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"Donald Trump is treating the destruction of a democracy as a political show—throwing Ukraine to the wolves and doing a favor for Putin," said one Senate Democrat.
A televised Oval Office screaming match between U.S. and Ukrainian leaders on Friday led to politicians worldwide reaffirming support for Ukraine, congressional Democrats decrying the Trump administration, and human rights advocates expressing alarm about what lies ahead.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance took turns berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who reportedly left the White House without plans for a cease-fire or a rare minerals deal with the United States, which has put nearly $183 billion toward helping Ukraine respond to the 2022 Russian invasion.
"This is thuggery from Trump and Vance, plain and simple," Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom, said of the public spat on Friday—a day after the U.K.'s Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, visited the White House and urged Trump to proceed cautiously on a potential peace deal for the region.
"Your dignity honors the bravery of the Ukrainian people," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen
told the Ukrainian leader on social media Friday. "Be strong, be brave, be fearless. You are never alone, dear President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. We will continue working with you for a just and lasting peace."
Zelenskyy responded, "Thank you for your support." He shared that same message in response to similar comments from the presidents of the European Council and Parliament as well as leaders in Austria, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Sweden.
Despite the incident at the White House, Zelenskyy also said: "Thank you America, thank you for your support, thank you for this visit. Thank you President Donald Trump, Congress, and the American people. Ukraine needs just and lasting peace, and we are working exactly for that."
While world leaders largely focused on rallying behind Ukraine and its president, many Democrats on Capitol Hill were quick to condemn Trump and Vance's conduct.
"Trump and Vance are an EMBARRASSMENT and DISGRACE. It was absolutely shameful to watch them berate the president of another country. Let alone one of our allies!" said Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas).
Crockett also blasted Trump's ultimatum for the Ukrainian leader, saying: "That's not leadership—this is a power play with no regard for what's really happening in the world. President Zelenskyy is literally fighting for his country's survival!
Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) slammed the U.S. leaders' subservience to the Russian president, charging that "there is no clearer evidence that Trump and Vance kiss the ring of Vladimir Putin than today's meeting with President Zelenskyy."
"What the American people saw was Trump and Vance behaving in ways that are unbefitting their offices," she continued. "Trump's obsession with pleasing Putin is a betrayal of the Ukrainian people, a national security threat, and an international crisis."
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) denounced their behavior as "disgusting and damaging," while Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) opted for "shameful and dangerous." She added that "Donald Trump is treating the destruction of a democracy as a political show—throwing Ukraine to the wolves and doing a favor for Putin."
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) similarly said that "the United States doesn't support Ukraine as a favor, but because it serves our security. Putin is a dictator, not Zelenskyy. Putin started the war, not Zelenskyy. Yelling in the Oval Office and siding with Putin is shameful and a danger to democracy around the world."
Andrew Albertson, executive director of Foreign Policy for America—which was founded after Trump's first win and is largely aligned with the Democratic Party—said in a Friday statement that "in capitals around the world, our closest allies are expressing tonight their shock and dismay at what they witnessed from an American president in the Oval Office."
"Once again," Albertson said, "we saw two things from President Trump: his bizarre affinity for the murderous dictator Vladimir Putin and Trump's grotesque willingness to make even this—Ukraine's fight for survival in the face of Russia's unconscionable invasion—about himself, turning a White House meeting into something we would expect from a reality TV show."
Amnesty International USA said on social media that "nothing that was said today in the Oval Office changes the facts: Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine was an act of aggression and a manifest violation of the U.N. Charter. Sustainable peace in Ukraine is only possible through justice and accountability for all crimes under international law committed since 2014."
Kenneth Roth, a former executive director of Human Rights Watch who's now a visiting professor at Princeton University, called out Vance over berating Zelenskyy for "daring to exercise his free speech rights before the American media," and Trump for "making life-and-death decisions based on his fragile ego."
"Because Ukraine's President Zelenskyy didn't immediately kiss the 'king's' ring, Trump threatens to abandon Ukraine's democracy to Putin's predation," he said. "Trump seems to be so accustomed to sycophants that he becomes outraged when Zelenskyy has the audacity to argue back. Zelenskyy rightly points out that Putin has already breached prior agreements. Why would this one be different without security guarantees?"
"Trump pretends to miss the point," Roth added. "Zelenskyy is perfectly 'ready for peace.' But he wants peace that will last, not a pause in the fighting that will enable Putin to rearm and reinvade. That requires a U.S. security guarantee that Trump refuses to provide."
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress praised Trump—as did Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now deputy chair of the country's Security Council.
"The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office," Medvedev said of Zelenskyy. "And Donald Trump is right: The Kiev regime is 'gambling with WWIII.'"
The battle in Ukraine over the past three years has elevated global fears of a world war and the potential use of nuclear weapons. Of the nine nations with nukes, Russia and the United States have the largest arsenals.
