Today at 10 a.m., the so-called “doomsday clock” — a masterful PR effort run by the anti-nuclear Bulletin of Atomic Scientists — will be reset for only the 19th time in its 62-year history.
The clock is probably, after the national debt counter in Times Square, the most famous virtual government watchdog ever created. Except, unlike the former effort, it is necessarily — and maddeningly — imprecise. The only thing reliable about the clock is its partisanship.
The clock began life as cover art for an issue of the Bulletin in 1947, the dawn of the nuclear age. The hands were set to seven minutes to midnight as a sign that end was nigh.
It caused such a stir that the Bulletin was persuaded to make the clock its chief marketing tool and mascot.
When the editors — made up almost wholly of left-leaning physicists and engineers who work in the nuclear field — feel that the world is hurtling faster toward nuclear disaster, they call a press conference, unveil a new graphic with the minute hand closer to midnight, and explain why. When they think things have moved in the right direction, the minute hand goes backward.
The most amount of time the clock has ever allowed us was 17 minutes (after the signing of the START I treaty in 1991). So shouldn’t we have all been incinerated 17 minutes — or days, or weeks, or months, or years — ago?
America faces its greatest nuclear threat today in the detonation of a terrorist-delivered nuclear device in the heart of a great city. The clock has virtually nothing to say about that eventuality, which of course could happen at any moment — in five minutes or five years.
In truth, what the clock really gauges is Bulletin editors’ approval or disapproval of the incumbent administration’s commitment to the arms control agenda of the antiwar and anti-nuclear left.
Hence, when the United Stated withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 (in order to move ahead developing systems that might save American lives), the scientists subtracted two minutes. But when we initially signed the treaty in 1972, they added two.
The most recent change came in 2007, ostensibly as a response to North Korea’s first nuclear test. But it was couched in anti-Bush rhetoric that seemed incongruous given the Bush administration’s second-term turn toward accommodation, deal making, and near-appeasement with North Korea.
Yesterday, the minute hand moved backward one minute. The Obama administration has shown itself to be more committed to arms control than any since President Carter’s, and no administration has ever talked more about disarmament.
This is no doubt music to the ears of the atomic scientists, who feel themselves to be especially qualified to judge these matters. But knowing in detail how the bomb works does not necessarily grant one any special insight into the complex geopolitics of nuclear posture, deployments, bargaining, and hosts of other issues.
It’s the job of statesmen, not scientists, to think through the latter, and they may not always come to the same conclusion.
If there is one thing we all can agree on, it is that nuclear weapons are worst thing that man has ever done to himself — the ultimate vindication of the ancient warning against “torturing nature” and the emancipation of science from strict moral and political control.
But the furious whirlwind we sowed on July 16, 1945, in Alamogordo, N.M., can never again be stilled. All we have left to decide is how we ride it out. We must use all our judgment and do our very best — and pray that an angel still rides with us in the whirlwind and directs this storm.
Michael Anton is a writer in New York who served in national security positions in the Bush administration. This article originally appeared here.
