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nuclear proliferation
The Doomsday Clock and Nuclear Reality: Our World in Peril
A breakdown of international nuclear norms, fueled by “us versus them” thinking and the newly termed “Donroe Doctrine” challenges our legitimacy around the world.
Jan 28, 2026
Today, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board presented the 2026 Doomsday Clock. At 85 seconds to midnight, this is the closest it has been since the original clock was presented 79 years ago by the Bulletin’s founders, scientists who were involved with the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. The prophetic clock symbolizes the proximity of humanity to nuclear apocalypse at the strike of midnight. It is yet again a stark reminder of how close we are to nuclear Armageddon and the end of life as we know it. It is at great peril that we continue to ignore this pronouncement. The current board is composed of globally recognized leaders in science, academia and threat assessment who are charged with determining the potential of man-made existential threats.
In recent years, the movement forward of the minute hand has taken into account the nuclear risk accelerators of climate change, disruptive technologies, emerging threats and a breakdown of international cooperation.
This announcement comes as civil society and the majority of the world‘s population last week celebrated the fifth anniversary of the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which formally made nuclear weapons illegal to have, test, develop, stockpile, transfer and/or threaten to use. In defiance of international law and norms, the nuclear nine nations continue their arms race to develop and modernize their nuclear weapons under the gross fallacy of nuclear deterrence. In reality deterrence remains the greatest driver of the current arms race and threat to our survival. This year’s setting of the Doomsday Clock follows a year where global order has been shaken and conflict multipliers occur, seemingly on a daily basis, increasing nuclear proliferation and potential for use either by intent, miscalculation, accident, or cyber attack. In this past year, 5 of the 9 nuclear nations, Russia, the U.S., Israel, India and Pakistan, were at war, the last two with each other and China has made increasingly bellicose threats to occupy Taiwan.
Additionally, the push to resume nuclear power and the entire nuclear fuel cycle, setting aside environmental safeguards, is presented under the charade of nuclear power – totally ignoring the intimate connection between nuclear power and weapons development increases the availability of nuclear material and thus the risk of nuclear proliferation, increased contamination of our communities, and, of course, a nuclear war.
Finally, the last remaining nuclear arms treaty, New START, is set to expire February 5 with no follow on treaty in the works.
This breakdown of international nuclear norms, fueled by “us versus them” thinking and the newly termed “Donroe doctrine” challenges our legitimacy around the world.
These flashpoints coupled with the interconnected existential threat of climate change that moves forward with the failure to create any significant climate agreements this past year. This has worsened due to the U.S. withdrawal from 66 international organizations and treaties further isolating us around the world.
Currently global nuclear arsenals have approximately 12,321 weapons or roughly 267,000 times the firepower of the bomb dropped over Hiroshima. Therefore, when, and not if, nuclear deterrence fails, as it certainly will as long as these weapons exist, everyone and everything we care about will be destroyed. As Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev stated in 1985, subsequently reaffirmed by Presidents Biden and Putin in 2021, “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” We cannot outspend or outgun our way out of this. Our only hope for survival for our generation and future generations is the complete and verified elimination of these weapons.
Fortunately there is hope. The non-nuclear nations of the world have refused to be bullied any longer. The International Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, signed by 99 nations, and ratified by 74 nations, is now international law. Here in the United States we have a growing grassroots movement, Back from the Brink, at all levels of our society, from civil society including faith-based organizations to cities, counties, states and bicameral resolutions in the U.S. House (H.Res.317) and Senate (S.Res.323) with 55 sponsors.
We can and must demand action now. Absent this we risk the reality expressed by Oppenheimer when he said, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” We must push back against the nuclear industrial complex and their captured elected officials. We must denounce the lie of deterrence whenever and wherever it is uttered. We must choose the path of hope, the hope and commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons. We will then be free to turn our global attention and our resources to fighting our other interconnected existential threat of climate change. The choice is ours.
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Trump’s Nuclear Testing Threat: Playing with More Than Dynamite
We have to hope that there is sufficient wisdom and leverage hidden in the cracks of the Trump administration to convince Trump that he needs to reverse course.
Nov 11, 2025
The thriller House of Dynamite, playing in theaters and streamed into our homes, leaves its audiences hanging as an unprepared US president must decide humanity’s fate after a surprise nuclear attack. Now picture the real president, Donald Trump, whose uninformed and garbled statement about resuming nuclear testing may have sounded the starting gun for an existentially dangerous multinational nuclear arms race. We can hope that those who may be able to influence this unstable and ill-informed president will devise a face-saving way for him to walk back the threat. But we can’t count on that happening.
In a recent track II session with US, Russian, and European former arms control diplomats, military officials, and analysts, there was something like a consensus that Trump misunderstood one or more reports about recent Russian nuclear activities. The claim is that either Russia or China conducted explosive, rather than subcritical, tests, a claim rejected by the head of the US Strategic Command. Not wanting to be out done by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump made his threat. When questioned about it, Trump reiterated the threat. This has caused profound uncertainty and confusion, leading the Kremlin to request clarification about US nuclear weapons testing policy.
