How Policymakers Can Build a Better Doomsday Clock

Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling during the invasion of Ukraine has many people wondering: How likely is this crisis to escalate to nuclear war? The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’s famous Doomsday Clock has a simple and frightening answer: Humanity is mere seconds away from “midnight,” and the risk of nuclear war is unacceptably high.

But how high is it, exactly?

The Doomsday Clock can’t give an answer to that—seconds don’t translate well to probabilities—and it’s not designed to, as a public communications and awareness-raising tool. Perhaps the question is fundamentally unanswerable. But new techniques in the nascent science of forecasting suggest that better tools can be built that give early-warning indicators of global catastrophic risks. If policymakers, researchers and funders em

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