J.B. Spector/Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago
“It is now two minutes to midnight,” begins the 2018 Doomsday Clock statement released January 25 from the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
“In 2017, we saw reckless language in the nuclear realm heat up already dangerous situations and re-learned that minimizing evidence-based assessments regarding climate and other global challenges does not lead to better public policies,” wrote Rachel Bronson, president of the group which has chronicled the global risk of annihilation since 1947.
The minute-to-midnight rankings are set by a board of nineteen scientists and scholars who evaluate the risk of nuclear catastrophe by looking at world events and trends. Their most recent assessment, which shaved 30 seconds off of the previous annihilation risk, asserted that world leaders in 2017 “failed to respond effectively to the looming threats of nuclear war and climate change, making the world security situation more dangerous than it was a year ago—and as dangerous as it has been since World War II.”
J.B. Spector/Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago
Indeed, the clock has never been closer to midnight in its seventy-year history. The only other time the hands stood at the two-minute mark was in 1953, shortly after the United States tested the first H-bomb. In 2017, following the Inauguration of Donald Trump, the hands were moved to two-and-one-half minutes, with the warning words: “Wise public officials should act immediately, guiding humanity away from the brink. If they do not, wise citizens must step forward and lead the way.”
Speaking to The Progressive in 2017, Bronson described the process used for setting the clock’s hands: “We come together in November, and look at two fundamental questions: Are we safer or at greater risk than we were at this time last year? And how are we doing compared to history?”
The clock, designed by Martyl Langsdorf (who was married to a scientist on the Manhattan Project, and later became the Bulletin’s art director), originated as a sketch in white paint on the back of a black-bound volume of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas. Its stark simplicity was meant to “convey a sense of urgency.” The first color chosen was “bright orange to catch the eye,” she remembered. Langsdorf died in 2013 at the age of ninety-six.
This past year, the seventieth anniversary of the “doomsday clock,” as it is called, was commemorated with an extensive exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. Patricia Ward, the exhibit’s project director, told The Progressive, “the message of this exhibit is that it's really important for all of us to be aware and pay attention and to be part of the conversation around the applications of scientific discoveries.”
J.B. Spector/Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago
The museum has long been known as a showcase for the benefits of technology and industrial achievement. In some ways, an exhibit, which warns of the potential dangers of these is unusual, but Ward is optimistic: “It’s human ingenuity, it’s human endeavor, that created all these amazing technologies, and it’s human ingenuity and endeavor and global cooperation that are going to solve these problems,” she said. “There are things we can do.”
But are those things being done? The team at the Bulletin is not sure. “We remain very concerned about deteriorating or deteriorated relations between the United States and Russia,” said Bronson in the interview, “we remain very concerned about the aggressive advancements in nuclear arsenals around the world, often called modernization. We are very concerned about the lack of international cooperation around climate change.”
This year’s decision to move the clock’s hands even closer to midnight emphasizes that concern in a stark and visual way. The exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry is scheduled to run through early 2018.
Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.