The United Nations: The Doomsday Clock

The United Nations: The Doomsday Clock (1987)

I thought I’d begin 2026 reflecting on a letter from 40 years ago, from the United Nations.

 It concerns The Doomsday Clock, a film about multilateral disarmament that the UN commissioned me and animation colleague Jonathan Hodgson to make. The film’s title is taken from the clock created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, to represent the likelihood of technological Armageddon. In 1986 the clock was set at 3 minutes to midnight (midnight being possible global destruction). Our brief was to show how this might be averted and the benefits of multilateral disarmament, without using dialogue, and in images that everyone worldwide would understand.

 The UN’s letter responds to our proposed film outline. Jon and I wanted to visually equate cutbacks in social spending with increased arms spending, but the UN felt that “cutting back on social welfare is part of a political philosophy which may go hand in hand with increased arms spending but is not necessarily caused by it," and we should “go easy on the locked schools and boarded up hospitals.” So we focused instead on how multilateral arms reduction could facilitate increased cooperation and productivity leading to increased social welfare.

 But Thatcher and Reagan’s 1980’s doctrine of privatization and reduced public spending has instead led to today’s hollowed-out society, with hospitals starved of funding, wealth concentrated increasingly at the top, calls for increased arms spending from those who would most benefit, and over it all, the screeching of an orange baboon, beating its chest in a drumbeat of war.

The Doomsday Clock's annual update is announced on 27 January 2026, at 15.00 GMT. It is currently the closest it has ever been to midnight.

The Doomsday Clock can be viewed on this website in the Films section

And on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/43307523

Atomic Clock live update: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/