The U.S.-based peace group CodePink said in a Friday statement that "the heated exchange in the White House... is not helpful for finding an immediate solution to the conflict," but also argued that "without an end to U.S. weapons to Ukraine, the war would continue to present an increased risk of nuclear catastrophe."
"The response to this exchange in the media has been largely about the demonstrated lack of decorum from the Trump administration regarding Ukraine—but we encourage the public to focus instead on the material realities facing Ukraine and Russia," the group said. "This war continuing would cost thousands of more Ukrainian and Russian lives—and an escalation would have an impact on the entire world."
"We hope the U.S. and Ukraine come back together on a more realistic basis before the war escalates further, but that will require serious diplomacy. It will require Europe to stop encouraging Ukraine to keep fighting," CodePink added. "Now is the moment when all sides must recognize that this war must be settled at the negotiating table, no matter how hard that is."
Instead of counting down the minutes and seconds to our extinction, the Peace Clock calls on the U.S. government to take a series of specific, concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament.
This year’s Doomsday Clock Statement landed like a damp squib in a Trump-swamped corporate news cycle on January 28th. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists only moved the hands of the Clock forward by one second, from 90 seconds up to 89 seconds to midnight, which must have come as a relief to the few members of the public who heard about it.
But this minimal advance in the hands of the Clock was a strange and misleading top-line for the Bulletin’s actual Doomsday Clock Statement, which was brimming with extremely dire warnings that deserve far greater official and public attention.
This disconnect between the movements of the hands of the Doomsday Clock and Bulletin’s underlying threat assessments is deeply troubling. If the positioning of the hands of the Clock does not accurately reflect the seriousness of the dangers it represents, then the powerful symbolism of the Doomsday Clock is lost, undermining the very purpose for which Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and their colleagues invented it.
The new Clock Statement began, “In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Trends that have deeply concerned (us) continued, and despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course.”
The original atomic scientists created the Doomsday Clock to symbolize humanity’s suicidal march toward annihilation by nuclear war, and that is still the greatest danger that midnight on the Clock represents, even as it now incorporates the added dangers of climate change, biological threats and disruptive technologies.
The threat assessments in the 2025 Clock statement begin with the warning that the war in Ukraine “still looms over the world,” and that it “could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation.”
It was this danger of escalation to nuclear war over Ukraine that led the Bulletin to move the hands of the Clock forward by 10 seconds in January 2023, from 100 to 90 seconds to midnight.
Since then, despite President Biden’s warning in 2022 that war between Russia and the United States would be the suicidal Third World War that we must avoid at all costs, the U.S. and NATO have blasted through every self-imposed “red line” designed to prevent that, providing Ukraine with tanks, F-16 warplanes, long-range missiles, and approval to use them inside Russia as well as in Ukraine.
The roles of U.S. and NATO personnel in targeting, planning, surveillance, intelligence and secret “special operations” involving Western weapons have escalated into the very war between the United States and Russia that Biden promised to avoid.
So we cannot understand the Bulletin’s decision to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock only one second closer to the global mass suicide it symbolizes, as if these developments in the war between NATO and Russia have not brought us significantly closer to self-destruction than we were two years ago.
The Clock Statement then addresses the crisis in the Middle East. In January 2023, when the Bulletin last moved the hands of the clock forward, the U.S. and Israel were enjoying a false sense of security and normalcy in that region, believing that they had suppressed and tamed armed resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.
Now, since the Palestinian breakout in October 2023 and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the new Doomsday Clock statement warns that, “Conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral out of control into a wider war without warning.”
With nuclear-armed Israel threatening to launch a major war on Iran and ready to use its nuclear weapons before it would accept an existential defeat in such a war, and with no real limits to U.S. support for Israeli war-making and genocide, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is right to warn that this could spiral out of control at any moment. Yet it seems to have ignored this danger too in its one-second tick forward of the Doomsday Clock.
While these raging conflicts involving nuclear weapons states may be the most dangerous current flashpoints for a nuclear war, nothing reflects the relentless nature of our accelerating march toward Armageddon more clearly than the determination with which the nuclear weapons powers, led by the United States, are expanding and “modernizing” their nuclear arsenals, even as they complete the dismantling of all Cold War-era arms control treaties and nuclear safeguards.
The 2025 Doomsday Clock Statement makes it clear that the Bulletin’s analysts understand this only too well:
“The countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their arsenals, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy civilization. The nuclear arms control process is collapsing, and high-level contacts among nuclear powers are totally inadequate given the danger at hand.”
And yet they insist that the inexorable advance of these Doomsday plans over the past two years has only brought us one second closer to Doomsday. How can that be?
