85 Seconds To A Nuclear War

I want you to stop for a moment and sit with a number.

Eighty-five seconds.

That is where the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock on 23 January 2026 — four seconds closer to midnight than the previous year, and the closest it has been to the symbolic point of annihilation in the instrument’s 79-year history. The Bulletin was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the University of Chicago scientists who built the first atomic weapons. When they created the clock in 1947, they were not building a metaphor. They were scientists who understood precisely what they had made, and they were trying to warn a world that was not paying attention.

Eighty years later, the world is still not paying attention. And the clock is closer to midnight than it has ever been.

What 85 seconds actually means

The Doomsday Clock does not measure certainty. It measures trajectory. The right question is not whether we are precisely 85 seconds from annihilation. The right question — the one that should be keeping political leaders awake — is this: how are we doing compared to last year? How are we doing compared to ten years ago? How are we doing compared to the end of the Cold War?

The answer to all three questions is the same. Worse. Consistently, measurably, and with accelerating momentum, worse.

The Bulletin’s Science and Security Board set the clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe. It cited three regional conflicts involving nuclear powers, all threatening to escalate: the Russia-Ukraine war featuring novel military tactics and Russian allusions to nuclear weapons use; conflict between India and Pakistan that erupted in May 2026 with cross-border drone and missile attacks amid nuclear brinkmanship; and in June 2025 and February 2026, Israel and the United States launching aerial attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Alexandra Bell, who led the announcement at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, stated plainly: “In terms of nuclear risks, nothing in 2025 trended in the right direction. Longstanding diplomatic frameworks are under duress or collapsing, the threat of explosive nuclear testing has returned, proliferation concerns are growing, and there were three military operations taking place under the shadow of nuclear weapons and the associated escalatory threat. The risk of nuclear use is unsustainably and unacceptably high.” 

These are not the words of activists or ideologues. They are the words of nuclear scientists, arms control specialists, and strategic analysts whose professional lives are dedicated to understanding exactly what these weapons do — and who are telling us, as directly as their institutional language permits, that we are in the most dangerous nuclear moment since the weapon was invented.

The treaty that nobody is keeping

Professor Ivana Nikolić Hughes, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University, has spent her career documenting the precise gap between what the nuclear powers committed to and what they have actually done. Her research on radiological conditions at former nuclear testing sites — including Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where the United States conducted the majority of its nuclear tests beginning six months after Hiroshima, and which remains radiologically contaminated to levels she describes as unacceptable for human habitation to this day — places the current moment inside a 79-year history of broken commitments and unacknowledged responsibility.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, now 56 years in force, rests on three pillars: non-proliferation, in which non-nuclear states pledge not to acquire weapons; the promotion of peaceful nuclear technology; and — the pillar that has functionally collapsed — the commitment by the five recognised nuclear weapons states to negotiate an end to the nuclear arms race and pursue genuine disarmament. 

The NPT review conference that concluded in May 2026 was the third consecutive conference since 2010 to end without an adopted outcome document. The five nuclear weapons states — the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom — have not kept their disarmament commitment. They have maintained it as a legal obligation, invoked its language in diplomatic forums, and proceeded to modernise, expand, and in several cases increase their nuclear arsenals.

All nine nuclear-armed states are currently upgrading their arsenals. The United States and Russia — which together hold roughly 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads — have allowed major arms-control treaties to expire or collapse, including the INF Treaty in 2019 and the Open Skies Treaty in 2020. The last bilateral nuclear arms control treaty between the US and Russia, New START, expired in February 2026 with nothing to replace it. 

Hughes has written and published extensively on the legal dimension of this failure. The NPT’s Article Six obligation is not a suggestion. When the United States ratified the NPT, it became — under the US Constitution’s Supremacy Clause — the supreme law of the land. The failure to negotiate disarmament is not just a foreign policy choice. It is a domestic legal violation. It is simply that no one in the American system is enforcing it.

The lesson Iran taught the world — and what comes next

The most dangerous immediate consequence of the Iran war may not be the war itself. It may be the lesson every non-nuclear state in the world is now absorbing from watching it.

