In a move that felt less like a warning and more like a final diagnosis, the guardians of humanity’s stopwatch have nudged us one terrifying second closer to oblivion.
On January 27, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—founded by the architects of the nuclear age—moved the Doomsday Clock from 89 to 85 seconds to midnight, marking the closest brush with total catastrophe since the clock’s creation in 1947.
The announcement, delivered by a sober panel including Nobel laureates and top scientists, was a clinical confirmation of a fever the world feels but its leaders refuse to treat.
“The Doomsday Clock’s message cannot be clearer,” said Alexandra Bell, president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline, and we are running out of time. Change is both necessary and possible, but the global community must demand swift action from their leaders.”
In response, a voice from the political wilderness issued not a plea, but a declaration of war against the establishment that presides over this decay.
Anti-establishment progressive Democrat Lisa McCormick, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey, seized on the moment not for political points, but as a final piece of evidence in her case against a broken system.
“The simple fact is, I’m running because I want to save the world,” she stated. “We can create a better future only if we prevent the destruction of our planet’s capacity to sustain life.”
McCormick framed the crisis with the words of Carl Sagan, reflecting on the “pale blue dot” to underscore “our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another.”
She then presented the jury with a damning indictment: a world paralyzed by greed and short-term thinking in the face of a dozen ticking bombs.
Her list extends beyond the Bulletin’s core concerns of nuclear war, climate change, and disruptive artificial intelligence to include a full spectrum of existential neglect: global warming, nuclear proliferation, emerging pathogens, plastic pollution, unintended AI consequences, biodiversity collapse, chemical contamination, cyber-warfare threats, famine engineered by inequity, the weaponization of space, deteriorating global health systems, and the metastasizing cancer of misinformation that paralyzes collective action.
“There is no place to go that is safe from the harm we do on this planet,” McCormick said. “These are things that can kill us all.”
Channeling the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, she argued that “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.”
From this, she draws her most radical prescription: a resurrection of a 1934 idea to impose a $100 million cap on personal wealth.
“A cap on wealth is a limit on greed,” she asserted, framing it not as punishment but as preservation, “the opportunity to preserve freedom consistent with America’s promises for liberty, prosperity, security and justice for all.”
This puts her in direct conflict with the very financial powers the Doomsday Clock implicitly indicts.
McCormick’s platform is a direct challenge to what she calls a “broken political establishment” that is “incapable of ensuring our survival.”
She positions her “Share Our Wealth & Power” economic doctrine as a necessary revolution to dismantle an “oligarchic elite” and bridge the chasm between the wealthy and the working class.
Her political journey—a previous Senate primary challenge that netted two of five ballots cast—demonstrates a persistent, if unorthodox, effort to storm the gates of a system widely viewed as fundamentally corrupt.
The scientists, for their part, offer analysis, not salvation.
The responsibility, their silent clock screams, falls to the people and the officials they elect.
McCormick’s conclusion is that the official class has failed its duty.
“We have everything necessary to save the world except the political will to do it,” she said. “There’s no reason to wait any longer. We must have peace, progress and prosperity or we shall suffer together instead of thriving.”
The question now hanging in the air, thicker than smog, is whether a population staring at a clock counting down its final minutes will listen to calm, expert warnings from symposiums, or to the angry, prophetic cries from the campaign trail.
The Doomsday Clock measures threat, not hope. McCormick is betting that in 2026, hope inspires a very loud, very disruptive alarm.