The Doomsday Clock keeps ticking

The bomb and I go way back. In Seattle, where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, it was common knowledge that we would be number two on the target list in the event of nuclear war because Seattle was home to Boeing, maker of B-52 bombers and Minuteman -missiles.

At school we had different exercises for different catastrophes, and we had to remember which was which. Earthquake? Run outside. The bomb? Run inside to an inner hallway without windows. In the summer, my high school friends and I would disappear into the backcountry of the Cascades or the Olympic Mountains for a few weeks. I always wondered if we would find the world in ashes.

Once, in Santa Monica in 1971, I thought it was finally happening. I woke up on the floor after bouncing out of bed early one morning in February. There was a huge roar. Everything was shaking. I crawled to my only window and pulled back the curtain, expecting to see a mushroom cloud rising over the Los Angeles basin. I saw nothing. When the radio came back, I heard that a deadly earthquake had occurred in the San Fernando Valley.

I was sent on this trip down memory lane by the announcement on January 23, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that it had decided not to change the setting of the Doomsday Clock, a metaphorical timepiece invented in 1947 as a way to dramatize the threat of nuclear Armageddon. The clock was originally designed with a 15-minute range counting down to midnight – the ominous strike – and Bulletin members move the clock from time to time in response to current events, which now include threats such as climate change and pandemics.

In a burst of optimism in 1991, after the Soviet Union collapsed and the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed, the clock was turned back to 17 minutes to midnight. “The Cold War is over,” says the The Bulletin editors wrote. “The forty-year nuclear arms race between East and West is over.”

A year ago, after Russia invaded Ukraine and brandished the threat of using nuclear weapons, the clock was set to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to the End yet. The threat of nuclear weapons in Ukraine has since diminished, but the clock remains at 90 seconds to zero.

This year's announcement came on the same day that “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan's biopic about the man who directed the invention of the bomb, received 13 Oscar nominations. In a interview before the film's releaseMr. Nolan described Robert J. Oppenheimer as the most important man in history because his invention had either made war impossible or doomed us to destruction.