Half a lifetime ago, I had a crappy copyediting job that meant I had to drive for 90 minutes through traffic across the sprawling concrete wasteland of Phoenix. The job itself was boring and soulless, and after spending another 90 minutes getting home in my AC-free beater, I would slam several Miller High Lifes while watching the honeybees gather goodies from the invasive London rocket in my backyard. I liked seeing the fuzzy little pollinators making trips back and forth between those tiny yellow flowers because it made my own problems feel less significant, compared to insects trying to survive on plants that didn’t belong in the desert and were themselves just trying to thrive in our overheated world. If the bees and the weeds were OK, I could be OK too.
Still, for anyone paying even a little attention, this era can feel extra-doomy. It’s not just a byproduct of social media, 24/7 cable news and our shared tendency to drowning in constant updates on the sorrows of the world. War, genocide, fascism and more terrible things seem to be trending upward, while our environment gradually loses the ability to sustain our species. In essence, the threat of global catastrophe has never been higher.
As you can tell, people say I’m really fun at parties. But it’s all true. As much as I like dissociating with the latest season of “Rick and Morty” or more of that beer plus bee-vision, there’s a part of me that always lingers on the growing existential risks that face our world.
The danger of nuclear war isn’t top of mind for most people, but it’s just as alarming, if not more, as climate change, unregulated AI and outbreaks of disease. Last week, a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that we’re moving backward on the issue of nuclear proliferation in pretty much every way.
Nine countries now possess nuclear weapons — the U.S., Russia, the U.K., France, China, Pakistan, India and North Korea — and all of them are expanding and upgrading their nuclear arsenals, which now number approximately 12,187 warheads. Efforts to stop this proliferation are weakening and treaties are expiring. On June 9, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons reported that those nine countries spent a collective $119 billion on nukes last year, with the U.S. spending the bulk of that ($69 billion), more than the eight others combined. If even one of those warheads were detonated, it would lead to catastrophe on a scale difficult to imagine and also probably would likely trigger a cascade of missiles and bombs that could make the planet all but uninhabitable.
What can be done about this? I’m not sure gazing at bugs will help, but there could be some value in returning to the roots of the issue. In the wake of the Manhattan Project that birthed the atomic era — and with it, the ever-present threat of nuclear war — people acted immediately to bring attention to this new threat. Out of these efforts came the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit academic journal that tries to raise attention to nuclear risks, climate change, biological threats and disruptive technologies.
The Bulletin is best known for its Doomsday Clock, an attempt to gauge the likelihood of a global catastrophe. In January 2026, the clock was set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest we’ve ever been to a designated zero hour. So the Bulletin’s mission seems more critical than ever. John Mecklin, current editor in chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is retiring after 15 years. I spoke with him recently about combating despair, the dangers of ongoing conflicts such the Iran war, and what it would take to get our world to give up nuclear weapons.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When the Bulletin was founded, this idea of a global existential threat was fairly new idea, right? We’ve had plagues and climate change before, to some degree, but until the Manhattan Project, humans weren’t really in control of that kind of existential, destructive power. These days it seems like there are more different types of existentialist threat: nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, agricultural collapse, stuff like that. How has the mission of the Bulletin changed in the last eight decades?
Well, when it was founded in 1945 the technology that could end civilization, at least globally, was nuclear atomic weapons, and that’s what the scientists who founded the Bulletin were concerned about. But even early on it wasn’t the only thing they were concerned about. Eugene Rabinowitch, the first editor of the Bulletin, wrote about the Pandora’s box of technology that modern science would open. There would be other technologies that have the same global civilization-ending possibilities, and the Bulletin really began talking about climate change as one of those technology-based existential threats in the late 1950s, really. The first Bulletin cover story on climate change was in 1978 — a long time before anybody else was looking at it.
The Bulletin has always covered a whole range of scientific issues that relate to human society and policy matters. Climate was formally adopted as something we cover, I think, in 2007, as was biotechnology, which back then primarily meant biological warfare. Both the Soviet Union and the United States had some form of biowarfare research, and both always claimed it was defensive. They were making defenses against other evil people who might engage in biological warfare. Later, that biological element was sort of reconfigured into something known as “disruptive technologies.” So the Bulletin now covers nuclear weapons and nuclear science, climate change and this grab bag of disruptive technologies. That includes biological technologies, AI, and some things to do with nanotechnology, but basically any technology that reaches the level where it could be considered a threat to civilization. Maybe not enough to make humans go extinct. I mean, a few humans might continue living at the end of a nuclear war, but civilization would be over. Nothing like the way we live would be possible after a full-scale nuclear war.
