A DAY before the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists (BAS) reset the notional Doomsday Clock on Jan 28 at 89 seconds to `midnight` at which time human civilisation will cease to exist, I sent it the following message: `You are about to reset the DDC for 2025. Gramsci the great Italian socialist intellectual said he was a pessimist of the intellect but an optimist of the will which meant he anticipated catastrophes but was confident they could be overcome.

Accordingly, I expect you to move the clock closer than ever to midnight by setting it at 61 or 59 seconds to it. The latter time would focus on seconds rather than minutes to ensure that a more concerned world would wake up to the proximity of midnight and do everything to avert it.

`The reasons for increased pessimism? Trump 2.0; the genocide in Gaza; artificial Intelligence and the pessimism of one of its founding fathers, Geoffrey Hinton, regarding the ability of humans to control it; progressiveclimateheating;zero-sumUS-China relations which raise the chances and reduce the margins for military/ strategic error; the tendency for people not to concern themselves beyond the lives of their grandchildren`s grandchildren roughly a century with irreversible momentum towards midnight setting in much earlier; etc.

`The reasons for optimism? Very few.

`Keep up your good work, but be more frantic.

In the event, the DDC was set closer to midnight by just one second, instead of the half minute I had suggested and hoped for.

In its explanatory statement, the BAS made no reference to the genocide in Gaza or the criminal support for it by the US which will be redoubled with the return of Trump.

Trump`s cavalier decision to take the US out of the Paris Accords for a second time despite the fact that the last two years were respectively the hottest and second hottest on record; his suspension of funding to all USAID projects which he has been forced by public opposition to put on hold; his decision to withdraw from the World Health Organisation despite the prospect of even worse pandemics than Covid-19; and his cynical support for the removal of the Palestinian population of Gaza to other Arab countries to seal the success of Israel`s genocide in effect a third and final `Nakba` merited much more than a ludicrous minus one second on the DDC.

Given that over the past year the global human security situation has deteriorated to the extent that it has, the anodyne statement of the BAS that the global situation `has not made progress during the past year` was a euphemism that frankly insulted the intelligence of the world. Onemember of the BAS Science and Security Board, which sets the DDC each year, sarcastically observed `if the world is to make progress towards avoiding midnight it may have to do so without the US`. That statement alone warranted a full minus one minute on the DDC! Moreover, the increasingly uncontrollable annual forest fires of California and other places; the breaking away of an Antarctic ice sheet the size of Greenland due to ocean warming; and the failure of COP29 were an indication of the failure of global leadership in general, and of the US in particular, to prioritise the saving of human civilisation. And I haven`t even mentioned Trump`s plans for Canada; Greenland; the Panama Canal; his oil mantra `drill, baby, drill`; his threat of a trade war with China; his threat to impose tariffs to compel foreign investment in the US in complete violation of the rules of the World Trade Organisation; etc.

Accordingly, over the next four years, the world will be fortunate if it merely findsitself on a rollercoaster ride instead of in a straight dive into perdition. Given the fact that irreversible climate heating, which by definition would be an unstoppable force multiplier for all the global threats listed by the BAS, may set in during Trump`s second term, the sagelyrestraint of the eminent elders of the BAS Science and Security Board was a disappointing and weak-kneed cop-out. Given that Trump is no more than a symptom of the degenerative disease that defines current American politics, what is the BAS waiting for? In conclusion, since the DDC represents the state of the world, notional DDCs for specific regions and countries, if they were established, would not have times more distant from midnight than the one on the global DDC because all countries and regions are part of one and the same world. But they could have times set closer to midnight for reasons of location, circumstance and governance. So, what time might a group of eminent scientists and security experts set for Pakistan and South Asia? The readers of Dawn might wish to have a go at it. • The writer is a former ambassador to the US, India and China, and head of UN missions in Iraq and Sudan.

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