Fanatics celebrate as global powers are closing the window on human history

Understand what is actually happening right now, on this planet, in this particular window of human history, before the next wave of missiles makes the accounting more complicated.

The United States and Israel have launched thousands of strikes against the Iranian government and military infrastructure, while the biggest land war in Europe enters its fifth year, and the smartest people in the world warn of our global vulnerability to a man-made catastrophe.

Many are hitting populated areas — Tehran, Tabriz, Isfahan, cities where people were, until recently, going to work, raising children, and doing the ordinary things that people do when they are not being bombed.

Iran has thus far launched 48 waves of retaliatory missile and drone attacks against Israel and American military positions across the Middle East, a number that should be read not as a statistic but as a portrait of a war that has found its own terrible momentum.

On March 13, The Wall Street Journal, citing two U.S. officials, reported that Iranian missiles struck Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, destroying five American aerial refueling tankers on the ground — the aircraft that keep U.S. warplanes circling over Iranian territory.

That’s not simply escalation—it’s a sign that the whole concept of restraint has already been thrown out the window.

Meanwhile, in Europe, a land war larger than anything the continent has seen since 1945 continues grinding through its fifth year, as Russian invaders in Ukraine are burning through men and materiel seemingly without memory of what World War II actually cost.

China, accelerating on a path toward becoming the wealthiest nation on Earth, is spending that new wealth with focused, unhurried deliberateness on the expansion of its nuclear arsenal and military capacity. Chinese President Xi Jinping has pledged to achieve the “reunification” of China and Taiwan, calling Beijing’s long-held goal “unstoppable.”

Thousands of Chinese fishing boats have been massing in geometric formations in the East China Sea, in coordinated actions that experts believe are potentially preparations for a of blockade or an amphibious invasion of Taiwan.

Tensions between nuclear-armed Pakistan and the Taliban have surged once again in late February, and sharply escalated over the last 48 hours with more than 270 rockets and artillery shells fired from the Islamabad government into Afghanistan’s Kunar Province. India, also a nuclear-armed nation, strongly criticized Pakistan, with their most recent military clash taking place in May 2025.

And the last treaty that placed any numerical limit on American and Russian nuclear weapons has expired. Just gone. Sixty years of painstaking arms control architecture, dismantled not by a dramatic rupture but by the quiet failure of anyone to care enough to replace it.

These are not separate stories.

They are one story, and it is the most dangerous story in the history of human civilization.

On Jan. 27, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight — the nearest it has stood to global catastrophe since the symbol was created in the aftermath of Hiroshima.

The scientists who maintain it are not dramatists. They are physicists, biosecurity experts, and former defense officials who have spent careers translating technical risk into language that policymakers can understand, largely without success. They are the smartest people in the world.

When they moved the clock to 85 seconds, they were not making a rhetorical point. They were doing arithmetic, and the math came out badly.

Three regional conflicts involving nuclear-armed states escalated in a single year. India and Pakistan exchanged cross-border drone and missile strikes in May. Russia has repeatedly gestured toward nuclear use in Europe in language that stopped being rhetorical some time ago. The United States and Israel struck Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025, and the honest answer to whether those strikes set back Iran’s weapons program or simply drove it underground is: nobody knows. What is known is that Iran is still here, still fighting, still absorbing and returning fire with a population that has now been given every conceivable motivation to want a nuclear deterrent of its own.

The Israelis, for their part, support this war overwhelmingly, while simultaneously having concluded — with a candor that should unsettle anyone paying attention — that it will end when Washington decides it ends. Not when Israeli interests are satisfied. Not when Iranian capabilities are neutralized. When Washington decides. This is the stated position of a nuclear-armed state that has opened two simultaneous fronts and is relying on an ally that has not, by any evidence visible to outside observers, fully modeled the scenario in which Iran does not simply collapse, or in which the combined weight of regional war, escalation, miscalculation, and exhausted command structures produces an outcome that no one in any of the relevant capitals has seriously war-gamed.

The White House’s National Security Strategy, released after more than 10 months of preparation, runs to 29 pages and does not seriously address any of this. It does not address nuclear escalation risk. It does not address the expiration of New START or what replaces it.

It does not address the climate trajectory, which has now pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide to 150 percent of preindustrial levels while the administration conducts what the Bulletin’s board accurately described as a war on renewable energy.

It does not address the AI governance vacuum into which the United States, Russia, and China are all pouring military applications with no agreed rules of engagement and no circuit breakers.

It does not address the biosecurity landscape, which has been actively degraded by the systematic dismantling of American public health infrastructure, or the warning issued in December 2024 by scientists from nine countries that the synthesis of mirror life — self-replicating biological structures that could evade every natural defense mechanism on Earth — represents a potential existential threat to all life on this planet, a warning to which the international community has produced no response whatsoever.

To govern in 2026 without confronting these realities is not restraint. It is negligence on a geological scale.

The fires in Tehran are visible from space. The drone swarms reaching Israeli cities and allied capitals carry the specific sound — that flat, mechanical buzz — of a conflict that has already exceeded the boundaries of any original intent. In Europe, an entire generation is being consumed by a land war that the architects of the post-World War II order built all of their institutions specifically to prevent. China is watching all of it and drawing the obvious conclusion, which is that military capacity is the only argument that gets heard.

And the Doomsday Clock sits at 85 seconds.

Not 85 minutes. Not 85 hours. Eighty-five seconds, as measured by the people whose entire professional purpose is to measure it accurately, and who have never in the history of the clock placed it this close to the end.

The men and women making the decisions that produced this moment — the missile orders, the unsigned treaties, the gutted science agencies, the 29-page strategy documents that ignore the actual threats — appear to be operating under the collective assumption that the clock is a metaphor, that the scientists are alarmists, that history will absorb whatever they choose to do next, and that there will be a next.

There may not be a next. That is the point. That has always been the point. And we are, as of this morning, 85 seconds from the moment when it becomes impossible to make it.