#thedoomsdayclock

The Doomsday Clock at 75 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2022)

If the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists isn’t apart of your newsfeed, please add it (https://thebulletin.org/). It’s 100 seconds to midnight (https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/) at the time of this review at the beginning of 2023, and with the way the world is heading, precious seconds could disappear from this infamous metaphoric timepiece (or it could just be completely irrelevant once that first nuclear missile is sent skyward by some powermad despot and his sycophant generals). Insanity has no limits.

I was a kid of the ‘70s and ‘80s with duck & cover drills still performed in elementary school, a ball-bearing plant in town rumored to be on the Soviet hit list (not to mention all the steel mills and iron works some twenty miles away in Gary, Indiana and East Chicago), television and films frantic about the Cold War going suddenly hot (then suddenly silent), and metal music embracing the themes within nuclear annihilation so lovingly (from Black Sabbath to Iron Maiden to Metallica to Evildead to Megadeth to W.A.S.P. to Living Death to Toxik to Sacrifice to Nuclear Assault to Terrorizer and onward. The long-lived band Satan recently released a phenomenal song titled “The Doomsday Clock” about someone sent back in time to avert apocalypse, only to ultimately fail: “We can’t stop the Doomsday Clock, it’s too late!”). Maybe it is.

As a young infantryman in the early ‘90s, they still taught us—in the event of a nuclear explosion one could visibly see—to lay prone on the ground, helmet towards the blast. Comfort in the face of incineration takes tragicomic forms. The SCIENCE of all this is much more frightening now, and those at the Bulletin, based out of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, know the science intimately and are nonpartisan, but “religiously pro-science”. It truly won’t take much to turn the entire world upside down, and we have enough to contend with as it is. The subject-matter experts at the Bulletin know this all too well, since the existential crises of climate change, disruptive technologies, and weaponized disinformation have also worked their way into the Bulletin’s portentous equations.

This might be the most conversation-stirring coffee-table book you’ll ever have. The iconic logo alone incites curiosity. Within, science and social policy, graphic design, satirical comics, fine art, and pop culture all combine to convey the messaging and advocacy of the Bulletin over the past 75 years. It has been a hard fight, and that fight is far from over in this “post-truth” era. Will humanity make it another 25 years? There are some 13,000 nuclear missiles around the globe right now. Time will tell, and the peremptory clock keeps us aware of the dangers we impose upon ourselves and the biosystems of the Earth we depend on.