The Doomsday Clock: A Chronicle of the Trivialization of the Apocalypse

By Raul Antonio Capote  –  Jun 11, 2026

I thought of my grandchildren; I thought of the children of Hiroshima, incinerated in an instant while they played in their school yards…

Dawn breaks in Havana with that murky glow that heralds a storm; I turn on the battery-powered radio while I make my morning coffee—a habit picked up during the days of blackouts—and the news hangs heavy like a bad omen: the Doomsday Clock has been set to 85 seconds to midnight.

I pause for a moment with the spoon in the air, suspended between the cup and the sugar. It’s 85 seconds—that is, nothing, barely a breath, the time it takes a religious person to cross themselves before crossing the street.

But then I take a sip of coffee, skim the rest of the paper, and carry on with my routine; life goes on, and there, in that very human gesture of normalizing what should terrify us, lies the true danger of our age.

We live surrounded by threats without batting an eye, while the great powers dangerously lower the threshold of nuclear deterrence.

As I write these lines, the United States and Israel are preparing to attack Iranian nuclear facilities without the international community managing to issue a firm condemnation.

What is extraordinary about all this is not that it is happening; what is astonishing is that we receive it with the same emotion with which we check the weather forecast, or read the baseball or soccer scores.

Thus, the bureaucratic coldness—that language of administrative procedure used by the elites who govern the planet—applied to the end of the world is, perhaps, the most unmistakable symptom of our era.

The fear industry, meanwhile, is having a field day; the construction of private shelters has skyrocketed by 200% since 2022, and luxury bunkers are proliferating like mushrooms, equipped with anti-radiation showers, concrete and steel walls, and drinking water reservoirs to last for months.

The cost of these modern Noah’s arks ranges from 150,000 to 350,000 euros in Europe; scientists, however, are quick to debunk the fantasy. Brooke Buddemeier, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, points out that, following a nuclear explosion, a person has barely 15 minutes to seek shelter from radioactive fallout.

The reality is that underground bunkers will not protect people. We must invest in preventing “nuclear proliferation”; nevertheless, people prefer to believe in individual salvation rather than collective responsibility. We have become a society of morons hoarding canned goods, while arsenals grow and treaties expire.

Advocating World War III is Just Mainstream Punditry Now

THE SURVIVOR’S LIE
There is a scene that sums up this ideological intoxication better than any academic essay: in the Netflix series *The Bunker*, a group of billionaires retreats to a luxurious bunker to survive a nuclear holocaust. The premise is appealing, cinematographically flawless: money buys immortality—at least for a few episodes.

But reality is far less photogenic; experts agree that even if someone managed to take refuge in time, the so-called “nuclear winter” would collapse global agriculture and condemn survivors to starvation, epidemics, and extreme violence.

The Western press, meanwhile, has been instilling the dangerous idea that a nuclear war is just another form of conflict, an additional step in the escalation of war, like moving from a machete to a rifle, and from a rifle to a missile.

This “normalization” of the apocalypse is, perhaps, the arms industry’s most perverse triumph: making total destruction seem, quite simply, inevitable.

A few years ago, Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi released a film that had nothing to do with atomic war, but which spoke, at its core, of the same thing: of how wounds do not heal if they are not named, of how silence rots the soul.

Perhaps something similar is happening to us with the nuclear threat; we have been silent for so long, we have grown so accustomed to its invisible presence, that we no longer even perceive it.

In the early morning as I was editing these lines, I stepped out onto the balcony; the neighborhood was quiet, a brown dog was dozing lazily on the sidewalk, and the sky was beginning to turn that deep blue that precedes dawn.

I thought of my grandchildren; I thought of the children of Hiroshima, incinerated in an instant while playing in schoolyards; I recalled the phrase Albert Camus wrote the day after that first explosion: “Technical civilization has just reached its highest degree of savagery.”

Many years have passed, but the clock continues its countdown, unperturbed, while we drink coffee and leaf through the newspaper, as if nothing were happening.

 

(Resumen Latinoamericano – English)