The Bulletin would argue that the threat is escalating, right?
It is escalating for all sorts of reasons. Primarily, the problem is that leaders of the world’s major countries aren’t doing anything as these threats continue, expand and intersect. In the United States, for instance, the Trump administration is going backward on climate change, even though it’s a severe threat that would end civilization if we don’t address it. Not only is it not addressing it, it’s going the other direction.
“After all that effort to end that extremely costly and senseless arms race during the Cold War, we’re right back in the middle of it.”
All three major nuclear powers have just … Well, China never joined any arms control treaties. The United States and Russia have just ended all the treaties that were created over a period of many decades to constrain nuclear arsenals, so now there are no constraints. What’s going to happen is very unclear, but in some sense, after all that effort to end that extremely costly and senseless arms race, we’re right back in the middle of it. And I mean, very stupidly, the U.S. and China are in an arms race related to artificial intelligence, which doesn’t have to be. Smart leaders would negotiate some way of not making it an extremely expensive, unproductive and dangerous arms race, but Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are not the kind of people who we need, frankly, to reduce the threat.
It does seem like there’s zero leadership on this issue, and I don’t think we can really vote on it either. Almost no one is even making it part of their platform, addressing climate change, nuclear proliferation, this AI stuff. So it’s frustrating. How do you get the public to care about this kind of stuff?
Well, that’s what I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life trying to do, and it is difficult but not impossible. I mean, the Bulletin has a reach roughly 15 or 20 times larger than when I came on as head editor in 2014. So it’s not that people can’t be interested in this. It’s a combination of a lot of media that don’t cover it very much or very well because it’s offputting. It’s kind of scary. It doesn’t get you the clicks of cat videos and rappers dating other rappers and stuff like that. So part of it is the media environment being completely polluted with disinformation and misinformation, but part of it is political reality. It’s connected to how important this is to the general population. If it’s important enough, they will push the politicians to care about it and do something about it. That has happened in the past.
So it is a difficult dilemma, but I don’t think it’s one that’s unsolvable. It’s just that it needs more direct attention from the media, and then I think the activist community that works on these issues hasn’t been very effective. Climate has become a movement, but the nuclear movement, frankly, needs people who are better activists. There are lots of little activist groups on the nuclear side, but I don’t see them as moving the general public or politicians very effectively. So the activism community needs to get better, the media community needs to get better, and the politicians who care about this need to be more active about leading on it.
There are a handful of people in Congress who introduce measures about nuclear weapons once a year. But that’s about all they do, some sort of pro forma legislation that has zero chance of passing and that nobody pays attention to.
“Think about the amount of money pushing to have more nuclear weapons and more defense spending. It is vast. In comparison to what the anti-nuclear community has, it is enormous. It’s the same with climate.”
It’s an interconnected system. Let’s just take it into two big areas, nuclear weapons and climate change. Think about the amount of money pushing to have more nuclear weapons and more defense spending. It is vast. In comparison to what the anti-nuclear community has, it is enormous, and it’s the same with climate. The oil and gas industry has vast resources, and now the high-tech industry has vast resources, and they are all putting their dollars into fending off anything like regulation or common sense in regard to nuclear weapons.
I mean, the idea that we need to build new plutonium pits, meaning new triggers for nuclear weapons, is utterly ridiculous. We absolutely do not. We have thousands of these in storage, and we have studies that show they don’t degrade in a dangerous way. We don’t need any new plutonium pits, but we’re spending billions to build them. It’s just the stupidest program the government has ever engaged in, but do you see the media paying attention? Do you see politicians saying, “What a stupid program”? No, because the only people who care about those programs come from South Carolina, where one of the pit production sites will be, and New Mexico, where Los Alamos National Lab will get to start building plutonium pits again. So the only people in Congress who care about that are the members from those states who push for it. Nobody else gives a damn. So this really, really stupid thing happens.
