It’s 89 Seconds to Midnight - 2025 Doomsday Clock Announced
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 2025 Doomsday Clock Announcement reflects a stark reality, the competing crises of a renewed nuclear arms race and unstable climate pose a grave and imminent risk to human health.
By moving the Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds before midnight, the scientific community is telling us that time is short to correct course, too short to compete once again in a global arms race, only this time with China as well as Russia as adversaries.
As a leading voice for sane nuclear policy in the Pacific Northwest, the Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility have worked for over 40 years to move back the hand on the clock.
“As a leader in the Washington chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, doctors like myself have long warned about the existential health risks of nuclear weapons. Every new weapon built, every line of communication broken, intensifies that risk” - Dr. Joseph Berkson
In 2015, the Obama Administration reneged on its promise of working towards a world without nuclear weapons, and instead began the process of nuclear weapons modernization, revamping the Cold War arsenal with newer and deadlier weapons. This move signaled to the world that it was through nukes, and not negotiations that the modern era would be forged. All but one of the treaties between the US and Russia, NewStart, have been abandoned. NewStart, which limits the number of warheads actively deployed by each country to 1,500, is set to expire next year. Meanwhile, China has doubled its arsenal of 200 weapons, potentially seeking parity with the US’s arsenal of over 5,000 weapons.
One doesn’t need to imagine an accident or nuclear war to understand the threat of nuclear weapons to civilization. In Washington, we need only to look at Hanford. A site critical to the Manhattan Project, Hanford produced ⅔ of the radioactive plutonium supplying for the current US nuclear arsenal. The resulting waste has been catastrophic. Hanford costs taxpayers over $3 billion a year, and the workers who toil to contain its waste experience abnormally high rates of cancer. Even with constant monitoring, Hanford poses a potentially disastrous risk to Eastern Washington and communities down the Columbia River.
Rising sea levels and extreme weather events are all but guaranteed to occur in the next decade. It’s unknown how this will affect the Bangor-Trident Nuclear Submarine Base in Kitsap County, home to more deployed nuclear weapons than anywhere else in the western hemisphere. What is known is that every new weapon increases the risk.
What we need now more than ever is a strong response from civil society to force the moral courage needed by many members of Congress to strongly oppose nuclear weapons. We need a movement similar to the Nuclear Freeze, which is why WPSR founded the Washington Against Nuclear Weapons coalition, to create an overwhelming demand to avert nuclear war.
Contact:
Sean Arent, Nuclear Weapons Abolition Program Manager, Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility
253-363-0843 or sean@wpsr.org
Dr. Joe Berkson, Nuclear Weapons Abolition Task Force
206-605-1837 joseph@wpsr.org
