The doomsday clock keeps ticking

Bom and I go back a long way. In Seattle, where I grew up in his 1950s and his 60s, Seattle was home to Boeing, the maker of his B-52 bomber, so if a nuclear war broke out, he would be on the target list. It was common knowledge that we would come in second place. Minuteman missile.

At school, there were different drills for different disasters, and I had to remember which one was which. earthquake? Please run outside. bomb? Run inside and enter the windowless interior hallway. Every summer, my high school friends and I would disappear for weeks deep into the Cascades and Olympic Mountains. I’ve always wondered if we would emerge into the world in ashes.

Once upon a time, in Santa Monica in 1971, I thought it would finally happen. Early one morning in February, I bounced out of bed and woke up on the floor. A loud roar rang out. Everything was trembling. I crept to one window, pulled the curtains aside, and expected a mushroom cloud to rise over the Los Angeles Basin. I couldn’t see anything. When the radio came back, we learned that there had been a deadly earthquake in the San Fernando Valley.

On January 23, I was struck by the announcement that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had decided not to change the setting of the Doomsday Clock, a metaphorical clock invented in 1947 as a means of exaggerating threats. I was sent on a journey to find out. About nuclear Armageddon. The clock was originally designed with his 15-minute range counting down to midnight, the moment of doom, and members of the Bulletin now use the clock from time to time in response to current events, including threats such as climate change and pandemics. move.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed, there was a burst of optimism and the clocks turned back to 17 minutes to midnight. “The Cold War is over,” the magazine’s editors wrote. “The 40-year nuclear arms race between East and West is over.”

A year ago, after Russia invaded Ukraine and threatened to use nuclear weapons, the clock was set to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest we’ve ever been to The End. Since then, the threat of nuclear weapons in Ukraine has diminished, but the clock still points 90 seconds to zero.

This year’s announcement came on the same day that “Oppenheimer,” the biopic of director Christopher Nolan, who directed the bombing, was nominated for 13 Oscars. In an interview before the film’s release, Nolan described Robert J. Oppenheimer as the most important man in history. His inventions either made war impossible or led to the extinction of humanity.