This is multiplied many times over throughout defense spending and dealing with climate change. Those are realities that the media, the activist community and people in government need to come to grips with. It is not an impossible task. When something is that stupid, that wasteful, other members of Congress need to stand up against the people pushing it. Now, it’s a difficult problem because so many people in Congress feed off the defense budget, right? They have jobs in their states.
I’ve read that pretty much every county in America has a military base, so everybody has an incentive to keep them running. I’m skeptical of a lot of these statements coming from the military-industrial complex and from AI tech companies saying that there are existential risks, talking about how we’re running out of munitions in the Iran war so we have to build more bombs. Then people like Sam Altman of OpenAI are like, yeah, AI is an existential threat, it could take over the whole world and that’s why you should put us in charge of it. This fear-mongering is beneficial to them, but the risks do exist, to some degree. It’s difficult to explain all this to the public. How do you pay attention to this amid so many distractions?
It is difficult, but journalists need to be more strategic. It is not a hard target to explain to people that the Trump administration just asked for a 50% increase in the defense budget: $500 billion. This is absolutely absurd, and they haven’t even explained what the hell they would spend it on. I doubt the military can even absorb that, but we’re well on our way to enacting a $1.5 trillion defense budget when the United States is already spending many times more than the nearest competitor on defense.
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It’s an absolute absurdity, and an easy target. But you do not see that leading the New York Times or the Washington Post or any other major media. It’s obscene, and I understand the difficulty of the Trump administration flooding the zone with obscene and crazy things, so that it’s difficult to focus. But $500 billion could go a long way toward solving a lot of American problems. If we’re going to spend $500 billion, we could probably cover most of the country with healthcare. It’s just a huge amount of money, and everybody’s sort of shrugging their shoulders. I think a more thoughtful approach by the media, by activists and by politicians can bring about change. I wouldn’t have done this for 15 years if I didn’t think that.
I’ve read criticisms of the Doomsday Clock, that it’s gimmicky, like it’s arbitrarily trying to measure something that can’t be defined so easily. But I also want to give it the benefit of the doubt. Is this an effective way of getting the public engaged on the issue?
Well, I listen to people’s critiques, and they’re welcome to them. My response is generally, OK, the Doomsday Clock explains the reality of existential risk to an audience somewhere in the range of the high tens of millions or low hundreds of millions of people. What else you got that reaches that many people and explains existential risk to them?
“The Doomsday Clock explains the reality of existential risk to an audience somewhere in the range of the high tens of millions or low hundreds of millions of people. What else you got that reaches that many people?”
This is an unique thing in the world. We can catch the attention of the entire world for an extended news cycle and get them to focus on these issues, at least somewhat. If people are saying, “Oh, it’s just a gimmick, you shouldn’t do it,” I’d say that’s an absurd argument at its core. Yes, it’s a metaphor. No, it’s not a scientific calculation. But it’s a judgment by — I think it’s 18 top experts in these fields, really the best of the best. What are you going to substitute for that judgment to tell people what they should care about? Pete Hegseth?
I want to talk with you about the ongoing U.S.-Israel war against Iran, and how this is bringing risks of nuclear war that I don’t think we’ve seen anytime recently. But there’s also Ukraine and Russia, Pakistan and India, North Korea launching things. It feels as if we’re in an era of extremely heightened nuclear risk.
My science and security board set the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been, in significant part because they view the nuclear risk as very extreme for a lot of different, complicated reasons. In the three major biggest nuclear countries, the United States, Russia and China, the people involved with those nuclear forces know that a purposeful attack is essentially suicidal. They know that a full-out nuclear war would end civilization, so the risk isn’t so much a purposeful sneak attack by one country against one or two of the others, it’s a miscalculation. Some country’s sensors falsely indicate there’s an attack underway, so there’s a mistaken response, then a response to the response, or somebody uses a “small” or tactical nuclear weapon, just one or two to get some kind of result.
Apparently Russia was considering that, at a point during the Ukraine war when it looked like some of its fronts were going to get completely overrun. Just the use of one or two. Most war games show that it won’t stop there, it will escalate into full nuclear war. So those pathways of accidental miscalculation, or a small use of weapons, that escalates into a bigger use.
