A Great Leap Backward

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists thinks mankind has taken a great leap backward--but it’s a cause for cheer.

This is the magazine that turned millions of Americans into Cold War clock-watchers. What they watched was the magazine’s stylized Doomsday Clock, measuring the time the world had left before it blew itself to smithereens.

The clock first appeared in 1947, its hands set at seven minutes to midnight for no better reason than that the artist liked the balance.

But two years later, the minute hand moved to three minutes to zero hour for the best of reasons. The Soviet Union has tested its first atomic bomb. Testing the first U.S. hydrogen bomb in 1952 nudged it a minute closer.

Last week, the Bulletin’s editorial page declared the Cold War over and reset the minute hand all the way back at 17 minutes to midnight, no small trick with a clock designed to show only 15 minutes of breathing room.

Sharp cuts in nuclear weapons was one source of its optimism, but a name on the list of advisers to this often chilling chronicler of Cold War provides an equally persuasive clue. It is Roald Sagdeev, a Soviet physicist and former director of the Soviet space program. He is now teaching and writing at the University of Maryland.