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Opinion: You’ve really lost track of the clock metaphor if you manually wiggle the minute hand backwards or forwards every year.
The 2023 Doomsday Clock is displayed ahead of a livestreamed event with members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on January 24 in Washington, DC Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Article Content
On Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (actually a foundation that publishes a famous magazine of the same name) announced that it would advance the minute hand of its famous “Doomsday Clock”. The clock will now show 11:58:30 PM minus 90 seconds. The Bulletin does this once a year – at a time, coincidentally, when newspaper publishers are notoriously copy-starved.
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The Doomsday Clock was originally (in 1947) a unique magazine cover designed by Martyl Langsdorf (1917-2013), a landscape artist married to one of the Manhattan Project physicists. He sometimes set the clock to around seven minutes to midnight, but the visual metaphor was irresistible. As the arms race and nuclear proliferation began, the editors of the Bulletin began rearranging Langsdorf’s clock face as a clue to the danger of a nuclear exchange.
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Even saying that, I’m treading a bit on the turf of a colleague, Tristin Hopper, who is eternally concerned about the sheer stupidity of the Doomsday Clock. As T-Hop never tires of pointing out, you’ve really lost track of the clock metaphor if you manually wiggle the minute hand backwards or forwards every year.
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Also, the clock face can best be considered a lagging indicator. The year 1947 was probably the time when the danger of a preemptive nuclear strike was greatest. Intellectuals and strategists needed a few years to think through the implications of nuclear weapons: the logic of a first strike was compelling and could have prevailed in any country that was developing nuclear weapons until the balance of mutually assured destruction is both established and theorized.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has brought the clock closer to midnight as the world learns to live with nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation. Eventually the hand was moved back in 1960 – almost in time for the frightening Cuban Missile Crisis.
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The clock was advanced to the 1980s as a critique of US President Ronald Reagan’s confrontation with communism; it was only after Reagan won the Cold War, paving the way for arms reduction and deproliferation, that the time was reduced to minus 17 minutes. The progression of the minute hand has not stopped progressing since 2010; say what you will good old Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, but at least its shitty clock is behaving like a clock these days.
There are other problems with the metaphor: I don’t know how midnight was designated as a time of catastrophe in the first place, unless it was under the influence of the Cinderella story. As Hopper sometimes observes when declaiming the Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now dedicated to researching/hypothesizing/communicating other sources of existential risk, including climate change , “disruptive technologies” and biological weapons (pretty fair on that point). a).
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What even Hopper didn’t point out amid all his stomachaches is that the “Atomic Scientists’ Bulletin” doesn’t have much involvement from… well, atomic scientists anymore. The Bulletin originally involved key people from all political persuasions within the Manhattan Project.
He had the holy imprimatur of Einstein and received contributions from names like Hans Bethe, Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and Max Born. The Bulletin was meant to be the voice of these masters of nature within the changed political agenda. Nobody had to wonder what right they had to help shape the future: they had already done so.
With that in mind, I would ask you to take a look at the Bulletin’s current “Science and Safety Council”, which decides the setting of the doomsday clock, and actually count how many members could reasonably be described as “atomic scientists”. (Look! There’s former California Governor Jerry Brown!) Quite a few are physicists, and most of them have scientific credentials, but it seems no more than two or three have been professionally trained. close to the atomic nucleus.
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A few are astrophysicists, which is frankly confusing, and some are climate scientists. COVID-skeptical readers will notice a few master’s degrees in public health. A few of the board members are just political scientists involved in the world of anti-proliferation studies.
It is probably important to listen to these people, and one imagines that they might even have relevant technical knowledge, but the original purpose of the Bulletin was to represent the nuclear shipowners themselves, not their non-scientific critics. In short, the name “Atomic Scientists’ Bulletin” is, at this point, an outright lie. You have been warned.
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Tristin Hopper: What does 2.5 minutes to midnight mean? Why the Doomsday Clock is a terrible indicator Avi Benlolo: As the Doomsday Clock closes at midnight, now is the time to act on Iran Share this article on your social network Advertisement 1
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