Each January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists greets the new year with a readout of its Doomsday Clock, an allegorical timepiece created in 1947 to illustrate our species’ proximity to the apocalypse. The announcement of the time—with human civilization in its eleventh hour—tends to arrive amid considerable fanfare, especially in these tempestuous times.

WIRED OPINION ABOUT Kyle L. Evanoff is a research associate with the International Institutions and Global Governance program at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This morning, the annual unveiling revealed that the clock's hands remain fixed at two minutes to midnight. Though that's as close as we've ever been to catastrophe, the clock didn't tick forward since last year. It should have. The Doomsday Clock's stasis, which implies a level of danger unchanged from 2018 and on par with that of 1953, fails to reflect the growing complexity of the threats we face today.

Dignitaries present at the ceremony, including former California governor Jerry Brown, cited a “perfect storm” of developments imperiling our world, including rising nuclear competition, increasing carbon emissions, numerous diplomatic setbacks, and unchecked information warfare. They referred to our current time, inches from midnight's reckoning, as the "new abnormal." Doomsday, once the prerogative of Mother Nature and Cold War superpowers, has gotten a lot more complicated—and intractable.

When the Doomsday Clock first adorned the Bulletin’s cover in the years after World War II, the atomic bombs that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh memories. Many of the scientists who had taken part in the Manhattan Project found in their retrospection a sense of terror at the creation they had wrought, a weapon capable of ending the lives of untold thousands in an instant. They sought to warn the world of the destruction this new specter portended.

Theirs was an ill-fated cause, as we now know. The first Soviet nuclear detonation in 1949 ushered in a new era of atomic politics and, with time, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. The Doomsday Clock ticked forward that year, to three minutes to midnight, then again in 1953, when the Soviet Union echoed the United States in its testing of a thermonuclear weapon.

Subsequent decades witnessed a perilous nuclear arms race, as well as a frightening number of near misses. Over time, international agreements and other precautionary measures provided some degree of safety. It was dumb luck, though, more than anything, that staved off global annihilation.

The risk of existential catastrophe, unfortunately, did not disappear with the end of the Cold War. In fact, the danger appears today to be on the rise. International arrangements that have long helped the world avoid a nuclear exchange are fraying, as the Trump administration threatens to abandon the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. More recent measures to curtail risks from weapons of mass destruction—most notably, the Iran Deal—are unraveling as well. But as much as nuclear weapons remain a menace, today they comprise only one of many threats to humanity’s survival.