Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Is midnight upon us? Doomsday Clock panel to set risk of global catastrophe
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to unveil its measure of how close human civilisation is to the edge of extinctionOn 24 October 1962, an American nuclear chemist, Harrison Brown, started to pen a guest editorial for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just as the Cuban missile crisis reached its climax.
“I am writing on a
plane en route from Los Angeles to Washington and for all I know this editorial
… may never be published,” Brown said. “Never in history have people and
nations been so close to death and destruction on such a vast scale. Midnight
is upon us.”
With this dire warning, he was referring to the Doomsday Clock, which has been the Bulletin’s iconic motif since it was founded 75 years ago by Albert Einstein and some of the University of Chicago scientists from the Manhattan Project. Their work had contributed to making the atomic bomb, but many of them had been outraged when the US used it against Japanese cities. The image of the clock ticking away to midnight was intended to convey the sense of urgent peril, which Brown felt so viscerally on that 1962 flight to Washington....
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