Worth noting is that this brouhaha comes at a time when significant forces within the Republican Party advocate renewed testing. The Kremlin has yet to receive that clarification or another one in response to its offer to extend the most essential elements of the New START Treaty beyond its February expiration date.
Among senior arms controllers, there is an understanding that if the US or Russia resume testing, it will open the gates for extremely dangerous nuclear weapons proliferation. Among the candidates for a nuclear breakout are South Korea, where a majority of the population wants their nation to develop nuclear weapons out of fear of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and growing uncertainties about Seoul’s military alliance with the United States. Other breakout candidates include Saudi Arabia, which recently concluded a military alliance with nuclear Pakistan and near-nuclear Iran. Despite Trump’s claims of having destroyed Tehran’s nuclear program, Tehran moved its highly enriched uranium prior to the Israeli and US missile strikes against its nuclear infrastructure. And as history teaches us, knowledge is not easily destroyed.
In our various nations we can use our people’s power to name, shame, isolate, and insist on no new nuclear weapons testing.
While Russia is reported to be in a position to resume explosive nuclear weapons testing in relatively short order, this is not the case for the US. While the Pentagon could detonate a nuclear weapon as a show of terrorizing force, it would take several years to install highly advanced nuclear testing technologies into the Nevada test site. Similarly, nations that aspire to join the nuclear powers will not immediately be able to test these “weapons of the Devil.”
However, the seminally important Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which has successfully limited nuclear weapons proliferation and thus the dangers of nuclear war, will be at risk if Trump persists with the threat to resume nuclear weapons testing. Despite the US and China having yet to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, with the exception of North Korea nuclear powers have respected the moratorium on kinetic testing since the CTBT was negotiated 30 years ago in 1996. Fears abound that if Trump does not reverse course before the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which begins at the United Nations in late April, he could torpedo the treaty. Despite the treaty’s double standards and failure to lead to the elimination of the world’s nuclear arsenals as prescribed in Article IV, the treaty remains a powerful diplomatic barrier to nuclear weapons proliferation. Dangerously, the last two Review Conferences were deemed failures for their inability to negotiate and issue a final declaration. The probability is that a commitment to resume nuclear weapons testing would sink the third RevCon.
In the tradition of three strikes and you’re out, a third successive NPT RevCon failure would likely doom the NPT, if not immediately then over the course of several years. In the mistaken belief that nuclear deterrence can provide national security, some states would withdraw from the treaty, become nuclear powers, and the resulting collapse of the treaty would “end the world as we know it.”
Where does this leave us? First and foremost, we have to hope that there is sufficient wisdom and leverage hidden in the cracks of the Trump administration to convince Trump that he needs to reverse course. In our various nations we can use our people’s power to name, shame, isolate, and insist on no new nuclear weapons testing. And with the NPT Review Conference approaching, we can organize to insist that the treaty’s Article IV commitment to nuclear weapons abolition, and previous implementation agreements, be respected.
Along the way we can remind people that even as we are enter and resist a new US-Russia-China Cold War, that arms control agreements between great power rivals can be negotiated, as was the case during the first Cold War. We can urge the US to join with Russia to extend the elements of the New START Treaty beyond the treaty’s February expiration. And we can join efforts to use the new Netflix film House of Dynamite to teach new generations about the existential threat of nuclear weapons and war and the reality that, as the Hibakusha teach, “Human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
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Trump’s Iran Attack Was a Dangerous Showcase of Why Nuclear Apartheid Must End
Counterproductively, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran may hasten Iran becoming a nuclear weapons state.
Jun 29, 2025
Over many years, I have had the extraordinary privilege of working with Japanese and other atomic and hydrogen bomb survivors. These are people who have endured and transformed the worst imaginable physical and emotional traumas into the most influential force for nuclear weapons abolition. Their fundamental call is that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
Their courage, their call, and their steadfast advocacy of nuclear weapons abolition earned them the Nobel Peace Prize last December. In awarding the Hibakusha the Nobel Prize, the Nobel Committee sent the world a powerful message. With the possible exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world is closer to the danger of catastrophic nuclear war than it has ever been, and we must act for nuclear weapons abolition.
There are just over 12,000 nuclear weapons in the nine nuclear weapons state’s stockpiles, 93% in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. The average strategic, or hydrogen, bomb is 20 times more powerful than he Hiroshima A-bomb, and some have been 1,000 times the power of the two comparatively small A-bombs that destroyed those two cities, killing 200,000 people almost immediately, and hundreds of thousands more as a result of radiation diseases.
As with the 1953 CIA led coup that overthrew Iran’s democratic Mosaddeq government, the attack’s negative impacts will be long lasting.