It’s hard to say that all the nuclear countries are led by level-headed, wise, deep-thinking people. They aren’t. There could be an attempted small use of nuclear weapons. There could be mistakes. There could be individual commanders who have some ability on their own to launch a nuclear attack that could start an escalatory process. From my knowledge, some Pakistani individual commanders can use battlefield nuclear weapons on their own. They aren’t entirely centrally controlled, particularly in times of high tension. If Pakistan used a nuclear weapon against India, and India responded would that drag in the whole world? Would that escalate to a worldwide nuclear war? It’s hard to say. It could, you know, given the ties between China and Pakistan and the U.S. and India.
“The risk isn’t so much a purposeful sneak nuclear attack by one country against one or two of the others. It’s a miscalculation, a mistaken response, and then a response to the response. Or somebody uses a ‘small’ or tactical nuclear weapon, just one or two.”
So it’s a very real risk that could be reduced, and the reason my board thinks it’s so extreme is that the risk is not being reduced. Leaders are not engaging in serious talks about things that could be done. You don’t even necessarily need new treaties, just agreements on notifications, and agreements to continue to abide by arsenal limits that were in previous arms control agreements. There are things that could be done and they’re just not being done at all. That’s why I think it’s a dangerous time on the nuclear front.
I think it’s really scary right now with the Trump administration. I don’t think they fully grasp how severe even one nuclear bomb being dropped would be. Pete Hegseth goes around describing himself as the “secretary of war,” and he’s gotten rid of the rules of engagement for the most part. They’re committing war crimes constantly in the Caribbean, and also in Iran, so I feel like the risk of something accidentally happening, and then the rest of the world getting pulled into it, is very high.
On April 7, when Trump said that an entire civilization would disappear, I just walked around with like this dark pit in my stomach all day. It was hard to focus on anything. I feel like it’s not inevitable, I’m not going to submit to despair. But it does seem like a strong possibility that we’ll see a nuclear bomb dropped at some point in my lifetime, and I don’t even know how I would react to that. Would I not go to work anymore, would I just wait to die? I struggle with these feelings a lot. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, because you’re on the frontlines of this issue. How do you deal with this anxiety? I’m not so much asking for myself, I have a therapist. But our readers may have the same feelings. How do they navigate that?
Well, I have always felt that I had the best job in the world. I get to go to work every day to try to save the world, to try to educate people about all these issues, to give them the information to influence the people in their governments to do better, and to do the right thing. In a couple months I won’t be the editor of the Bulletin, but that doesn’t mean I won’t feel the same way.
To stop trying to reduce the risk, to stop caring and advocating for what’s sensible policy, that’s just, as has been said, letting the terrorists win, letting the warmongers and the climate deniers win. It doesn’t affect me mentally that the world is in a bad situation. I just view it as a challenge. It’s fixable. Humans can undo what they’ve done, it just requires will, caring. Anything can be changed. It is fixable.
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I mean, think about this: In 1991 and 1992 the Russian and U.S. leaders unilaterally, on their own, got rid of thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons just by agreeing to. They didn’t have to do big long treaty negotiations or whatever. They just talked. They had their top advisers talk, and they just got rid of those weapons, disabled them, put them in storage. The difference is, now we have people who aren’t that wise in power. These leaders are clearly not up to the task, so we need new ones.
There’s also this narrative that, you know, if you give up your nuclear weapons, you’re inviting future attacks. Ukraine is obviously the prime example. They gave up their nuclear weapons under the Budapest Memorandum in 1994. Is there any truth to that?
It’s a false example. Ukraine had nuclear weapons stationed on its territory that were the Soviet Union’s weapons. The keys were in Moscow. Ukraine had no ability to use those nuclear weapons, and gave them back as part of an agreement to assure, first of all, that it be allowed to be an independent country.
“It doesn’t affect me mentally that the world is in a bad situation. I just view it as a challenge. It’s fixable. Humans can undo what they’ve done, it just requires will, caring. Anything can be changed.”
Yeah, they tried to have a security agreement, and the Russians absolutely violated that security agreement that went along with giving the nuclear weapons back to Moscow. But the Ukrainians couldn’t use them anyway, and would it have mattered if they had a few? Would Russia have stopped trying to reincorporate Ukraine into Russia if Ukraine had a few nuclear weapons? No. This is an ideological obsession of Vladimir Putin’s. He thinks the breakup of the Soviet Union was a catastrophic historical mistake, and his mission in life is to, in some way, reconstitute that Russian Empire or Soviet Union. So the idea that having a nuclear arsenal would have protected Ukraine, is just — in my mind, they didn’t have one anyway, and trying to create one would have caused Russia to invade sooner. I just think it’s kind of a phony argument.
