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2002 Special Recognition Award
"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our
modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe,"
remarked Albert Einstein, one of the spiritual Godfather's of The
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in May of 1946. The goal of the
Bulletin, in the words of its senior editor Michael Moore, is to render
that wonderfully apt Einstein quote obsolete.
The title of the magazine would suggest a journal crammed with
sexless QED formulas for the titillation of its PhD. audience. But to
flip through the pages of any Bulletin is to encounter thoughtful, well-
written articles accessible to anyone interested in international security
and nuclear policy issues. From Novaya Zemlya to the Moruroa atoll,
from Baghdad to Tel Aviv, from the worldwide Wild West tactics of
the Bush administration to the wasteful nuclear greed of Soviet-relic
Minatom, the Bulletin audits the nuclear health of the world.
Called to life in May of 1945 by a group of former Manhattan Project
nuclear physicists, from its very outset the Bulletin has been dedicated
to changing how people think about war-and-peace issues in a world
that can self-destruct at the push of a button. Not until May of 1947
did the leaflet publication receive an honest-to-God cover, one which
featured the "Clock of Doom", as it was then called, and which went
on to become known as the "Doomsday Clock" -- the most famous
symbol of the world's countdown to zero hour. The clock was the
creation of a Chicago artist known as Martyl, the wife of physicist
Alexander Langsdorf, a Bulletin founder. Years later, Martyl said she
hit upon the clock idea as a way "to symbolize urgency," and as for
the decision of placing the minute hand at seven to, it was merely a
matter of "good design."
Since the Doomsday Clock's inception, the minute hand has been
pushed forward or moved back on seventeen different occasions.
Doomsday was never so close as in 1952 -- two minutes to midnight --
following successful thermonuclear weapons testing by both Superpowers;
and never so far away --seventeen minutes until midnight -- as in
1991 after the United States and the Soviet Union signed the long-stalled Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).
In February of this year, the minute hand was pushed forward to the
same setting at which the clock debuted – seven minutes to midnight.
This time the decision was not for "design reasons," but because of
the U.S. administration's decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty,
concern about the security of the world's huge stockpile of nuclear
weapons, the crisis between India and Pakistan, the increased peril of
nuclear terrorism, and the U.S. administration's threats of using pre-emptive force over diplomacy in order to halt nuclear proliferation.
For 57 years The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has helped the world
visualize the possibility of the unimaginable. Perhaps that's why we're
still around.
--Craig Reishus
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