89 Seconds to Midnight

Death came in quantum timeframes — far faster than things moved in the realm of biological time. What Mrs Aoyama suffered on August 6, precisely at 8.15 a.m. local time in Hiroshima, was ‘one of the fastest deaths in human history’. Before her optic nerves could even attempt to register the first burst of light from the atomic flare of the ‘Little Boy’ directly overhead, she had been vapourised.

“Under the hypocenter, the blood in Mrs. Aoyama’s brain was already beginning to vibrate, on the verge of flashing to vapor.”… “The bones themselves would (soon) become instantly incandescent, with all of her flesh trying simultaneously to explode away from her skeleton while being forced straight down into the ground as a compressed gas.” Charles Pellegrino wrote in his book ‘To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima’ — a terrifying account of the nuclear-age human tragedy that unfolded 80 years ago.

Mrs Aoyama was one of the luckiest thousands that day — among the roughly 25,000 to 30,000 people within approximately one kilometre of ground zero — who knew no pain whatsoever. The less fortunate were simultaneously seared by the nuclear flash, skinned alive by the supersonic compressed air, and irradiated to the bone marrow by gamma rays — but were denied the mercy of instant vapourisation. They endured horrific deaths over days, weeks, and months — a drawn-out horror that claimed around 140,000 by year’s end in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki.

From Temptation to Taboo

Ever since those two fateful days in August 1945, which saw most of Hiroshima, part of Nagasaki, and its suburb Urakami flash-banged out of existence, the world has lived under the long shadow of nuclear annihilation. The first few years after the pika-don (Japanese for the nuclear flash-bang) were tentative. As the truly horrific consequences of the A-bomb were yet to sink in, the temptation to use the new weapon on other targets was great. It came perilously close to being used in the Korean War in the early 1950s, when American B-29 Superfortresses modified to carry the A-bomb made their dry runs. When North Korea did not blink, President Truman threatened to use the nuclear arsenal.

Brandishing the weapon had started even earlier, during the Berlin stand-off with the Russians in 1948, when B-29s flew sorties that dropped no bombs, only the unmistakable warning.

In the years that followed, as other major powers developed nuclear warheads and ended the US monopoly, the impracticality of nuclear engagement became increasingly clear. Though the arms race intensified, the logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD) worked as a brake on open nuclear posturing.

After the near-catastrophe of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, wielding a nuclear threat became almost taboo, and major powers largely avoided explicit public threats. Even the rare, veiled warnings were conveyed through guarded diplomatic channels. Every “signal” was painstakingly vetted to avoid accident, misinterpretation, or panic.

The Return of Nuclear Poker

All that changed and the caution vanished with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin not only issued an unambiguous nuclear warning, but backed it up on the ground by raising the alert level of the Russian nuclear forces. Since then, open nuclear threats have multiplied. In the past 80 years there were barely a dozen major incidents; in 2025 alone there have already been three. Pakistan repeatedly invoked its nuclear trigger during the three-day Indo-Pak war and after; the Israel–Iran conflict saw US pre-emptive strikes on Iranian nuclear sites; and US–Russia exchanges featured blatant nuclear posturing, deployments, and references to Russia’s “Dead Hand” last-strike system.

This month, with Russia’s withdrawal from the INF Treaty, the last major arms control framework collapsed. This leaves only New START — due to expire in 2026 — as the last treaty standing between the US and Russia.

The world is sliding towards a pre-Cuban missile crisis era of unrestrained nuclear poker.

Worse, the deliberate, tightly calibrated alert signals of the past have been replaced by impulsive, knee-jerk nuclear messages blasted over public social media, shortening and destabilising the nuclear fuse.

Reason and Restraint

In a world this delicate, avoiding nuclear disaster requires more than reason alone — it needs leaders and societies capable of resisting dangerous impulses, valuing life through compassion, reasoning clearly, and creating new ways out of crisis. In the past decade, psychologists have become increasingly interested in a constellation of three closely related malevolent traits — narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy — collectively referred to as the ‘Dark Triad’, because of their role in transgressive and norm-violating behaviour. Of the three, psychopathy is the trait most closely associated with criminal acts and is characterised by impulsive behaviour and a lack of empathy and remorse. A research paper published in 2020 by Professors Alessandro Nai of the University of Amsterdam and Emre Toros of Hacettepe University, Ankara, compared the profiles of 157 leaders who contested in 81 elections worldwide between June 2016 and July 2019 — including 14 leaders with autocratic tendencies. Using ratings provided by over 1,800 scholars, the study showed that autocratic leaders scored significantly higher than non-autocrats on the ‘Dark Triad’.

Ironically, the gulf between a mind capable of empathy and one untouched by compassion is driven home by the sharply contrasting legacies of the two men who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Paul Tibbets, who commanded the plane that unleashed Little Boy over Hiroshima, never showed the slightest remorse. Years later, he re-enacted the bombing at an airshow, complete with a simulated mushroom cloud, and even cut cakes shaped like the blast’s mushroom column.

Charles Sweeney, who flew the Nagasaki mission, was cut from different cloth. Troubled by the assignment, he sought counsel from the Air Force chaplain before the bombing mission, questioning whether such a weapon could ever be justified. He prayed the mission would strike Kokura, the primary military target, so the civilians of Nagasaki, the fallback target, might be spared. Fate denied him that wish. A

month later, standing at Urakami’s ground zero, he offered a silent prayer: that theirs would be the last such mission ever flown. In later years, Sweeney quietly donated his speaking fees to a Hiroshima orphanage.

Eighty-Nine Seconds

The Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) abandoned minutes and began counting in seconds since January 2020. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis — arguably the closest the world has ever come to a nuclear flashpoint — the clock stood at seven minutes to apocalypse. According to BAS, the Doomsday Clock factors in the ability “of leaders and societies to respond to crises with reasoned actions to prevent nuclear holocaust”.

The dramatis personae in the 1962 crisis, John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, were considered capable of reasoned action and restraint. Today, the clock stands at 89 seconds, less than one and a half minutes, to midnight — the closest ever to doomsday since it started ticking in 1947. History will not forgive a civilisation if it sleepwalks into its own destruction. If there is a history after.

The writer is an industrial and organizational psychologist and is affiliated with PeopleProfit Group.
Views expressed are personal