For states weighing whether to engage diplomatically with Washington, the Iran precedent is significant. Iran was also attacked during two active rounds of negotiations — in June 2025, and again in late February 2026. Dialogue did not protect Iran. Since the war, prominent voices within the Iranian regime are now arguing that Tehran should quit the NPT and develop the bomb. Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is reported to be more hardline than his father, who issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons and reportedly pushed back against senior Iranian military leaders who argued for acquiring them. 

If Iran were to develop a nuclear weapons programme, the consequences for regional proliferation could be severe. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has previously warned that the kingdom would seek to acquire a nuclear weapon if Iran does.

The proliferation cascade that John F. Kennedy feared in the 1960s — when he was deeply concerned about the Israeli nuclear programme and warned that 15, 20, or 25 nuclear-armed states would make nuclear war nearly inevitable — is now beginning to take visible shape. In Japan and South Korea, serious debates about domestic nuclear acquisition have been building for several years, driven by China’s sustained nuclear buildup, North Korea’s expanding arsenal, and concerns about the reliability of US security guarantees. The US stationing of THAAD missile defence systems in South Korea and the reported redeployment of part of that capacity to the Middle East signals that Washington may be prioritising Middle Eastern engagements over its Indo-Pacific commitments.

Explorations are underway of the possibility of a Euro-deterrent supported by the French and UK nuclear arsenals, or allowing other European countries to develop nuclear latency so they could quickly build nuclear weapons if necessary. Public opinion in Turkey, Poland, and South Korea seems to be shifting toward support for developing domestic nuclear capabilities.

The lesson is being absorbed plainly, as Chatham House’s analysis states: nuclear weapons deter attack in a way that conventional capabilities cannot. This belief was already gaining ground after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which some have interpreted as confirmation that Kyiv’s relinquishing its Soviet-era arsenal left it exposed. Iraq and Libya, which abandoned their weapons programmes, were also targeted with military action. 

North Korea did not abandon its weapons. North Korea is not being bombed. That is the lesson. Every government in the world has registered it.

The accident nobody is planning for

Hughes’s research and writing centre on a danger that receives far less attention than the question of deliberate use: the possibility of accidental or miscalculated nuclear war. This is not a hypothetical concern. It is the most documented near-miss pattern in the history of nuclear weapons.

The histories of close calls are unambiguous. In 1983, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov received a signal indicating five American missiles had been launched at the Soviet Union. Petrov concluded — correctly, against the weight of his training — that the signal was a false alarm. His unilateral decision not to report it as confirmed prevented an automatic Soviet nuclear response. In 1995, Russian President Boris Yeltsin had his nuclear briefcase opened for the first time in genuine response to what appeared to be an incoming US missile — actually a Norwegian scientific rocket whose launch had not been communicated through the proper diplomatic channels.

Hughes has written on the technical dimensions of this risk with precision. Launch-on-warning policies — which the United States currently maintains — mean that decision-makers have minutes, not hours, to determine whether a detected incoming strike is real before retaliating. A cyber attack that triggers false readings in a nuclear detection system, a technical malfunction, a communication failure between commands, a misread radar signature — any of these could trigger a sequence of events that no individual decision-maker intended but that no individual decision-maker can stop once set in motion.

As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted with the 2026 Doomsday Clock move to 85 seconds to midnight, the shift from regional tension to direct military intervention in Iran significantly heightens the risk of global instability and potential nuclear proliferation. The Iran war has introduced a specific new danger: a new Supreme Leader whose family was killed in American strikes, whose political legitimacy depends partly on demonstrating independence from Washington, and whose advisers are actively debating nuclear acquisition — operating in a context where the NPT review process has failed, where arms control treaties have expired, and where the United States has demonstrated that diplomatic engagement does not protect a country from military attack.

That is the accident-risk environment we are operating in. Not the Cold War’s two-player, relatively structured deterrence. A multi-polar nuclear landscape with nine armed states, degraded communication channels, AI systems being integrated into military decision-making without adequate governance, and the accumulated lesson that the only reliable protection is the weapon itself.

The nuclear powers and their imperial logic

Hughes has published work in Al Jazeera Arabic, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Scientific American, and The Nation arguing that the history of nuclear weapons cannot be separated from the history of imperialism. This is not a polemical position. It is a reading of the documented record.