The next and final sentence in the paragraph on nuclear weapons addresses the dangers of nuclear proliferation, which is the widely predicted result of the failure of the nuclear powers to pursue genuine nuclear disarmament:
“Alarmingly, it is no longer unusual for countries without nuclear weapons to consider developing arsenals of their own—actions that would undermine long-standing nonproliferation efforts and increase the ways in which nuclear war could start.”
The next paragraph in the Doomsday Clock Statement addresses the dangers of the Climate Crisis. It explains that global greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing and global temperatures are still rising, causing extreme weather, floods, tropical cyclones, heat waves, droughts and wildfires on every continent.
“The long-term prognosis for the world’s attempts to deal with climate change remains poor,” it reads, “as most governments fail to enact the financing and policy initiatives necessary to halt global warming.”
But this is just one more dire warning that is not reflected in the hands of the Doomsday Clock.
On biological threats, the Clock statement warns, “Supposedly high-containment biological laboratories continue to be built throughout the world, but oversight regimes for them are not keeping pace, increasing the possibility that pathogens with pandemic potential may escape. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have increased the risk that terrorists or countries may attain the capability of designing biological weapons for which countermeasures do not exist.”
On disruptive technologies, it warns that, “Systems that incorporate artificial intelligence in military targeting have been used in Ukraine and the Middle East, and several countries are moving to integrate artificial intelligence into their militaries. Such efforts raise questions about the extent to which machines will be allowed to make military decisions—even decisions that could kill on a vast scale, including those related to the use of nuclear weapons.”
The strange decision to only advance the Doomsday Clock by one second appears to be a hedge against the possibility that all these current trends will continue, but that, by some miracle, none of them will actually succeed in destroying us all in the next few decades. This could leave BAS in the embarrassing position of a Chicken Little predicting a calamity that has not come to pass, even as the hands of the Doomsday Clock advance to within a few seconds of midnight.
But this way of thinking defeats the very purpose of the Doomsday Clock, which is to raise the alarm with policy-makers and the public about the dangerous course we are on. The existential dangers we face are only too real, and the failure of our public and private institutions to address and resolve them is the most egregious and potentially suicidal failure in the history of our species.
In abdicating its responsibility to warn us of the gravity of these dangers, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists risks turning Einstein and Oppenheimer’s call for sanity into yet another mechanism to normalize the suicidal insanity of our 21st century rulers.
The Bulletin appears to have joined all the other mainstream institutions of American society - the White House, Congress, the military-industrial complex, the Republican and Democratic Parties, the corporate media, Wall Street, academia - in normalizing the collective denial by which our corrupt ruling class lulls the public into sleepwalking toward mass extinction.
Remarkably, while the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists seems to have abandoned its founders’ commitment to the urgency of nuclear disarmament, President Trump apparently recognizes that ending the nuclear arms race would be the crowning diplomatic achievement of his, or any, U.S. presidency.
In off-the-cuff remarks in a video call to the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 23rd, Trump suddenly raised the tantalizing prospect of nuclear disarmament negotiations with Russia and China. Talking about a phone call with President Xi of China, Trump elaborated,
“We’d [Trump and Xi?] like to see denuclearization. In fact, with President Putin, prior to an election result, which was, frankly, ridiculous, we were talking about denuclearization of our two countries, and China would have come along. China has a much smaller, right now, nuclear armament than us or field than us, but they’re going to be catching up at some point over the next four or five years.”
“And I will tell you that President Putin really liked the idea of cutting way back on nuclear. And I think the rest of the world, we would have gotten them to follow. And China would have come along too. China also liked it. Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it. It’s too depressing.”
“So, we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible. And I can tell you that President Putin wanted to do it. He and I wanted to do it. We had a good conversation with China. They would have been involved, and that would have been an unbelievable thing for the planet. And I hope it can be started up again.”
What Trump says in these unscripted, off-the-cuff remarks is encouraging. It seems that President Xi reminded Trump of their discussions during his first term, and, at least for a moment, turned his attention to the ultimate “elephant in the room” hanging over all our heads.
As the fate of the world teeters in the hands of an unpredictable U.S. president and the enfeebled Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists muffles the powerful symbolism of its Doomsday Clock, CODEPINK has created an alternative for the precarious times we live in: the Peace Clock. Instead of counting down the minutes and seconds to our extinction, the Peace Clock calls on the U.S. government to take a series of specific, concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament.
That starts with agreeing to Russian and Chinese proposals for a ban on weapons in space and reinstating the 1972 ABM Treaty with Russia, including the removal of formerly prohibited U.S. anti-ballistic-missile installations in Poland and Romania. By such concrete, practical steps, the Peace Clock would, step by step, make the world safer and safer, leading sooner rather than later to its sixth and final step: the complete nuclear disarmament of all the nuclear weapons powers.
You can learn more about the Peace Clock and sign the Peace Clock Manifesto here.