Thank you for pushing back on that, because I hear it so much and I don’t really hear the counter-argument. I think South Africa is a good example of a country giving up its nuclear weapons, and they haven’t been invaded since then, as far as I know. This idea that if every country just had their own nuclear arsenal then we’d have world peace is just so false.
Nuclear proliferation just multiplies the odds that there’s going to be a mistake or miscalculation that causes nuclear weapons to be used, so the world should definitely be focused on not allowing more nuclear countries. So in that regard, I think the focus on making sure that Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon is correct. It’s just the way the Trump administration and the Netanyahu administration have gone about it is as dumb as it gets. It is absolutely thoughtless, shallow and unwise in every way you can imagine. That’s just not the way that would work, ever, to make sure that, long term, Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. And now it’s just a mess. I don’t know how to get out of it.
Yeah, I agree. We had a deal with Iran under President Barack Obama, and I don’t think that was a perfect agreement, but it was diplomatic at least. We’re never going to get people to the table on these issues by blowing them up. There is also the idea that no nation that has a nuclear arsenal has ever fought another nation that has a nuclear arsenal. It usually happens via proxy wars.
It’s a fuzzy area. It’s like, were the United States and Russia at war during Vietnam? Are the West and Russia at war over Ukraine? You can call those proxy wars, but they’re wars where nuclear-armed countries are on opposite sides. They’re doing things to keep it below the level of nuclear war, which I guess is good.
It’s a very complicated idea: Do nuclear weapons create security or create danger? Rather than engage in the philosophical, I stick to the practical. The current nuclear countries could reduce their arsenals by a lot, without losing anything in terms of deterrence. They could enter agreements that made accidental wars, and wars by miscalculation or misapprehension, far less dangerous. Then the world can continue to enforce the nonproliferation regime, so that more nuclear countries don’t spring up. Those things can reduce the risk.
If you start to get into the philosophical, well, how low can you go? How do you get to zero nuclear weapons? It gets almost theological, or theoretical. If Russia, the United States, and China all agreed to cut their arsenals to 200, how would you go to zero after that without any of those countries feeling like they were leaving themselves vulnerable? Because there are nine countries with nuclear weapons. If you went to zero, and even if, like the United States, you have a huge conventional capacity, would some other country with 20, 30 or 40 nuclear warheads be a real threat? I try to focus on practical ways that the risk can be reduced.
“I think the focus on making sure that Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon is correct. It’s just the way the Trump administration and the Netanyahu administration have gone about it is as dumb as it gets.”
You can go to the Doomsday Clock statements published every year and read the practical ways that the risk could be reduced. There are real things that could make the world less dangerous. It’s just we need wiser, smarter, better leaders, who are, frankly, less mercenary. People point to Donald Trump and his money and the apparent corruption of his regime, but Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a kleptocracy. He may be the richest man in the world. He has stolen the wealth of his country. China is full of corruption and state-level companies that are just looting the place.
All three of these countries have their own forms of military-industrial complex, so all three countries need leaders who are aware of that and can maneuver around it, and who will oppose it when it’s really important to oppose it. That doesn’t exist right now, and I don’t think real improvements can happen without it. It’s simple, almost to the point of simple-mindedness, but we need better leaders.
Do you think humanity, or at least Western society, is running into an empathy deficit, where we’re running out of compassion for each other? Is that why we don’t even pay attention to some of these existential risks? I hear this narrative a lot, like, people are so plugged into social media and desensitized to violence that we just don’t care about anyone else anymore.
No, I believe people are basically good. I think the last 10 years of the American experience has shown that the American public is quite unsophisticated in large parts of it. Quite poorly educated, quite easily misled, perhaps less than enlightened. But I’ve traveled around the country, I’ve known a lot of people, I’ve lived in “red states” or whatever. I think people are basically good, and I think they don’t want the world to end, and they don’t have some empathy deficit, as you put it. They may not be able to connect to people in other countries, because they’re unsophisticated. A lot of Americans have never been to another country, they’ve never had any experience of other people. People are tribal, but I think they are basically good, and that good can be harnessed. It has been at other times in American history. We’re just living in a time where our leaders have not harnessed that goodness.
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existentialism from Troy Farah