The United States is the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons in war. It used them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 — when Japan was already seeking peace terms, when the primary obstacle to Japanese surrender was the American insistence on unconditional terms that excluded preserving the Emperor, and when a group of scientists at the Manhattan Project (the Frank Report) had recommended demonstrating the weapon before foreign dignitaries rather than using it on populated cities. The bombings were not a military necessity. Leading US historians — not foreign critics, not ideologues — have documented that they were principally a demonstration directed at the Soviet Union, to establish American nuclear primacy at the outset of the post-war order.

Six months later, the United States was in the Marshall Islands, displacing the people of Bikini Atoll to conduct the first in a series of nuclear tests. More than 2,000 nuclear tests followed, across multiple decades, by multiple states — but the United States conducted the most, wrote what Hughes describes as the “playbook for the nuclear testing era,” and the Marshall Islands test sites remain radiologically contaminated at levels she and her husband, in their joint research, consider unsafe for their own children to inhabit.

The United Kingdom and France have each maintained arsenals of 200 to 300 warheads for decades. France has recently announced expansion and potential sharing of its nuclear capability with European partners. The practical reason these states retain nuclear weapons is not security — Europe is far too small and too densely populated for localised nuclear use to be survivable, and nuclear winter from any significant exchange would cause mass starvation across the continent regardless of which cities were targeted. The real reason, as Hughes’s analysis argues, is international standing — the retention of a seat at the tables where the most consequential decisions are made, derived from the possession of weapons that can destroy cities.

This is not security policy. It is colonial legacy dressed as deterrence.

The Global South chose differently — and deserves to lead

While the nuclear powers have presided over 56 years of failed disarmament commitments, the most significant institutional development in nuclear governance has come from the Global South.

Accompanying these dangerous trends is 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 have approaches to international relations that favour grandiosity and competition over diplomacy and cooperation. Against this backdrop, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) — initiated primarily by non-nuclear Global South states, negotiated at the United Nations, and now counting 74 state parties and 25 signatory states — represents the most coherent institutional response to the nuclear crisis that exists.

The TPNW does not simply prohibit the use of nuclear weapons. It prohibits their development, possession, transfer, testing, and deployment. It is backed by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. It was driven by precisely the countries that have the least to gain from nuclear weapons and the most to lose from their use — small island states, countries in the Global South, nations that watched nuclear powers test their weapons on their territory and in their oceans without consent, and countries that have recognised that nuclear weapons pose a threat not just to the cities they might target but to all of humanity through the cascading effects of nuclear winter, ozone depletion, and radiation spread.

The nuclear powers — including all five NPT-recognised weapons states — have refused to sign or ratify the TPNW. Their argument is that the treaty is incompatible with nuclear deterrence. That argument is precisely the point. The TPNW’s foundational premise is that nuclear deterrence is a false narrative — that nuclear weapons do not keep us safe, but instead keep all of humanity under continuous and growing threat of annihilation through accident, miscalculation, or deliberate use.

The Global South built the one institution that takes this seriously. It has not been given credit for doing so.

What this means for Malaysia and ASEAN

Malaysia is a signatory to the TPNW. Malaysia has been consistent and principled in its support for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. Malaysia sits within a region that is formally declared a nuclear-weapon-free zone under the 1995 Treaty of Bangkok — the Southeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ), to which all ten ASEAN members are party.

That treaty, and the zone it establishes, has been honoured primarily in the breach by the nuclear powers. The United States has never signed the SEANWFZ Protocol. Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom have not ratified it in a manner that provides meaningful legally binding guarantees to ASEAN states. The zone exists on paper as an expression of regional political will. It does not exist as an enforceable security guarantee.

The proliferation cascade now underway — driven by the Iran war, the failure of the NPT review process, the expiry of New START, the expansion of Chinese, French, Russian, and American arsenals, and the explicit debate in South Korea and Japan about domestic nuclear capability — will arrive in ASEAN’s immediate strategic environment regardless of ASEAN’s own choices. If Japan or South Korea acquires nuclear weapons, if North Korea continues expanding its arsenal with Russian assistance, if China responds to US maritime pressure by deploying nuclear assets closer to the South China Sea, Malaysia and ASEAN face a neighbourhood that is more dangerous than at any point since the Cold War ended.