China, Russia, and the United States "have the collective power to destroy civilization," so they also "have the prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink," according to The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Highlighting the threat posed by nuclear weapons, the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, the potential misuse of biological science, and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Tuesday moved the Doomsday Clock "from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to catastrophe."
The Bulletin was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and University of Chicago scientists involved with the Manhattan Project. The clock was launched two years later, as a symbol of how close the world is to apocalypse due to nuclear arms. The Science and Security Board now considers various threats with its annual updates.
"The purpose of the Doomsday Clock is to start a global conversation about the very real existential threats that keep the world's top scientists awake at night," explained Daniel Holz, a University of Chicago professor who chairs the board. "National leaders must commence discussions about these global risks before it's too late. Reflecting on these life-and-death issues and starting a dialogue are the first steps to turning back the clock and moving away from midnight."
The clock announcement came just over a week after the return of Republican U.S. President Donald Trump, whose country has a sizable nuclear arsenal.
"Blindly continuing on the current path is a form of madness."
"Long-standing concerns about nuclear weapons—involving the modernization and expansion of arsenals in all nuclear weapons
countries, the build-up of new capabilities, the risks of inadvertent or deliberate nuclear use, the loss of arms control agreements, and the possibility of nuclear proliferation to new countries—continued or were amplified in 2024,"
notesThe Bulletin's statement on the clock. "The outgoing Biden administration showed little willingness or capacity to pursue new efforts in these areas, and it remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will seize the initiative."
The other eight nations with nuclear weapons are China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea, Russia, and the United Kingdom. The statement points out that "against the backdrop of Russia's continuing war against Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended compliance with the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), and Russia's Duma voted to withdraw Moscow's ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty."
While the United States and Russia have the most nukes, "China's nuclear arsenal has grown to about 600 warheads, and China may also now be deploying a small number of warheads on missiles during peacetime," the statement says. Additionally, "Iran continues to increase its stockpile of enriched uranium" and "Kim Jong Un recently declared his goal was to 'exponentially expand' North Korea's nuclear arsenal in coming years."
Along with detailing "extremely dangerous trends" on the nuclear front, the statement spotlights "devastating impacts and insufficient progress" in terms of climate. As board member and Princeton University professor emeritus Robert Socolow summarized Tuesday: "2024 was the hottest year on record. Extreme weather and other climate events—floods, tropical cyclones, extreme heat, drought, and wildfires—devastated societies, rich and poor, as well as ecosystems around the world."
"Yet the global greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change continued to rise. And investments to adapt to climate change and cut fossil fuel emissions were way below what is needed to avoid the worst impacts," he added. "There were formidable policy headwinds globally: Particularly worrisome, electoral campaigns showed climate change to be a low priority in the United States and many other countries."
The board's statement also lays out "daunting biological threats," including emerging and reemerging infectious diseases, proliferation of high-containment laboratories, artificial intelligence involvement in research and development, and weapons programs.
Artificial intelligence also features prominently in the statement's section on "disruptive technologies," which warns that "increasing chaos, disorder, and dysfunction in the world's information ecosystem threaten society's capacity to address difficult challenges, and it is clear that AI has great potential to accelerate these processes of information corruption."
The tech section also states that "the growing presence of hypersonic weapons in contested regional theaters substantially increases the risk of escalation," and "there is a growing belligerence among the United States, Russia, and China in space."
Those three countries, the statement stresses, "have the collective power to destroy civilization," so they also "have the prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink, and they can do so if their leaders seriously commence good-faith discussions about the global threats outlined here."
"Blindly continuing on the current path is a form of madness," the document declares. "It is 89 seconds to midnight."
The #DoomsdayClock moves to 89 seconds to midnight. Humanity stands closer to catastrophe than at any moment in its history. How did we get here and what must we do now? Chair of The Elders, Juan Manuel Santos, gives an urgent diagnosis. @thebulletin.org
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— The Elders ( @theelders.bsky.social) January 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
In anticipation of the clock update, Dr. Robert Dodge from Physicians for Social Responsibility and nuclear activist Talia Wilcox
pointed to some recent progress in a Tuesday opinion piece for Common Dreams, writing that "there is great hope arising from the international community as the fourth anniversary of the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons."
"The timing of this Doomsday Clock unveiling could not be more critical," the pair wrote, acknowledging Trump's expressions of "concern about the existential consequences of nuclear war throughout his public life" and urging him to seize "one last chance to make the ultimate deal for the future of humanity."
Meanwhile, in a Monday piece for Common Dreams, Danaka Katovich, CodePink's national co-director, argued that "doom isn't good enough to get us to where we need to go."
"At CodePink, we've created a Peace Clock to give us ways not to just move away from doom, but to bring us closer to the kind of world we want to see," she explained. "It's something that's been within our sight a thousand times. We have to sprint toward it."