In 1945, on the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project that built the world's first atomic bombs began publishing a mimeographed newsletter called The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Two years later, as those same scientists contemplated a world in which two atomic weapons had been used in Japan, they gathered to discuss the threat to humanity posed by nuclear war.
"They were worried the public wasn't really aware of how close we were to the end of life as we knew it," said Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin.
Martyl Langsdorf, an artist and wife of Manhattan project physicist Alexander Langsdorf Jr., came up with the idea of a clock showing just how close things were.
It came to be called the Doomsday Clock.
"It gave the sense that if we did nothing, it would tick on toward midnight and we could experience the apocalypse," Bronson said....
Did anybody see "Oppenheimer?" I don't think it ran in wide release yet but there were billboards for it all over LA. It cost damn near as much to make as The Bomb did in WWII. It's supposed to be good, but I don't know if anyone's seen it outside The Industry.
The real bio of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a hell of a story.
"We must remember that we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation." --Liz Cheney, Republican, 7/21/22
On Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset the Doomsday Clock for 2023 to 90 seconds to midnight, warning the world is closer to global annihilation than ever before, in part due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Since 1947, the Bulletin has maintained a Doomsday Clock to illustrate how close humanity is to the end of the world due to existential threats including nuclear war and the climate emergency. We speak with Frida Berrigan, longtime peace activist and nuclear weapons abolitionist, whose new cover story for In These Times is “How to Avoid Nuclear Stand-Offs That Threaten the Entire World.”
PBS NewsHour Why there are new assessments of Oppenheimer's role in history
Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons during World War II and is perhaps best known as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb.” But he was a complicated man. As William Brangham explains, there are new assessments of his role in history.
Like I said, it's a hell of a story. I suppose no one did it as a biopic until now because the communist aspect was too controversial to put in a mass market movie project. My own interpretation is that, like most intellectuals of his time, he briefly flirted with anarcho-communism right after the Russian revolution promised a workers' paradise and the "withering away" of the state, but became disillusioned with it the same way most people did after it morphed into Stalinism. Mostly this brief phase caused the ostracism of a lot of people who had moved on from such notions, and who would have made a huge contribution to the evolution of this country had they not been purged in the Witch Hunts.
That's just me, though. Oppenheimer's life is far from simple, and he was a complex intellectual with a lot of different sides and also a type of person that is typically distrusted by ordinary people. I'll be interested to see if this complexity can be incorporated into a medium as transparent and unforgiving as motion picture, and still succeed as history and/or cinema.
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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is not the only Doomsday Clock. Several years ago, a fairly incomprehensible public art project facing New York's Union Square was changed, with maximum publicity hype, into a Climate Doomsday Clock. Its basic premise equates 1.5 degrees C, the Paris conference guideline, to a point of no return. The estimated time until this happens is incorporated into a calculation which the clock on the left side displays. It counts down until this theoretical epoch. It currently stands at around seven years to go. It gets updated on the subjective conclusions of experts when these change.
If you're ever in NYC, Union Square has a good left wing history, now largely forgotten, and also it's a far better place to hang than Times Square. The Climate Doomsday Clock is that huge weird thing on the whole wall of a huge expensive condo complex facing the square. It has an enormous wall that looks like the sun with a needle in its eye and radio waves coming out. You can't miss it.
"We must remember that we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation." --Liz Cheney, Republican, 7/21/22