COVID-19 and the Doomsday Clock: Observations on managing global risk

| April 26, 2020 | Leave a Comment

Reducing human population would affect both supply and requirement of working hours. Punch Clock by Tom Blackwell | Flickr | CC BY-NC 2.0

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Date of Publication: April 2020

Author(s): Bulletin Science and Security Board

On January 23, 2020, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward to 100 seconds to midnight. We board members warned then that the world’s institutional and political capacity for reducing the possibility of civilization-scale catastrophe had been diminished, and the need for emergency action was urgent. In our statement, we explained that because of the worldwide governmental trend toward dysfunction in dealing with global threats, we felt compelled to set the Doomsday Clock closer than it had ever been to apocalypse.

Three months later, the transformation of the novel coronavirus outbreak into a global pandemic is demonstrating the importance of domestic and international governance, not only in the mitigation of and response to global challenges such as a pandemic, but also in their prevention. In short, as the world is now seeing, governmental dysfunction can cost lives. Competent, timely actions to prevent and mitigate future global crises—whether they involve biological, nuclear, climatic, or other major threats—will depend on the world’s ability to address three fundamental governance concerns.

The first involves the need to repair a worldwide erosion of infrastructure for managing crises. We noted in January that leaders had undermined cooperative, science- and law-based approaches to managing the most urgent threats to humanity, helping to create a situation that will, if unaddressed, “lead to catastrophe, sooner rather than later.” This dysfunction is most evident in the United States, where active political antagonism toward science and government-sanctioned disdain for expert opinion have led to the dismantling of programs crucial to disaster prevention (such as the US Agency for International Development program for warning of pandemics) and mitigation. The COVID-19 pandemic shows the dangers of dysfunction at many levels of government, exacerbated by failures to provide adequate authorities and resources necessary for a robust response.

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