ABSTRACT
By 1939, during World War II, it was clear that the Nazis had made important ground toward making an atomic bomb. Elite scientists and recent European émigrés to the US, Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, both lobbied then US President Franklin Roosevelt to begin nuclear research given the advances of the Nazis, and this effort was eventually named the “Manhattan Project.” As a leading figure in the Manhattan Project, Fermi became the first person to successfully control a nuclear chain reaction in 1942, famously on a squash court in Chicago. Three years later, the US tested the first nuclear weapons in the New Mexico desert, and then dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War II was effectively over. Physicists and engineers that had been working on the Manhattan
Project founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Having observed first-hand what the total destructive power of this new science was and the potential it contained, they were witness to a momentous change in human history because knowledge and innovation had instantly exceeded the political and institutional capacity to manage existential danger. In 1947, the Bulletin devised a metaphor to communicate these dangers that nuclear power presented to the entire human race through the Doomsday Clock. In the metaphor, “midnight” is the twilight of our time on Earth.
The clock is seen as ticking both closer or farther away, depending on the gravity and urgency of threats and advances to reducing these threats in any given year. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists can hardly be described as a
fringe apocalyptic group, but they believe that existential threats, threats to existence, have grown and been reduced since the 1940s. By their estimation, climate change and biotechnology bring us closer to the midnight hour. They include biotechnology as a threat because, while they admit it provides benefits and potential solutions, it also is something that includes serious uncertainties as well as options for designing bioweapons in different forms. They are concerned that scientists could inadvertently create more virulent forms of current pathogens, or even new pathogens, just like when scientists in Australia tried to make a contraceptive out of