The architecture of arms control accords has unraveled. Gone is the post-Cold War period when the US and Russia pledged to reduce their nuclear weapons stockpiles by more than 80%. What replaces it, if nothing replaces it, is an unregulated multipolar nuclear environment in which the absence of agreed rules means the absence of agreed limits.

For Malaysia specifically, the lesson from the TPNW process is the right one: Global South solidarity on nuclear abolition is not idealism. It is the only framework that treats the lives of people outside the nuclear powers’ capitals as equally valuable to the lives within them. Malaysia should deepen its engagement with the TPNW, use its platform at the UN and at ASEAN to push for universal adoption, and build diplomatic coalitions with the 74 state parties who have already made this commitment.

The Stimson Center’s 2026 risk assessment placed nuclear escalation as the primary risk driver. Great-power competition is driving new nuclear risks as existing powers seek to increase their stockpiles or carry out new tests, while proliferation threats are unfolding in what analysts are calling a third nuclear era. AI, offensive cyber, and anti-satellite weapons are creating new vulnerabilities for nuclear powers. ASEAN’s response to this environment cannot be limited to declarations of a nuclear-weapon-free zone whose protocols the major powers refuse to honour. It must include active, sustained, high-level diplomatic engagement on the specific mechanisms that reduce the risk of accidental or miscalculated nuclear use — crisis communication channels, no-first-use agreements, and the genuine implementation of the disarmament obligations that the nuclear powers have legally accepted and consistently violated. 

The choice that is still available

Every nuclear near-miss in history was a near-miss because one human being made the right decision at the right moment. Stanislav Petrov. Vasili Arkhipov. The analysts who correctly identified the 1995 Norwegian rocket as non-threatening. The chain of human judgment that has, so far, prevented the 85-second clock from reaching midnight.

We have built a system that depends on that chain of judgment holding, indefinitely, across multiple states, across political transitions, across technological failures, across the fog of active conflict — and across whatever cognitive deterioration may or may not be affecting the individuals who hold the launch codes at any given moment.

Hughes’s analogy is the right one. A patient with serious chronic conditions who is also using heroin every day cannot address the chronic conditions without first addressing the heroin. The heroin is the thing that kills you before anything else can be fixed. Every day that passes without addressing it is another day of accumulated risk.

We have over 12,000 nuclear weapons. Most are far more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They would flatten hundreds of cities. The people in those cities would be incinerated or survive to suffer third-degree burns, radiation exposure, and the cascading effects of nuclear winter — crop failure, famine, ozone depletion, civilisational collapse — that would reach every human being on earth regardless of where they live or what choices their governments made.

The Global South did not build these weapons. The Global South did not choose the arms race. The Global South did not allow the NPT review process to collapse. The Global South built the one treaty that treats this as an unconditional priority — not a bargaining chip, not a deterrence asset, not a strategic tool, but an existential threat to all of humanity that must be eliminated.

The Doomsday Clock stands at 85 seconds to midnight. In its 79-year history, it has never been closer. The institutions that created the danger have failed to address it. The institutions that the Global South built to address it are being ignored by the people with the weapons.

That is the situation. The only question left is what we do about it.

Sources: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — “2026 Doomsday Clock Statement,” January 23, 2026; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — “2026 Doomsday Clock Statement: Nuclear Risk,” January 27, 2026; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — “Video: Experts Analyse the Conflict in Iran,” March 2, 2026; Chatham House — “The Iran War Risks Triggering a New Wave of Nuclear Proliferation,” March 30, 2026; Stimson Center — “Top Ten Global Risks for 2026,” February 4, 2026; Reuters/Times of Israel — “Doomsday Clock Set Closer to Midnight Than Ever,” January 27, 2026; Ivana Nikolić Hughes — Nuclear Age Peace Foundation publications; Ivana Nikolić Hughes and Peter Kuznick — Al Jazeera Arabic, March 2026; International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) — Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons; UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — current state parties; Treaty of Bangkok — Southeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone; Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — Review Conference outcomes 2010, 2015, 2022, 2026; Arms Control Association — NPT review failure analysis; Annie Jacobsen — Nuclear War: A Scenario (cited in discussion of 32-minute response window).