And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars — Matthew 24:6. The text distinguishes the two. So do we.
COVERAGE UP, EVENTS DOWN
Events -4.441 index points per month · Coverage +3.208 index points per month · Flat band ±0.5
The units do not match: one series counts recorded events, the other measures the share of monitored articles. Each is indexed to its own mean across the overlapping window, so 100 is that series at its own average and the only thing compared is direction.
Coverage share is partly an artifact of the media GDELT indexes, which has grown and shifted over the record. Expressing it as a share of all monitored articles removes the growth of the archive but not changes in what is monitored. This is the same class of problem as the seismograph count on The Velocity, and it is not solved here.
Georeferenced organised-violence events. Each event renders on the aperture through the existing CONFLICT token — no new marker language. Death figures are carried as the source publishes them: where UCDP gives a low and a high that disagree, the record shows the range and names it as theirs. Nothing is estimated to fill a gap. The current month is excluded from the chart because it is incomplete and would read as a collapse.
These events are separate from The Toll. A conflict event is not a persecution record, and the two datasets are never merged or added together even where they describe the same country and year.
Measured as the percentage of all articles GDELT monitored in each period that matched the query below. Attention share, not article count.
(war OR "armed conflict" OR airstrike OR shelling OR insurgency OR ceasefire)
This series does not enter the index. Attention is not an event, and adding it to a count of events would be exactly the sleight of hand this project exists to refuse.
The passage distinguishes wars from rumours of wars and does not say which is the sign. Reading a gap between the two lines as fulfilment is a claim about meaning, not a measurement, and it is not one the data can settle. The two series above are data. The verse is scripture. This card is the only place on this surface where the relationship between them is interpreted, and it is labelled accordingly.
89 seconds to midnight
“In 2025, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe.”
The Clock is a judgement issued by a board of scientists. It is not a measurement, it is not ours, and it is reproduced here as a citation.
| Date | State | Record |
|---|---|---|
| 1998-05-11 | India | Pokhran-II. India announced three tests on 11 May and two on 13 May. CTBTO, declared nuclear tests since 1996. |
| 1998-05-28 | Pakistan | Chagai-I. Pakistan announced five tests on 28 May and one on 30 May. CTBTO, declared nuclear tests since 1996. |
| 2006-10-09 | North Korea | First announced test. Low yield; seismically detected. CTBTO International Monitoring System. |
| 2009-05-25 | North Korea | Second announced test. CTBTO International Monitoring System. |
| 2013-02-12 | North Korea | Third announced test. CTBTO International Monitoring System. |
| 2016-01-06 | North Korea | Fourth announced test. CTBTO International Monitoring System. |
| 2016-09-09 | North Korea | Fifth announced test. CTBTO International Monitoring System. |
| 2017-09-03 | North Korea | Sixth and largest announced test. The largest seismic signal of the series. CTBTO International Monitoring System. |
More than 2,000 nuclear tests were conducted between 1945 and 1996, the great majority by the United States and the Soviet Union. The figure is the CTBTO's aggregate; we do not hold a sourced per-year series and do not publish one.
Opened 1968, entered into force 1970
191 states party. India, Israel and Pakistan have never joined. North Korea announced withdrawal in 2003; its status is disputed by other parties.
UN Office for Disarmament Affairs treaty status.
Opened 1996
Entry into force requires ratification by all 44 Annex 2 states; eight have not ratified. Russia revoked its ratification in November 2023 while remaining a signatory. A voluntary testing moratorium has held among the recognised nuclear-weapon states.
CTBTO status of signature and ratification.
Opened 2010, entered into force 2011
Extended in 2021 to 5 February 2026. Russia announced suspension of its participation in February 2023, ending mutual inspections; both parties stated they would continue to observe the central warhead limits. No successor treaty has been concluded.
US Department of State treaty implementation reporting.