As Daniel Ellsberg, who was the principal author of Presidents John F. Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s nuclear warfighting doctrines, testified, the U.S. has repeatedly threatened to initiate nuclear war during wars and international crises. Presidents have used them in the same way that an armed robber uses a gun when it points it at his victim’s head. Whether or not the trigger is pulled, the gun has been used. In my book Empire and the Bomb, I documented about 30 times that U.S. presidents have done this, most frequently to reinforce U.S. hegemony in the Middle East and Asia.
Each of the other nine nuclear weapons states has prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear war at least once. Russian President Vladimir Putin has used the U.S. nuclear playbook in his war in Ukraine.
I’ve been asked to say a little about the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, one of the seminal treaties of the 20th century. Iran signed it, but following U.S. President Donald Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, the Iranian parliament has voted to stop cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and there is talk of leaving the treaty altogether. Israel refused to sign the treaty and lives outside its obligations.
In the 1960s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union recognized that the science creating nuclear weapons was no longer beyond the reach of many countries. They feared that as many as 40 countries could develop nuclear weapons by the end of the 20th century. The treaty they negotiated with the vast majority of the world’s nations rests on three pillars: Nonnuclear weapons states forswear becoming nuclear powers and have the right to develop and use nuclear power for peaceful purposes—a flaw in the treaty. Article VI of the treaty obligated the initial five nuclear powers to engage in good-faith negotiations for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons: creating a nuclear weapons-free world.
I have had the privilege of working with several Nobel Peace Prize recipients. Joseph Rotblat, the only senior scientist who resigned from the Manhattan Project because of his moral objections, was clear that because no nation will long tolerate an unequal balance of power—in this case terror—unless nuclear weapons are abolished, proliferation and the nuclear war that would followed are inevitable. Mohamed ElBaradei, who led the IAEA, decried the double standard of nuclear apartheid. Like Rotblat, he insisted that the only way forward was nuclear weapons abolition.
And on the question of double standards, our government and media have long and consciously turned blind eyes to the one nuclear weapons state in the Middle East: Israel. Few know that during the 1973 war, Golda Meir threatened to use Israel’s “Temple Weapons” to extort Henry Kissinger to open the floodgates of weapons and spare parts to turn the tide of the war.
Do not forget that the bombings were grossly unconstitutional and should be grounds for an impeachment. Only Congress has the legal right to declare war.
Counterproductively, Trump’s and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran may hasten Iran becoming a nuclear weapons state. This in turn would trigger nuclear weapons proliferation across the Middle East. We need to remember the fatwa stating that possession of nuclear weapons is contrary to Islam. But we should also acknowledge the Shiite tradition of continuing revelation—not unlike the Mormons here in the U.S. Enriching uranium to 60%, almost to weapons grade, was certainly not necessary for nuclear power generation.
But diplomacy, not war, was and remains the way.
As some initially feared, the Iranian government apparently moved some of its fissile materials from Natanz and Fordow before the attacks. And contrary to President Trump’s claims that he obliterated Iran’s nuclear project, and pathetically that the bombing was equivalent to the Hiroshima A-bombing, the Pentagon reports that they do not know how much or where enriched uranium is now stored, if the fissile materials remain accessible should Iran now opt to develop a nuclear arsenal, or what if any radioactive fallout has occurred. And with Iran’s foreign minister traveling to Moscow, the multi-dimensional Iranian-Russian-Chinese-North Korean alignment may have been strengthened by the U.S. attack and lead to future nuclear collaboration between Teheran and Moscow.
The attacks will spur nuclear weapons proliferation. Knowledge about how to build a nuclear weapon has not been eliminated, and the attacks will likely redouble Iranian will to build a nuclear weapon, at the very least to defend its independence. Other nations will take the lesson that their sovereignty and independence require having a retaliatory nuclear arsenal, as was the case in North Korea.
As with the 1953 CIA led coup that overthrew Iran’s democratic Mosaddeq government, the attack’s negative impacts will be long lasting. Coming in the tradition of that coup, of U.S. support for Iraq in its calamitous 1980s war to overthrow the Iranian government, and Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement, the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure came a day before scheduled negotiations. This reinforces the lesson that the U.S. cannot be trusted, and the loss of trust in the U.S. word and commitments will not be limited to Iran. It is being learned or relearned by the nations and people of the world, with negative consequences for the U.S. people for decades to come.
Do not forget that the bombings were grossly unconstitutional and should be grounds for an impeachment. Only Congress has the legal right to declare war.
The bombings were gross violations of international law. They undermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the increasingly fragile post WWII United Nations charter order. A world in which there is no respect for law and diplomacy opens the way to international chaos, autocracies, wars, and devastating human suffering.
Even as we must rally to prevent renewed and widening war and press for nuclear disarmament and abolition, we must not be diverted from the urgent work of stopping Israel’s brutal genocide in Gaza, its attacks across the West Bank, for an Israeli-Iranian cease-fire, and for a just and sustainable Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Common security is the only path and foundation for Israeli, Palestinian, and Middle East peace and security.
No War with Iran!
Work for a Just, Peaceful, and Nuclear Weapons Free World!
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