100 Seconds to Midnight

Photograph: Jean Pimentel

This powerful pix of an H Bomb blast resonates to no end, both as something most deadly but also of ominous beauty akin, at grand scale, to looking at a Black Widow spider or peering into the eye of a black mamba. With this image in mind, the Doomsday Clock tells us we're 100 seconds to midnight, the time where mankind ends his reign on planet earth via such entities as nuclear war, climate change, malevolent AI and/or other disruptive technologies in other domains.

IN STANLEY KUBRICK’S classic 1964 satire Dr. Strangelove, it just takes one errant general in command of nuclear bombers, plus American and Soviet policies of “mutually assured destruction,” to trigger worldwide catastrophe. The darkly hilarious film dwells on risks that remain today, including the possibility of an automated launch system or a single person with access to nuclear codes bringing about a deadly mushroom cloud.

Chicago-based artist Martyl Langsdorf designed the clock in the wake of World War II, working with her husband Alexander Langsdorf, a Manhattan Project physicist, and other researchers who helped get the fledgling Bulletin off the ground. The Doomsday Clock’s experts have the unenviable job of identifying and weighing potential apocalypses, as well as our progress as a society—or lack of it—in avoiding them. They started the clock when nuclear conflicts were on everyone’s minds following the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where bombs had killed as many as 210,000 people and injured and sickened many more with cancer-causing radiation. The clock’s minute hand ticked back and forth over the decades, following the development of even more destructive hydrogen bombs, cases of nuclear false alarms, and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the most dangerous standoff in history.

In Dr. Strangelove, people engineer devices of their own destruction. One of the general’s B-52 bombers strikes a target in the USSR—only to set off a Soviet “doomsday device” that detonates bombs all over the world. (“It is not a thing a sane man would do. The doomsday machine is designed to trigger itself automatically,” the Russian ambassador says in the movie.) The message of the Bulletin is to inspire the dismantling of such machines, to turn back the clock before it’s too late.

Its initial purpose was to highlight the dangers of nuclear war, but that mission was later expanded to encompass other primarily human-made crises that threaten civilization. Initially set at seven minutes till “midnight,” it’s now perilously set at just 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to the end of humanity. On Thursday, as Bulletin members celebrate the clock’s 75th anniversary, they will update the time again, when it could tick slightly toward or away from the apocalypse.

It is 100 seconds to midnight