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Doomsday Watch Back Catalogue

America’s Next Civil War?

The world has never stood as close to the apocalypse as it does today. Hosted by ARTHUR SNELL, a former British diplomat and counter-terrorism operative who has seen service in Yemen, Helmand and Zimbabwe, DOOMSDAY WATCH meets experts and eyewitness for an unflinching look at the threats that conventional media ignores. On this first edition: Is a toxic combination of extreme partisanship, detached elites and Trump’s incitement driving the world’s greatest democracy to a second Civil War?

Hydropocalypse Now

An Indian megacity of 11 million people literally runs out of water, trucking in 10m litres a day to hydrate a panicking population amid water queues and panic-buying. In Bolivia a scandalous water privatisation leaves people paying a quarter of their earnings just to drink. Water riots and deaths ensue. And in the UK, companies take £60bn in profit while pumping raw sewage into waterways – while London’s millennia-old chalk aquifer is now drained bone-dry. The Capital is now under threat of running out of drinking water altogether.

McJihad - How Terror Became a Global Franchise

What could persuade someone to leave a comparatively wealthy country in the Western Hemisphere to fight and die in the hellhole of the Islamic State? That’s exactly what happened in the unlikely setting of Trinidad and Tobago. Arthur Snell pieces together an astonishing story of how radicalisation is continuing in unexpected places around the world – how jihad leaders learned from the experts in global expansion, the fast food giants – and how jihad has found its mirror in QAnon. How do we fight terror when global jihad has gone local?

Season Finale: Where Do We Go From Here?

n this series we’ve looked at under-reported threats to global stability, from the psychology of Xi Jinping to the coming water crisis to the War on Truth. But what happens next? In this extended end-of-season edition, Arthur Snell steps back to look at the big picture with experts in geopolitics, future warfare and the Chinese, Russian and American superpowers. Can the world pull itself from the brink – or is our Long Peace coming to an end? 

The War On Truth

The Cold Warriors of the postwar world never dreamed that Western democracies would come to rely on a global information network – and that our very openness could be turned against us. As the stories of Brexit, COVID and Trump coalesce into one nightmare tale of disinformation and weaponised lying, Arthur Snell asks whether democracy can survive in a post-truth world. If you control the information space, do you control the future? And after the pandemic, can we withstand the infodemic?

The War in Your Living Room

The digital Utopia we were promised has given us a desperately vulnerable world where we depend on a global internet with a billion badly-protected backdoors. Today’s cyber-war battlegrounds aren’t on bank servers or Government databases. They’re in your smart fridges, doorbells and security cameras.

Twilight Of The Oiligarchs – The end of petrochemical power?

What happens to the Middle East when the world stops buying its oil? As the world races to decarbonise, the region’s petrochemical plutocrats face a terrible decision. To keep power, they must cut off their addiction to oil. The plans of one young Saudi prince – the ambitious, ruthless Mohammed bin Salman – are already unleashing a wave of arrests, intimidation, black ops and murder across the world.

What Putin Wants

Russia’s newly-belligerent stance has rocked the democratic West on its heels, from the annexation of the Crimea to the sponsoring of extremist digital disinformation to – almost certainly – the stacking of elections in the US and UK. And it all stems from the paranoid, Machiavellian, espionage-steeped mindset of one man: Vladimir Putin. 

Why Can’t The West Win Its Wars Any More?

After 9/11 the West invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to remake them as friendly, terror-free liberal democracies. But the unintended consequences were historic disaster, countless dead and the humbling of Western power, symbolised by the shameful evacuation of Kabul in 2021. How did we get it so catastrophically wrong?

World War Xi

Who is Xi Jinping? What are the forces that shaped China’s paramount leader? Will his psychological make-up, and his belief that his country has been robbed of its rightful place, lead inexorably to confrontation with the West? And what does Thucydides have to do with it? Arthur talks to experts and China insiders to ask: are we on the brink of World War Xi? 

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