Countdown to Midnight January 20, 2025

Karen Peterson, Guest Opinion, 1.20.25

Today is Donald Trump’s inauguration. It’s also Martin Luther King Day. Next Tuesday, on Jan. 28, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will tell us what time it is, as recorded by the annual Doomsday Clock, the 78-year-old monitor of how close we are to a nuclear midnight.

The irony is worth noting: The symbols of war and peace and the ticking clock separating life and death are playing out over the next seven days in January 2025.

For the past two years, the hands on the Doomsday Clock have stood at 90 seconds to spare before the unthinkable doomsday strike. It is the closest to midnight in the clock’s history, accelerated in 2023 by the escalating war in Ukraine and Putin’s “thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons,” as the timekeepers of the clock reported. Intimidation imposes “a terrible risk” that could escalate the situation “by accident, intention, or miscalculation.”

“The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high,” they warned.

The clock doesn’t always change from year to year. It stayed at 90 seconds last year as well, so it could remain at 90 seconds again in 2025. After all, this year’s threats to human life are basically an extension of situations and events in previous years. With deeper concerns: Russia and Ukraine continue to escalate their war; Ukraine has penetrated Russian territory; the US and UK have supplied Zelensky with long-range missiles, which he fired into Kursk; North Korean mercenary troops are fighting alongside Putin’s foot soldiers; and last year the world sweltered under a another year of heat that wiped out the records set in 2023.

Climate change has been a factor in the clock’s calculations since 2007. In recent years, AI has been tapped for closer observation.

If the early days of January 2025 are eligible for consideration, the clock-watchers could take into account, and likely hasten the symbolic end of times, the inferno that has killed an untold number of people and, to date, destroyed vast neighborhoods in Los Angeles, leaving the landscape as colorless and barren as Hiroshima after the bomb dropped. The fires in L.A. are still burning as the week begins.

On the positive side, if the Israel–Gaza cease-fire holds, the release of tension might give us a few seconds more to ponder our existence. Trump likes to say that he knows everything about nuclear war because he had an uncle who taught at MIT. He also claims that he has never read the 922-page tome of conservative didactics, the 2025 Project produced by the Heritage Foundation. Regardless, the project succeeded, in pedantic detail, to churn out policy and governance for the incoming Republican president. It didn’t appear overnight. Thought leaders on the Right have been working on their treatise since the Reagan era and back to Nixon, besieged by the rise of a Boomer generation of Leftists. 

The authors of Project 2025 have been thinking and writing and waiting for their turn to take back America. Trump, like Reagan, knows how to play his role as the strongman, and nuclear power politics, for weaponry and domestic energy, is a good look for wannabe autocrats.  More explosive power is better power. MAD isn’t bad. Project 2025 goals wrap tightly around turning out more advanced nuclear weapons for the “Triad” of land, sea and air defenses; significantly increased production of uranium and plutonium; and the revival of atomic testing in the eerie, pock-marked Nevada Test Site 65 miles north of Las Vegas.  Most importantly in the weapons-of-war planning process is the conflict envisioned by Project 2025: the US faces simultaneous battles with antagonists China and Russia. “To ensure its ability to deter both Russia and the growing Chinese nuclear threat, the U.S. will need more than the bare minimum of nuclear modernization,” writes Christopher C. Miller, author of the Department of Defense chapter of Project 2025 and the last assistant secretary of defense in the first Trump administration.

As dangerous as a nuclear Russia is, Miller warns that the “most significant danger to America from abroad” is China. The Communist regime, he writes, “is undertaking a historic military buildup [that] could result in a nuclear force that matches or exceeds America’s own nuclear arsenal.”

Whatever the Trump Administration plans for an American nuclear renaissance, know that the US is already on track to spend an obscene amount of taxpayer money on refurbishing our aged atomic arsenal—the current plan that Miller considers the “bare minimum.”

If it comes to full fruition, the Nuclear Modernization Plan of 2010 could cost upwards of $1.7 trillion over 30 years, not counting inflation, according to the Federation of American Scientists, which works with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist on timekeeping.

To be clear say it out loud, one trillion, seven hundred billion dollars for new bomber jets, land-based missiles, and thermonuclear warheads, among other necessities of what could ignite an Armageddon for the Anthropocene era. (It is also approximately the price tag for Greenland, according to the Washington Post.)

Do we really need more? One missile is all it takes to rile a belligerent leader into retaliation. And there are more than enough bombs to join the obliteration game of nuclear warfare. The nine nuclear nations collectively have control over 12,100 nuclear warheads, 9,500 of which are in “active military stockpiles.”

The NY Times and recently the Wall Street Journal have carried in-depth and exploratory articles on the threats of new nuclear war, brought into focus by the election and Project 2025. “The Bomb Is Back,” writes the WSJ. The world is on “The Brink,” the NY Times reports in a sprawling, interactive opinion piece. Both are sobering.

Yet as dire as the headlines and the unknowns of Trump’s lame-duck presidency are, there is reason for hope. The Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in December, honored the last of the hibakusha—the survivors of the 1945 atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—for their life-long service to preventing another nuclear war through their stories, testimony, and unwavering dedication to telling the truth about government response and responsibility.

It is the second time the coveted peace prize has been awarded to organizations and people protesting the use and existence of nuclear weapons. PSR is among them by proxy for its connections to the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (ICAN), cofounded by Ira Helfand, who had earlier co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility.

For decades PSR national and its chapters including PSR Arizona have kept watch, lobbied legislators, demonstrated, and rallied communities to support and adopt legislation that would prevent the weapons of war from starting one.