By Steve Rhodes
“Martyl Langsdorf, an artist married to a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, created the widely known Doomsday Clock for the first cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,” the Tribune reports.
“That June 1947 magazine put the clock, meant to depict how close the world is to nuclear holocaust, approaching 11:53 p.m., with midnight being the zero hour.
“She understood the deep anxiety of the scientists in 1947, and the urgency of preventing the spread or use of nuclear weapons,” said Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin since 2005. “With the clock design, she gave the world a symbol that is even more potent today.”
“Mrs. Langsdorf, 96, died Tuesday, March 26, at a rehabilitation facility near her home in Schaumburg, after a lung infection.”
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Here’s an article I wrote for the Baltimore Sun in 1998 about the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
CATCHING UP WITH . . . THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK
Keeping Track Of The End Of Time
While the Doomsday Clock continues to tick, its keepers at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists strive to prevent us from ever reaching the final hour.
When international affairs reach a certain level of tension – nuclear testing, border wars, instablility inside a major power – the phone in Mike Moore’s office inevitably rings. Journalists on the line have one simple question: “Are you going to change the clock?”
Moore, a former newspaperman himself, is editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and thus the public keeper of the Doomsday Clock, which, since 1945 has served as a symbol of how close the world is to nuclear disaster.
At its best, in the optimism after 1991’s arms-control agreements, the clock has stood at 17 minutes to midnight. At its worst, after both the United States and the Soviet Union tested hydrogen bombs in 1953, it’s ticked all the way to two minutes to midnight. The changing hands of the clock, which are approved by the bulletin’s board of directors, have become a media staple. The most recent reports came in June, after nuclear tests in India and Pakistan moved the hands of the clock from 14 to just nine minutes before the doomsday hour.
But resetting the clock isn’t exactly a full-time job. Between crises, Moore edits the Bulletin. The bimonthly magazine carries the clock on every cover, but rarely gets much attention outside wonkish public-policy circles despite its steady reputation within the peace, security and arms-control communities.
“We like to think we’re influential,” says Moore. “All the ideas that have been accepted in bilateral arms control, or in international arms control, were pioneered by the kind of people who write for the Bulletin.”
Started ‘to save the world’
The Bulletin was founded in 1945 by the scientists and engineers who invented the first atomic bomb and were grappling with the moral implications of what they had wrought. Their initial goal was to create what became the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“They really believed if there was some kind of international atomic-control agency that weapons would fade away and the peaceful uses of atomic energy would flourish,” says Moore. It was an idea, he adds, that “may have been a little bit naive.”
Even the original atomic scientists could not comprehend the world they were ushering in. The aftermath of the nuclear detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki only quickened their concern.
“We were stunned almost to a state of disbelief by the magnitude of the destruction accompanying the birth of the new age,” John Simpson, the first chairman of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, wrote in the Bulletin in a 1991 reminiscence.
In the Bulletin, science was able to document its misgivings. The first issue, a six-page newsletter, appeared in December 1945 as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago. It was edited by a former soccer reporter for Russia’s Pravda who had escaped to the West.
“It was started – and I don’t know how to make this sound less grandiose – to save the world,” Moore says.
The original Bulletins were no-gloss, simple typographical affairs without covers. That changed with the June 1947 issue, fronted in a brazen orange with a 7-by-7-inch clock face indicating a countdown to doomsday of seven minutes to midnight.
The stories, by and large, remained without color, however. Take these offerings from the May 1948 issue: “The Dispersal of Cities as a Defense Measure,” “A Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution,” “The Exposition of Truth, Isotopes and Their Application to Peacetime Use of Atomic Energy.”
Not just for scientists
Today’s Bulletin is much broader in scope. “We bring you international reporting on global security – new voices from every corner of the globe,” the magazine states. “Timely stories on nuclear issues and international affairs . . . and powerful ideas for creating a safer world.”
Recent issues have featured cover stories on Mexico’s conflict with Zapatista rebels in the state of Chiapas and on a controversial new jet fighter; the September/October issue will feature a story on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program, based on interviews with an Iraqi defector the magazine has been working with. And, of course, today’s magazine has a Web site – www.bullatomsci.org.
[Editor’s Note: Now thebulletin.org]
“The name of the magazine is very counter-intuitive,” Moore says. “The name of the magazine not only does not communicate what the magazine is about, it suggests very clearly that whatever it is, it’s going to be technical: Atomic Scientists, that’s the bulletin for rocket scientists, or something like that.
“But it’s never been a terribly technical thing. It’s always been about public-policy issues. We’ve always been oriented toward peace and security issues. We say it with a straight face – we’re against war.”
The Bulletin deals not just with nuclear war, but border conflicts, arms trading, biological weapons – any and all types of security issues.
“We look at the possibility that people are doing the dumb thing,” Moore says. “Everybody has the capability of doing the dumb thing.”
Which isn’t to say the Bulletin is a lily-livered, tree-hugging, all-you-need-is-love operation, although it has often been accused of a liberal bias.
“Look at Chiapas,” Moore says. “The Mexican government is doing the dumb thing. But that doesn’t let the Zapatistas off the hook. Everybody has the capability of doing the dumb thing.”
The Bulletin also has a dose of atomic-scientist humor in New Yorker-like cartoons sprinkled throughout (guy in lab coat says: “And, of course, I’m nominating Johnson’s paper on anomalous magnetic fields in interstellar clouds for the booby prize”).
Victim of its own success?
Peace has not been good for the Bulletin’s circulation. It hit 23,000 in 1984, the peak of Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric about the Soviet “evil empire,” but stands at just under 10,000 today. And that’s without any real competitors, although Arms Control Today and a Federation of American Scientists newsletter overlap somewhat.
“We’re all broadly in the same business,” Moore says, “the business of trying to bring a little order and reason to a really, truly mad situation. Within minutes, the world as we know it could be gone.
“It’s a low-probability event,” he acknowledges, “with high consequences . . . The Bulletin is keeping some focus on problem that has not gone away, even though most people think it has, and which may resurge in the next century. And it could resurge with a vengeance.”
While the magazine remains known mostly within a small community, its Doomsday Clock’s reach is much larger.
A University of Michigan business professor once demonstrated that Americans spend more in uncertain times by finding a correlation between the clock and savings rates. International relations and political science students have used the clock to track the rise and fall of international tensions. Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a one-time presidential candidate, titled his 1990 book Five Minutes to Midnight.
Hawks, doves, even religious fundamentalists see value in the clock. Todd Strandberg, an Air Force supply sergeant, runs a Rapture Index Web site that tracks how international affairs correspond with the end times described in the Bible. In a recent interview with Mother Jones magazine, Strandberg said:
“The Rapture is an important event that’s going to transpire soon and rivet the world’s attention, and I think that putting some sort of numeric evaluation on it is extremely important. You know, like the atomic scientists thought the danger of a nuclear holocaust was important enough to create their Doomsday Clock.”
According to Moore, it was never the intention of the magazine’s founders for the clock to overshadow the publication. But after more than 50 years of reminding us just how close we are to oblivion, the Doomsday Clock has become pre-eminent. For the general public, anyway, the Bulletin will likely continue to be something to keep Moore and his staff busy in between moving the clock’s hands.
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See also, from the Reader:
* Artist Martyl Langsdorf, Mistress Of Schweikher House And Creator Of The World’s Scariest Logo.
* More About Martyl Langsdorf, The Chicago Artist Who Designed The Dooomsday Clock.
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And:
* Martyl.com.
* Oral history of Martyl Langsdorf.
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Finally, from the Bulletin:
* An Open Letter To President Obama: It’s Five Minutes To Midnight.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on April 9, 2013