Doomsday Clock Remains at Three Minutes to Midnight Since Jan 22, 2015

Summary: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock remains at three minutes to midnight while American TV series Madam Secretary confronts resets.

Doomsday Clock set to current display of minus 3 minutes: Yury Tarasievich, Public Domain (CC0 1.0), via Wikimedia Commons

Resetting the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock in Chicago to three minutes to midnight (the clock’s setting since Jan 22, 2015) enters popular culture via Sunday, March 27, 2016’s “On the Clock” episode of American political drama television series Madam Secretary.

The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decides the time display on the Doomsday Clock, also known as the Clock of Doom. The Doomsday Clock setting responds to threats with the potential for global destruction. Sources of annihilation include climate change, nuclear power, pandemics and dangerous technologies.

“Clock moves reflect major trends, not transient events,” explained editor Mike Moore in his historical article, “Midnight Never Came,” in the Bulletin’s November/December 1995 issue.

The Doomsday Clock is not a physical clock. The Doomsday Clock is a design created for the cover of the June 1947 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Austrian-born physicist and co-editor Hyman H. Goldsmith asked artist Martyl Langsdorf, wife of Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf, Jr., for a design to mark the Bulletin’s transition from newsletter to magazine.

Discussions by scientists who had worked on developing the Manhattan Project’s nuclear devices impressed upon Martyl the urgency of controlling atomic weapons. She switched her original choice of the symbol for uranium, nuclear weaponry’s main raw material, to the last quarter of a clock face, symbolic of countdown to the ultimate doomsday of global destruction.

The June 1947 edition debuted the Doomsday Clock, with the time displayed at seven minutes to midnight.

“It looked good to my eye,” Martyl explained her decision for the original clock time.

Doomsday Clock graph; left column with minutes to midnight, as expressed on Doomsday Clock; right column with conversion to 24-hour clock times: Fastfission, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Since its debut in 1947, the Doomsday Clock design on the Bulletin’s cover has been reset 21 times within its 15-minute range of midnight. The first reset took place with the October 1949 issue. The Bulletin's iconic mascot was advanced four minutes to display three minutes to midnight.

The precipitating event was the Soviet Union’s first nuclear weapon test, conducted Monday, Aug. 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk, Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (now Republic of Kazakhstan). The Cold War (1947 to 1991) Western bloc of the United States and U.S. allies interpreted the event as the beginning of an intensive arms race. On Sept. 23, 1949, 33rd U.S. President Harry Truman’s informed the American people of the Soviet test.

Russian-born biophysicist and Bulletin co-founder Eugene Rabinowitch explained the implications of the loss of nuclear weaponry monopoly by the United States in his article, “Forewarned -- But Not Forearmed,” in the October 1949 issue:

“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; but we think they have reason to be deeply alarmed and to be prepared for grave decisions.”

The closest apocalyptic setting, at two minutes to midnight, was announced in the September 1953 issue. An Editor’s Note inserted in the lower right corner of page 235 identified confirmation by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) of a Soviet-exploded hydrogen bomb as the reason for the Doomsday Clock’s reset.

“The announcement by the Soviet Government that it had explored a hydrogen bomb, and the admission by the AEC that an atomic test involving ‘both fission and thermonuclear reactions’ had been detected, came as this issue of the Bulletin was going to press.

“Readers will note that the hands of the Bulletin clock have moved forward.”

The hands of the Doomsday Clock were set the farthest from midnight in 1991. The reset trigger was the official end of the Cold War. Significant events, such as the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) by the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Wednesday, July 31, 1991, and the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union Thursday, Dec. 26, 1991, signaled the close of the Cold War.

A caption on the cover of the December 1991 issue noted the momentous time reset: “The minute hand moves, farther than ever before.”

“The clock is in a new region because we feel the world has entered a new era. Never before has the Board of Directors moved the minute hand so far at one time. Conceived at the dawn of the Cold War, the clock was designed with a 15-minute range,” noted the Bulletin's editorial.

Confidence in the new era was so high that the minute hand was moved beyond the normal range. The Doomsday Clock enjoyed the optimistic time display for five years. The Bulletin’s Board of Directors decided to move the minute hand to 14 minutes to midnight in December 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the Bulletin’s founding. The reset appeared on the cover of the January/February 1996.

Editor Mike Moore explained in his Editor’s Note, “On the Scale,” that the multiplicity of the current headlines drove the reset.

“But the clock has never been just an Armageddon metaphor. When the board resets the clock, it also looks toward the future, assesses trends, and takes into account the vision (or lack thereof) of policymakers, foreign and domestic,” Moore added.

As for Madam Secretary’s Doomsday Clock-themed episode, The Bulletin’s website welcomed questions about the Doomsday Clock and the online journal generated by exposure in popular culture. The site headline announced “Bulletin now also a TV star.”

Téa Leoni as Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord: BulletinOfTheAtomic @BulletinAtomic, via Twitter March 28, 2016

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Doomsday Clock set to current display of minus 3 minutes: Yury Tarasievich, Public Domain (CC0 1.0), via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Doomsday_Clock_minus_3.png

Téa Leoni as Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord: BulletinOfTheAtomic @BulletinAtomic, via Twitter March 27, 2016, @ https://twitter.com/BulletinAtomic/status/714241133249847296

For further information:

Benedict, Kennette. “Doomsday Clockwork.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists > Features > Columnists. March 3, 2015.
Available @ http://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clockwork8052

BulletinOfTheAtomic‏ @BulletinAtomic. "Here we go: Madam Secretary's #doomsdayclock episode tonight: 8pm EDT." Twitter. March 27, 2016.
Available @ https://twitter.com/BulletinAtomic/status/714241133249847296

DNAinfo Staff. “’Madam Secretary’ Show Gives Chicago Doomsday Clock Staff Reason to Party.” DNAinfo. March 28, 2016.
Available @ https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160328/hyde-park/madam-secretary-show-gives-chicago-doomsday-clock-staff-reason-party

GeoBeats News. "Doomsday Clock set at 3 Minutes to Midnight." YouTube. Jan. 22, 2015.
Available @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2t179wbiR0