Colby Cosh: Doomsday Clock metaphor ran out of time long ago

On Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (really a foundation that publishes a famous magazine by that name) announced that it would be scooching the minute hand of its renowned “Doomsday Clock” forward. The clock will now read 11:58:30 p.m., midnight minus 90 seconds. The Bulletin does this once a year — at a time, by pure coincidence, when newspaper editors are notoriously starved for copy.

The Doomsday Clock was originally (in 1947) a one-off magazine cover design by Martyl Langsdorf (1917-2013), a landscape artist who was married to one of the Manhattan Project physicists. She happened to set the clock at about seven minutes to midnight, but the visual metaphor was irresistible. As the arms race and nuclear proliferation began, the editors of the Bulletin started rearranging Langsdorf’s clock face as an index of the danger from nuclear exchange.

Even by saying this much I am intruding somewhat on the turf of a colleague, Tristin Hopper, who is eternally preoccupied with the pure stupidity of the Doomsday Clock. As T-Hop never tires of pointing out, you have really lost track of the clock metaphor if you manually wiggle the minute hand backward or forward annually.

Moreover, the face of the clock can at best be considered a lagging indicator. The year 1947 was probably the moment at which the danger of a pre-emptive 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 might have won the argument in any country that developed nukes until the equilibrium of mutually assured destruction was both established and theorized.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the clock closer to midnight as the world was learning to live with nukes and nuclear proliferation. Eventually the hand was moved backward in 1960 — practically in time for the frightening Cuban Missile Crisis.

The clock was pushed forward in the 1980s as a critique of U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s confrontation with communism; it was only after Reagan won the Cold War, paving the way to arms reduction and deproliferation, that the clock was turned back to minus 17 minutes. The progress of the minute hand has been continually forward since 2010; say what you want about the good old Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, but at least its crappy clock is behaving like a clock these days.

There are other problems with the metaphor: I’m not sure how midnight got designated a moment of disaster in the first place, unless it was under the influence of the story of Cinderella. As Hopper sometimes observes when he’s ranting about the Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now dedicated to finding/hypothesizing/doing PR for other sources of existential risk, including climate change, “disruptive technologies” and bioweaponry (fair enough on that one).

What even Hopper hasn’t pointed out amidst all his bellyaching is that the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists” no longer has much involvement from … well, atomic scientists. The Bulletin originally involved key people from all political tendencies within the Manhattan Project.

It had Einstein’s holy imprimatur and took 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 in the setting of the altered political agenda. No one had to ask what right they had to help shape the future: they’d already done it.

Keeping this in mind, I would ask you to glance at the Bulletin’s present-day “Science and Security Board,” which decides the setting of the Doomsday Clock, and actually count how many members might reasonably be described as “atomic scientists.” (Look! There’s former California governor Jerry Brown!) Quite a few are physicists, and most of the bunch have some scientific credentials, but it looks like no more than two or three have been anywhere near the atomic nucleus professionally.

A few are astrophysicists, which is frankly confusing, and some are climate specialists. COVID-skeptic readers will notice a couple of 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’s probably important to listen to those people, and one imagines they might even have relevant technical knowledge, but the original point of the Bulletin was to represent the nuclear weaponeers themselves, and not their nonscientific critics. In short, the name of the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists” is, at this point, an unvarnished lie. You’ve been warned.

National Post

1. Tristin Hopper: What does 2.5 minutes to midnight even mean? Why the Doomsday Clock is a terrible indicator

2. Avi Benlolo: As the Doomsday Clock closes in on midnight, the time for action on Iran is now