John Mecklin
In 1947, the Manhattan Project scientists who’d been distributing a short newsletter called The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decided they needed to professionalize their product, which, after all, addressed the most important issue in the world – the Bomb. They wanted to make the Bulletin into a proper magazine and provide a growing audience with information about the dangers of the extraordinary technology that had incinerated tens of thousands of civilians instantly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a technology that, as Albert Einstein put it, “changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” As scientifically distinguished as the scientists behind the Bulletin might be – in addition to Einstein, the Bulletin’s early supporters included a Who’s Who of nuclear physics, from Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard to Hans Bethe and Robert Oppenheimer – they knew little about the mechanics of popular publishing. But they knew enough to know that every magazine needs a cover.
The wife of one of the scientists associated with the Bulletin, Martyl Langsdorf, was an artist, so she was asked to come up with the cover design. After sorting through alternatives, Martyl (she went by that single name professionally) hit on the idea of a minimalist clock, ticking toward midnight – the all-out nuclear war that would end the world. The minute hand was initially set at seven minutes ahead of the hour, because … well … that pleased Martyl’s artistic eye. The graphic served as the magazine’s sole cover image for two years, only the color of the background changing. Then the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, and the Bulletin’s editor, a multilingual Russian biophysicist named Eugene Rabinowitch, had an idea: To illustrate how much more dangerous the world had become, he moved the Clock’s minute hand, making the time three minutes to midnight. “We do not advise Americans that doomsday is near and that they can expect atomic bombs to start falling on their heads a month or a year from now,” he wrote, “but we think they have reason to be deeply alarmed and to be prepared for grave decisions.”
Until his death in 1973, Rabinowitch determined whether and how the minute hand of the Clock should move. Since then, the Clock decision has been made by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, currently a group of 16 leading experts scientific and policy experts who now take account of other technologies – from the fossil fuel use that causes climate change to cyber attacks and information warfare to artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and beyond – that pose existential threats to humanity when setting the Clock. (This broadening of focus, by the way, is anything but unforeseen. As Rabinowitch noted very early on, “It was anticipated that the atom bomb would be only the first of many dangerous presents from Pandora’s box of modern science. Consequently, it was clear that the education of man to the realities of the scientific age would be a long, sustained effort.”)
Over the decades, as the threats under consideration have grown in number, the annual announcement of the Clock setting has become a true global media phenomenon. In today’s atomized digital media landscape, it is difficult to precisely calculate the total worldwide audience, but the best available estimates suggest that at least tens of millions of people view or read reports about our Doomsday Clock announcement after it is made each January.
There are hundreds of thousands of publishing enterprises in the world, most of them dealing with subjects less potentially off-putting than nuclear holocaust, climate change, killer robots, designer plagues, super-intelligent overlords, and other technologies that pose potentially existential threats to humanity, and almost all of these publishers are looking to spread their brands as widely as possible. The persistence and ubiquity of the Doomsday Clock – the longstanding global power of what was initially a magazine cover designed on the cheap – raises an obvious question: Why do so many millions of people continue to care about a metaphorical timepiece?
I believe the answer to that question is simple: The world has adopted the Clock because it tells an extraordinarily compelling story, perhaps the central story of our technology-inflected times. As the minute hand moved 23 times over the decades, the tale of the Clock roughly paralleled the history of the Atomic Age, following the outlines of the Cold War from the first US and Soviet hydrogen bomb tests in 1953 (when the Clock moved to two minutes to midnight, the closest it has ever come to apocalypse) to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War (when the Clock was moved 17 minutes away from catastrophe) and on to the current day, when Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong un and others seem to be leading the world to new levels of global nuclear danger and it is once again two minutes before the hour.
Beyond its impact on post-World War II security thought and policy, the Doomsday Clock has had an outsized impact on the arts, inspiring serious and ephemeral movies, rock albums, television series, books, and even comic books. These works – many of them narrative in form – have created a feedback effect of sorts. The Clock inspires storytelling that spreads word of the Clock, which creates ever more general interest each year when the Clock is reset.
At the same time, the Clock – a symbol controlled by science and policy experts dedicated to authoritative facts and rigorous documentation – has acquired what I see (and this is solely my opinion) as a sort of spiritual dimension, a semi-religious aura that often goes unnoticed because it is so at odds with the Bulletin’s fact-based, scientific emphasis.
All major world religions have an end-of-creation story, an eschatology, and via its Doomsday Clock, a magazine created by frightened atomic scientists has, to my way of thinking, somehow provided the world with a new one, almost by accident. But this new tale is neither religious nor fatalistic. It is factual, interactive, and full of hope, a narrative in which Armageddon could happen – but is perpetually staved off, the four horsemen of the apocalypse continuously dismounted by the worldwide care and work of human hearts and minds.
For this issue, I asked top experts to tell stories of technology-related doomsdays the world might soon face if specific threats go unaddressed, not to frighten readers, but, in the tradition of the Clock, to alert them, so they might act in time, making a loud and unmistakable demand: that the Earth be preserved, that the human experiment be extended, that midnight never toll.
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