It is now 85 seconds to midnight

2026 Doomsday Clock Statement

Science and Security Board
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Editor, John Mecklin
January 27, 2026

Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes eight Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by man-made technologies.

The Science and Security Board

The Bulletin‘s Science and Security Board (SASB) is composed of a select group of globally recognized leaders with a specific focus on nuclear risk, climate change, and disruptive technologies. Learn more…

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It is now 85 seconds to midnight

A year ago, we warned that the world was perilously close to global disaster and that any delay in reversing course increased the probability of catastrophe. Rather than heed this warning, Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead 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. Far too many leaders have grown complacent and indifferent, in many cases adopting rhetoric and policies that accelerate rather than mitigate these existential risks. Because of this failure of leadership, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board today sets the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe.

Last year started with a glimmer of hope in regard to nuclear risks, as incoming US President Donald Trump made efforts to halt the Russia-Ukraine war and even suggested that major powers pursue “denuclearization.” Over the course of 2025, however, negative trends—old and new—intensified, with three regional conflicts involving nuclear powers all threatening to escalate. The Russia–Ukraine war has featured novel and potentially destabilizing military tactics and Russian allusions to nuclear weapons use. Conflict between India and Pakistan erupted in May, leading to cross-border drone and missile attacks amid nuclear brinkmanship. In June, Israel and the United States launched aerial attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities suspected of supporting the country’s nuclear weapons ambitions. It remains unclear whether the attacks constrained those efforts—or if they instead persuaded the country to pursue nuclear weapons covertly.

Meanwhile, 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, 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. 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.

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.

The national and international responses to the climate emergency went from wholly insufficient to profoundly destructive. None of the three most recent UN climate summits emphasized phasing out fossil fuels or monitoring carbon dioxide emissions. In the United States, the Trump administration has essentially declared war on renewable energy and sensible climate policies, relentlessly gutting national efforts to combat climate change.

During the past year, developments in four areas of the life sciences have increased potentially catastrophic risks. 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 defenses. 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. Perhaps of most immediate concern is the rapid degradation of US public health infrastructure and expertise. This dangerously reduces the ability of the United States and other nations to respond to pandemics and other biological threats.

The increasing sophistication of large language models and their applications in critical processes—coupled with lingering concerns about their accuracy and tendency to “hallucinate”—have generated significant public debate over the past year about the potential risks of artificial intelligence. The United States, Russia and China are incorporating AI across their defense 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.

These dangerous trends are accompanied by another development that undermines efforts to deal with major global threats: the rise of nationalistic autocracy in countries around the world, including in a number of countries that possess nuclear weapons. Leaders of the United States, Russia, and China greatly vary in their autocratic leanings, but they all have approaches to international relations that favor grandiosity and competition over diplomacy and cooperation. The rise of autocracies is not in itself an existential threat, but an us-versus-them, zero-sum approach increases the risk of global catastrophe. The current autocratic trend impedes international cooperation, reduces accountability, and acts as a threat accelerant, making dangerous nuclear, climatic, and technological threats all the harder to reverse.

Even as the hands of the Doomsday Clock move closer to midnight, there are many actions that could pull humanity back from the brink:

• The United States and Russia can resume dialogue about limiting their nuclear arsenals. All nuclear-armed states can avoid destabilizing investments in missile defense 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 that AI be 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.

Our current trajectory is unsustainable. National leaders—particularly those in the United States, Russia, and China—must take the lead in finding a path away from the brink. Citizens must insist they do so.

It is 85 seconds to midnight.

Editor’s note: Additional information on the threats posed by nuclear weapons, climate change, biological events, and the misuse of other disruptive technologies can be found elsewhere on this page and in the full PDF / print version of the Doomsday Clock statement.

Learn more about how each of the Bulletin‘s areas of concern contributed to the setting of the Doomsday Clock this year:

Nuclear Risk

The lack of arms control talks and a general dearth of leadership on nuclear issues has worsened the nuclear outlook. Read more…

Climate Change

Reducing the threat of climate catastrophe requires actions both to reduce the primary cause—the burning of fossil fuels—and to deal with the damage climate change is already causing. Read more…

Biological Threats

Four developments—research into self-replicating “mirror life”; AI tools that can design biological threats; state-sponsored biological weapons programs; and the dismantling of US public health efforts—have increased the possibility of bio-catastrophe. Read more…

Disruptive Technologies

The increasing sophistication and uncertain accuracy of AI models have generated significant concern about their application in critical processes, particularly in military programs. Read more…

About the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

At our core, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a media organization, publishing a free-access website and a bimonthly magazine. But we are much more. The Bulletin’s website, iconic Doomsday Clock, and regular events equip the public, policy makers, and scientists with the information needed to reduce man-made threats to our existence. The Bulletin focuses on three main areas: nuclear risk, climate change, and disruptive technologies, including developments in biotechnology. What connects these topics is a driving belief that because humans created them, we can control them.

The Bulletin is an independent, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. We gather the most informed and influential voices tracking man-made threats and bring their innovative thinking to a global audience. We apply intellectual rigor to the conversation and do not shrink from alarming truths.

The Bulletin has many audiences: the general public, which will ultimately benefit or suffer from scientific breakthroughs; policy makers, whose duty is to harness those breakthroughs for good; and the scientists themselves, who produce those technological advances and thus bear a special responsibility. Our community is international, with more than half of our website visitors coming from outside the United States. It is also young. Half are under the age of 35.

Learn more at thebulletin.org/about-us.