Apocalypse now? The Doomsday Clock keeps tickingChristopher Borrellu
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published bimonthly out of Hyde Park since 1945, tends to scare the living hell out of people. It was co-founded by Eugene Rabinowitch, a biophysicist who worked on the development of the atomic bomb at the University of Chicago. Contributing writers have included Oppenheimer and Einstein; in the 1960s, Stanley Kubrick, inspired by a Bulletin piece about accidental nuclear war, made “Dr. Strangelove.” Still, the journal’s true legacy was cemented 70 years ago this summer, when its editors came up with an ingenious and unsettling metaphor to convey the existential threat that nuclear weapons pose to life on Earth. It created a Doomsday Clock and put it on its June 1947 cover, the hands poised at seven minutes to midnight.
Midnight being the end of the world.
Clocks grab attention, clocks have urgency. So like an apocalyptic version of Oprah’s O magazine, the Bulletin has put a Doomsday Clock on many covers since. In 1991, at the end of the Cold War, the hands fell to 17 minutes before midnight. But recently, as Donald Trump entered the White House, the hands leapt to two-and-a-half minutes before midnight, the closest the Doomsday Clock has been to Armageddon since 1953.
Anyway, how’s your summer going?
Partying like it’s the end of the world?
Understandable. As you make your way to “Turn Back the Clock” at the Museum of Science and Industry, a new exhibit on the cultural and political legacy of the Doomsday Clock, you pass beneath a banner that notes, indeed, mankind may be nearing last call. Still, the exhibit, which runs through early 2018, is a thoughtful boogeyman, lurking between a Mold-A-Rama machine and the third-floor elevators. It is certainly the most compelling museum exhibit in Chicago this summer centered around a bimonthly academic journal. To spend time there, to watch tourists, locals and kids approach, is a portrait in how uneasy, confused and disconnected we have become about Doomsday.
Just after the museum opens on a weekday morning, a young woman and small girl enter. The woman leans down, points to the images of the Doomsday Clock on the display and carefully explains: “This is about how close we are to nuclear annihilation.”
The girl, who has alligators on her shirt and dogs on her skirt and large eyeglasses and wears her hair in a ponytail and an intelligent, inquisitive face, asks: “What is that?”
“It means,” the woman says, halting, “all the bombs drop and everyone dies.”
The girl says nothing.
The woman, seeing where this is headed, leans down as if to collect the inevitable tears in a bucket and quickly adds, “But don’t worry about that, OK? It won’t happen. Relax.”
Some visitors, as they approach the exhibit, notice the amount of reading involved, then make a swift beeline for the vintage World War II Spitfire and Stuka nearby. Others eyeball the images of mushroom clouds and breeze through with their heads down, as if sidestepping a Greenpeace activist on Michigan Avenue. But many stop, shudder, shake their heads, mention North Korea being crazy and starting a fight, or Trump being crazy and starting a fight, or the world being crazy. Some can’t turn away.
Kimberley Hamilton-Ross of South Holland, a school speech-language pathologist, lingers. She’s hooked to every chunk of text, every letter from Gorbachev, every letter from Reagan. She listens to Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech, picks through the interactive timeline. She had not planned to dive so deep. “I’m on a staycation,” she explains. “But this is fascinating. My husband watches a lot of History Channel, so I was curious. I think we’re moving closer to midnight. That’s how I honestly feel. This is important information, you have to keep yourself on top of information now. This stuff? It really, really affects us. I don’t see how you can’t be interested. The leader of North Korea seems to be crazy as a fox. And Trump, he’s crazy like a fox. I don’t know what that guy’s about. I’m going to be 60 in three weeks. I’d like it not to be my last birthday.”
An hour later, she’s still there.
Strollers zoom past her. Summer camp groups ebb and flow.
A man approaches a map of the world that shows which countries have nukes and which agreed to the 2016 Paris climate accord — since 2007, the Clock’s movement has reflected existential threats to mankind beyond nuclear war — and pulls Cheerios from a plastic bag and reads and chews. An elderly couple stare at a small model of Chicago Pile 1, the nuclear reactor where in 1942 the U. of C. conducted the first controlled nuclear chain reaction a short walk from the museum itself. A couple in their 20s flip through a video timeline of relevant cultural and historic moments, the Soviets invade Afghanistan, Atari releases the Cold War classic “Missile Command,” Pakistan gets nuclear weapons, Seth Rogan makes “The Interview,” in which North Korea once again threatens Armageddon.
“That (expletive) was funny,” the man says.
“That (expletive) was stupid,” the woman says.
They walk on.
Nearby, a father and his teenage daughter read about recent movements to the Doomsday Clock. “In 2010, the clock actually moved back a minute,” the father says.
“Why?” the daughter asks.
“Obama,” the father says.
“Thanks, Obama,” the daughter says flatly.
“No,” the father says. “You want it to go backwards.”
“Oh!” the daughter says. “Thanks, Obama!”
They laugh and continue reading.
Regardless of how much time a visitor spends at “Turn Back the Clock,” many stop at two civic-engagement stations where people are encouraged to use small yellow discs to vote on several broadly related questions, such as: Will climate change affect life? Can speaking up affect policy? Patricia Ward, the museum’s director of science exhibitions, said, “We strove to infuse a sense of agency, the idea that people have a voice and it can be expressed a number of ways. We have the ingenuity to create breakthroughs, and that we’ve kept the world from annihilation shows we have the agency to manage them.”
This voting tally, however, should not be confused with actual opinions. Children swarm the stations and, in historic Chicago fashion, shamelessly stuff the ballots. On the other hand, notes Rachel Bronson, executive director of the Bulletin, which proposed the show a few years ago, younger people have been some of its best audiences. (“Adults will do two things: They say, ‘Oh, I remember that.’ Or they ask, ‘Are we still talking about this?'”)
Specifically, teenagers love Lyndon B. Johnson.
The exhibit’s unofficial focal point is a simple video monitor showing “Daisy Girl” on a loop, the former president’s infamously disturbing 1964 election commercial. A child counts as she picks the petals from a daisy, until her voice is replaced with a man’s voice, counting down. When he reaches zero, there is a white flash and a nuclear cloud, then Johnson’s Texan croak:
“These are the stakes.”
Three boys stop and watch, note its creepiness, then walk off doing the finest LBJ: “These are the stakes! These are the stakes!” A young girl stops and watches transfixed, head jutted forward, body curled back, her eyes wide, as if being dragged into the grainy black-and-white “Night of the Living Dead”-esque palette; when the ad restarts, she shoots it with her iPhone and leaves. A group of teenagers come through just as the countdown begins. They stop and watch silently. When the mushroom cloud rises, they move on without a word or a shiver or even a change in their bored expressions, the Cold War reduced to a suspense vehicle.
Two middle-aged women stop.
“I remember this,” one of the women says. They watch until the end, then the woman adds, “Do they really have to put this out here when the kids are on school break — really?”
Hamilton-Ross, a few feet away, is still reading the wall text.
“Ostrich,” she says, referring to the woman. “Some people are ostriches. Some people do not want to know the truth — their head’s always in the sand. But it’s her history, and her future.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
