ABSTRACT
From the start of what, in retrospect, may have been the fi rst nuclear age, perhaps no image has so captured the sense of looming risk that nuclear weapons pose as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock,” an icon that has graced the cover of that publication since 1947. As the editors put it then, the Clock represents “the state of mind of those whose closeness to the development of atomic energy does not permit them to forget that their lives and those of their children, the security of their country and the survival of civilization, all hang in the balance as long as the specter of atomic war has not been exorcised” (“If the UN” 169). And, from its perilously close two minutes to midnight following the detonation of the fi rst Soviet bomb in 1953 to its position at a relatively comfortable seventeen minutes to midnight in 1991, the Clock has stood as a barometer of the world’s proximity to its end. With the end of the Cold War, this icon might seem to have joined duck-and-cover drills and fallout shelters as an archaic relic of the atomic age; nevertheless, it has continued to mark the times-and has marched fairly steadily toward midnight, from fourteen minutes in 1995, to nine in 1998, to seven in 2002, each tick reminding us that, though the cultural obsession with the nuclear may have waned, we continue to live under the shadow of the atomic bomb.
