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Why the war in Ukraine is pushing the Doomsday Clock’s hands closer to midnight
Published: April 22, 2022 3.30am BST
Author
Alexander Gillespie
Professor of Law, University of Waikato
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Alexander Gillespie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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The so-called Doomsday Clock, created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to measure the imminent risk of nuclear conflagration, has been at 100 seconds to midnight since 2020. It’s now looking increasingly out of time with current events.
News that Russia has tested a nuclear-capable missile this week, and warnings by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Russia may resort to nuclear or chemical weapons, suggest the clock’s hands should be moving.
To bring events to this point, Russian president Vladimir Putin has exploited gaps in international law and policy that have failed to better regulate the arsenals of the world’s nuclear powers.
Perhaps following former US president Donald Trump’s lead, Putin has broken with diplomatic norms around the reckless use of nuclear rhetoric, threatening the West it would “face consequences that you have never faced in your history”.
And following the failure of the international community to create a convention that nuclear weapons should be kept at a non-alert status (meaning they can’t be fired quickly), Putin has put his nuclear forces into “special combat readiness”.
Sabre-rattling or not, these are worrying developments in a world that has struggled to pull back from the precipice of nuclear disaster since the Doomsday Clock began in 1947.
Ramping up the rhetoric: Vladimir Putin speaks at a concert marking the anniversary of the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Getty Images
Putting back the clock
Even when the United States and Russia were closest to a nuclear conflict during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the clock only got to seven minutes to midnight.
While the clock moved backwards and forwards as threats came and went, the US and Russia extended the bilateral arms control treaty capping the number of deployed warheads, and in January this year the five main nuclear powers agreed that a nuclear war “cannot be won and must never be fought”.
Read more: Russia is sparking new nuclear threats – understanding nonproliferation history helps place this in context
The very next month this small pause of reason was broken when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.
Although Ukraine is hardly comparable to Cuba in the 1960s – there were no missiles on Russia’s doorstep and no blockade – Putin feared the country could potentially become a nuclear base for NATO. His aim has been to force all the former Eastern bloc countries now aligned with the West to agree to their 1997 pre-NATO positions.
To achieve this, Putin violated the United Nations Charter, sidelined the rule of global order set by the International Court of Justice, and possibly allowed his military to commit war crimes.