The bomb and I go way back. In Seattle, where I grew up in the 1950s and '60s, it was common knowledge that, as the home of Boeing, the manufacturer of the B-52 bomber, we would be second on the target list in the event of nuclear war. Minuteman missiles.
At school we did various drills for different disasters, and we had to remember which was which. earthquake? Run outside. bomb? Run inside and go into the windowless inner hallway. In the summer, my high school friends and I would disappear into the backcountry of the Cascade or Olympic Mountains for a few weeks. I always wondered if we would emerge from the ashes to find a world.
One time, in Santa Monica in 1971, I thought it was finally happening. I rolled out of bed and woke up on the floor early one morning in February. There was a loud cheer. Everything was shaking. I crept up to one window, pulled aside the curtain, and expected to see a mushroom cloud rising over the Los Angeles basin. I didn't see anything. When the radio came back I learned that there had been a deadly earthquake in the San Fernando Valley.
I took a trip down memory lane when I heard the January 23 announcement in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that they had decided not to change the settings of the Doomsday Clock, a metaphorical clock invented in 1947 as a way to dramatize the threat. Nuclear Armageddon. The clock was originally designed to span 15 minutes, counting down to midnight, the moment of doom, 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.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the signing of the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, a burst of optimism caused the clocks to turn back 17 minutes to midnight. “The Cold War is over,” the Bulletin editors wrote. “The 40-year East-West nuclear arms race is over.”
A year ago, after Russia invaded Ukraine and threatened to use nuclear weapons, clocks were set to 90 seconds before midnight, the closest thing to an apocalypse. Since then, the threat of nuclear weapons in Ukraine has diminished, but the clock still strikes 0:90.
This year's announcement came on the same day that Christopher Nolan's “Oppenheimer,” a biopic about the man who masterminded the invention of the atomic bomb, was nominated for 13 Oscars. In an interview before the film's release, Mr. Nolan described Robert J. Oppenheimer as the most important person in history. Because his inventions either made war impossible or doomed us to destruction.