the trees and gothic buildings of campus, over the apartment buildings in Hyde Park, and out to the Chicago skyline, hazy with wildfire smoke from Canada. He points out which neighborhoods would vanish in blasts of varying size, estimating casualties, injuries, and radiation effects.
What I know, what everyone there knows, is that if a nuclear bomb were to explode right then, right over us, it would be better to be inside that room, in the zone of vaporization, than in an outer ring of slow, painful death.
It’s the opening session of the three-day 2025 Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The gathering is convened by scientists and nuclear security experts alarmed that a new arms race, eroding global cooperation, and the rise of artificial intelligence in warfare—among other factors—are pushing civilization closer to catastrophe. Timed to the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the world’s first nuclear explosion, the assembly aims to produce a declaration urging world leaders to reduce the nuclear threat.
The same urgency drives the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and its iconic Doomsday Clock, the stark graphic that represents how close we are to self-annihilation. The clock is set yearly by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board chaired by Daniel Holz, PhD, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Chicago.
In January, six months before the Nobel Assembly, Holz stood at a lectern at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., to announce the time. “It is now 89 seconds to midnight,” he said, as four solemn presenters swiveled a turntable to reveal a pared-down quarter clockface, a white wedge rimmed by black dots for numbers, the hands angled so sharply they overlapped. It was the closest to midnight since the clock’s inception in 1947.
Now Holz and several other clock setters are at the Nobel Assembly here in Chicago. The Bulletin is one of the sponsoring organizations, and Holz has spent the past year helping to plan the event, hoping that the voices of Nobel laureates and nuclear experts will move the world to act.
In December 1945, just months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a group of Chicago-based Manhattan Project scientists published the first issue of a newsletter called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Fearing politicians and the public didn’t understand the gravity of the nuclear threat, the scientists used their publication to warn about the implications of the new weapons and to advocate for global policies governing nuclear energy. The Bulletin has since grown into a nonprofit organization with a digital platform covering nuclear weapons, climate change, and other man-made existential risks.
The Doomsday Clock is its most famous communication tool. Today, the time is set by the 17 scientists and policy experts who make up the organization’s Science and Security Board. They move the minute hand forward to indicate heightened existential threats, and back in response to efforts that can mitigate those threats. The farthest from midnight the clock has ever been was 17 minutes in 1991 at the end of the Cold War. Since 2010, it has only edged closer to midnight.
The clock is a compelling and polarizing image. Every year after the announcement, hundreds of international news outlets report the time with grim headlines that could be drawn from a thesaurus entry for doomsday: annihilation, apocalypse, Armageddon. The clock has been celebrated as a powerful and enduring example of information design and criticized as a fear-mongering media stunt. In the nearly 80 years of its history, it has inspired music by Iron Maiden, Linkin Park, and Hozier, among others, and has appeared in TV shows from Dr. Who to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and even in a satirical adaptation of the children’s book Goodnight Moon called Goodnight Trump: “Goodnight global climate shock. Goodnight ticking Doomsday Clock.”
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