The Doomsday Clock, reset each January, remains at 100 second to midnight for the third year in a row. “The world remains stuck in an extremely dangerous moment,” say scientists who set the clock’s time
The clock is reset every January, and not even at the height of the Cold War, when Americans were digging fallout shelters and kids were being told to “duck and cover” under their school desks in case of atomic attack, were the clock’s hands this far into the final countdown.editor John Mecklin observes, the ingredients for a possible doomsday scenario are more numerous than ever.
The early atomic scientists “knew that nuclear weapons were the first human creation that could literally end civilization,” Mecklin says. “But they also realized there would be others.”, Robert K. Elder and J.C. Gabel trace the history of the clock, which they argue is “the most powerful piece of informational design of the 20th century.”
Luckily, the Chicago-based scientists in charge didn’t have to look far for a graphic designer. Martyl Langsdorf, a celebrated landscape artist, was married to physicist Alexander Langsdorf, who worked on the“Being the so-called artist-in-residence for the scientific community, they asked me to do the first cover for the magazine-to-be,” Langsdorf, who painted under the name “Martyl,” said in an interview before her death in 2013.
Langsdorf’s design started as an entire clock face, but she soon stripped it down to the last 15 minutes of the hour. It apparently never occurred to Langsdorf that the editors might someday want to pull that minute hand far below the 45-minute mark. No matter: World events have only once raised that happy dilemma. In 1991, after the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and the Soviet Union dissolved, the clock briefly dipped to 17 minutes before midnight.
Mecklin says that the Doomsday Clock was always meant to be an alarm—and from a group of scientists who had a clear agenda against nuclear weapons. Co-founder Goldsmith was one of 70 scientists who had written a joint letter to President Harry S. Truman urging him not to use the atomic bomb against Japan. stopped printing copies of the magazine in 2008. Still, the iconic clock appears on each digital issue and at the top of the Atomic Scientists’ web page.
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