Setting the Doomsday Clock

It’s January 22, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, stewards of the famous Doomsday Clock, have called a press conference in Washington, D.C. Dozens of reporters are in attendance as Kennette Benedict, outgoing publisher and executive director of the Bulletin and a lecturer at Chicago Harris, somberly takes the stage.

“Today, unchecked climate change and a nuclear arms race resulting from modernization of huge arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity,” proclaims Benedict. She explains that theBulletin’s Science and Security Board, a cadre of top scientists and policy experts, has decided to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward two minutes. “It is now three minutes to midnight.” Cameras flash as Richard Somerville, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, pulls a placard from an easel, revealing an updated clock face with the new time: 11:57.

Over the next few days, more than 2,000 media outlets covered the announcement. The event rang in the Bulletin’s 70th anniversary with the kind of spectacle that Benedict, who officially retired from the Bulletin in February, had hoped to produce when she first came to the organization nine years ago. “I’d been very interested in finding better ways for scientists and experts to communicate to a general public,” she says. Luckily, a powerful and internationally recognized symbol was sitting at her fingertips.

The Bulletin was founded by University of Chicago physicists who had helped develop the first nuclear weapons. Upon realizing the incredible power of these new technologies, the scientists sought to inform the public about the grave threat that nuclear proliferation posed. “They really understood the power of this, more than anybody else would,” says Benedict. The Doomsday Clock icon originated in 1947, when the Bulletin’s editors decided to make the newsletter into a magazine for the public. In need of a design for the cover, they reached out to Martyl Langsdorf, an artist married to a Manhattan Project physicist. Langsdorf wanted a visual that conveyed “the urgency that all of the scientists felt about controlling this dreadful technology,” says Benedict. “And so the idea of a clock came to her mind.”

Every few years, the Science and Security Board would quietly decide to move the hands of the clock forward or backward. Yet despite the grave problems that the clock represented, it received little media fanfare. “I thought we could use this communications instrument more intensively,” Benedict recalls. Increasing the clock’s visibility would become a key priority under her leadership.

This year’s high-profile announcement brings the clock the closest to midnight it’s been since 1984, when the United States and the Soviet Union severed contact amid an escalating arms race. Relations softened after the cold war ended, but Benedict is quick to point out that there are still 16,000 nuclear weapons in existence today, each with about 200 times the destructive power of those dropped in World War II. She doesn’t mince words: “We are poised, every minute of every day, to have a nuclear war.”

Further threatening human existence is climate change, which the Board began including in its deliberations in 2007. Rising temperatures and sea levels could alter weather patterns and force mass migrations, likely causing widespread hunger and conflict, and possibly leading governments to infringe upon civil liberties. “That’s the end of our way of life,” Benedict concludes.

It was the startling lack of progress in addressing both weapons and climate that led the Board to make its announcement – the last that Benedict would oversee as director. Rachel Bronson, formerly of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, has since filled that role, and has quickly embraced the high stakes of her new mission. “So many events taking place in the world right now demonstrate that the Bulletinis not only still relevant, but vital,” says Bronson.

Benedict will continue to lecture at Chicago Harris. She says that her interactions with students help keep her hopeful, despite the dire outlook. “For me to be able to teach courses that will reach people who will serve in those positions in the future – I think that gives me some sense of optimism,” she explains.

“All this time, I have been inspired by the example of those first scientists,” Benedict adds. The Bulletin was started at a time when any opposition to increasing U.S. military might was politically unpopular. “They were quite courageous – they didn’t care much what their careers were going to look like, or who was going to like them or not. They did what they thought was right,” she reflects. “That example sticks with me, and I hope it would stick with the next leaders of the Bulletin.”