Technology and Culture

In June 2022, it was seventy-five years since a clock first graced the front page of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a publication that since 1945 sought to avert catastrophe by supplying information and encouraging debate about the atomic bomb among learned and scientific communities in the United States and abroad. Situated at the intersection of security politics, cultural history, design history, and visual communication/art, this book charts the history of the Bulletin's doomsday clock. Snippets of the clock's history exist mainly in the pages of the magazine, especially since the 1980s; in histories of the nuclear age (like Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light and Spencer Weart's The Rise of Nuclear Fear); and in studies of the nuclear disarmament movement (e.g., Lawrence S. Wittner's One World or None). Apart from Vuori's analysis of the clock as a visual (speech) act of securitization (in the journal Security Dialogue, 2010), however, studies of the clock itself are sparse.

References to the doomsday clock are ubiquitous, yet the visual metaphor only began to be described in this manner in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Adjusting the time on the clock is now managed by the Bulletin's Science [End Page 1246] and Security Board and garners considerable publicity, but well into the 1970s the timekeeping was the responsibility of the editor. The clock is of interest to historians of technology because it encapsulates the global risks of a technologized world. Conveying urgency and danger, the clock charts humanity's proximity to midnight, the metaphor of irreversible peril. During most of the Cold War, the clock's main point of reference was nuclear war, but its purview now includes climate change and emerging technologies. The clock stands in the public sphere as the foremost political horology of human-made global catastrophe.

A considerable part of the The Doomsday Clock at 75 is devoted to the clock's design history and especially the role played by landscape artist Martyl Langsdorf, who through her marriage to an atomic scientist in the circle around the Bulletin was invited to design a cover for the magazine. The modern metaphor of the ticking clock was an apt choice to evocatively convey global danger, and the volume reflects the power, versatility, and circulation of the symbol. It is a beautifully crafted and richly illustrated book. Having said that, many historians would prefer a thicker contextualization of the clock and the political and technological developments it has come to signify. The rich cultural history of the clock—displayed through its appearance in film, music, cartoons, games, etc.—gives some hints, but apart from the brief overview of "Clock Changes Over Time," the book contains little by way of sustained analysis of the history of nuclear technologies.

The chapter by E. Tammy Kim on the clock and the climate crisis (pp. 100–110) is a highlight, yet the book is more about the symbol, its origins, and circulation than about the alarming threats signified by a clock ticking toward doomsday's dark midnight. It would have been interesting to read a discussion of how the clock has contributed to and fed off other metaphors of globality and security. One larger question raised by the book concerns the political and rhetorical challenges of the clock's symbolism: "How much is too much apocalypse talk?" Kim asks (p. 107). Setting the time is obviously crucial here. It took more than two years before the time moved from seven minutes (chosen for its aesthetic quality) to three minutes to midnight on the Bulletin's front page in October 1949 in the wake of the Soviet Union's testing of an atomic bomb. It took even longer before the political nature of time was stressed. In September 1953, following the development of thermonuclear weapons, the Bulletin's backcover stated that "the hands of the clock on the Bulletin's cover now...