The Doomsday Clock Is Now 85 Seconds to Midnight
The recent decision by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight is a sobering reminder of how fragile our shared future has become. Created in 1947, shortly after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Doomsday Clock was designed by scientists—many of whom worked on the Manhattan Project—to warn humanity about existential threats of our own making. Figures such as Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer believed scientists carried a moral responsibility to communicate risk beyond laboratories and governments. The clock is not a prediction, but a moral signal: a way to translate complex scientific and geopolitical dangers into a clear, universal message that decision-makers and the public cannot ignore (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs).
The clock’s movement is guided by multiple indicators, including nuclear weapons proliferation, breakdown of arms-control treaties, active military conflicts involving nuclear states, climate destabilization, and emerging technological risks such as artificial intelligence and cyber warfare. Each second closer to midnight reflects the compounding effect of these threats rather than a single event, as assessed by experts in nuclear policy, climate science, and global security (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute; National Academies of Sciences). Yet among all these factors, the continued accumulation of vast nuclear arsenals remains the most immediate and irreversible danger.
At Freemuslim, we believe that even one nuclear weapon represents an unacceptable risk to humanity—and that storing 1,550 warheads, the current treaty limit between the United States and Russia, is far beyond any rational definition of security. Such destructive capacity contradicts the ethical purpose of science and undermines the sacred value of human life.
Freemuslim opposes the use of weapons in general and promotes peaceful coexistence rooted in justice, restraint, and shared human dignity. We therefore advocate not only for a 50-year extension of existing nuclear arms treaties, to stabilize trust and reduce escalation, but also for amendments that reorient advanced technologies toward human advancement and wishes for abolishment of military use. (Nuclear warheads themselves cannot be directly “converted” into civilian tools, but the scientific knowledge, materials, and industrial capacity behind them can be redirected.) For example, nuclear expertise can be repurposed toward clean energy generation, medical isotopes for cancer diagnosis and treatment, nuclear desalination for water-scarce regions, space and climate monitoring technologies, and radiation-based agricultural and food-preservation methods (International Atomic Energy Agency; World Health Organization; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). These pathways demonstrate that the same intelligence once devoted to annihilation can instead protect life.
Freemuslim urges nations to choose cooperation over coercion and wisdom over fear—so that science becomes a bridge between peoples, not a weapon held above them.
