Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists first appeared in late 1945, only weeks after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki turned two cities into rubble. The scientists who launched it were not journalists or politicians. They were the people who had built the bomb itself, former members of the Manhattan Project working at the University of Chicago. They had watched their work destroy two cities, and they believed the world needed to understand what had just become possible. What would drive them to keep publishing for decades? How does a newsletter born in crisis become the keeper of one of the most recognizable symbols of existential fear in human history? And who was the artist who gave that fear a face?

• 2. Born from the Bomb

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  Scientists from the University of Chicago who had worked on the Manhattan Project formed a group in late 1945 they called the Atomic Scientists of Chicago. Their first publication carried the full name Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago. By the seventh issue, dated the 15th of March 1946, they dropped the words "of Chicago" to reflect, in their own phrase, "the increasingly broad nature of the contents of, and the wider geographical distribution of the contributors to, the Bulletin."

  The founding editor was Eugene Rabinowitch, a biophysicist born in 1901 who died in 1973. He co-founded the publication with physicist Hyman Goldsmith. Rabinowitch held a professorship in botany and biophysics at the University of Illinois, and he would go on to become a founding member of the Continuing Committee for the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.

  The contributor list that gathered around Rabinowitch and Goldsmith reads like a roll call of twentieth-century physics. Hans Bethe, Max Born, Albert Einstein, James Franck, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Harold Urey all appeared in its pages. Oppenheimer served as the first chairman of the board of the organization.

  The Bulletin's stated purpose was twofold: to educate fellow scientists about the relationship between science and national and international politics, and to help the American public understand what nuclear energy meant for warfare. Its founders believed the atomic bomb was not the last danger but merely the first in a long series that technological acceleration would deliver.

• 3. The Clock That Woke the World

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  Hyman Goldsmith approached landscape artist Martyl Langsdorf in 1947 and asked her to design the cover for the June issue of the Bulletin. Langsdorf was married to Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf, and the subject of nuclear peril was far from abstract to her. She first considered using the symbol for uranium, then decided a clock would better capture what she described as "a sense of urgency."

  The resulting image placed a clock face against a stark background, with only bullets marking the numbers in the upper left-hand corner. The minute hand sat seven minutes from midnight when the clock debuted. That specific distance was not arbitrary; it was a judgment about how close the world stood to nuclear catastrophe in 1947.

  Two years later, in 1949, the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test. The Bulletin responded by moving the minute hand closer to midnight for the first time. By 1953, as the Soviet Union continued testing nuclear devices, the hand reached two minutes to midnight, the closest it had been. The clock was not a prediction of when destruction would arrive. The Bulletin leadership was explicit on that point: the time was a metaphor, a warning calibrated to the state of the world.

  The hand moved in both directions across the following decades. In 1991, after the United States and the Soviet Union reached an agreement on nuclear arms reductions, it was set at 17 minutes to midnight, the furthest from midnight it had ever stood. Since that moment, however, it has moved steadily closer. The current setting stands at 85 seconds to midnight, surpassing the previous records set in 1953, 2018, 2020, 2023, and 2025.

  The decision about where to set the hand belongs to the Bulletin Science and Security Board, which meets in person twice a year. Each November the Bulletin hosts an annual dinner and meeting in Chicago open to the public. The formal announcement of the time comes every January. Since the clock's creation in 1947, it has been adjusted 27 times.

• 4. Expanding the Threat

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  Nuclear weapons dominated the Bulletin's attention through the 1950s and 1960s, and the focus of its warnings gradually shifted from describing the dangers of atomic war toward arguing for disarmament. The change in emphasis tracked a change in the scientists' own thinking: the problem was not just the weapons but the political systems that produced them.

  In 1947, the Bulletin had been part of the formation of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, annual gatherings of scientists focused on nuclear proliferation and the broader role of science in society. Rabinowitch himself sat on the Continuing Committee for those conferences.

  By 2007, the Bulletin's leadership began factoring anthropogenic climate change into the Clock's annual calculation. The range of threats the organization tracked had grown: nuclear weapons, other weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and what the Bulletin calls disruptive technologies all entered the equation. The 2015 launch of the Doomsday Dashboard, an interactive infographic, gave the public a window into the data the Science and Security Board weighs each year.

  As of August 2018, the Bulletin Board of Sponsors included 14 Nobel Laureates. The organization that started as a newsletter typed up by bomb-builders in Chicago had become a recognized forum drawing scientists of the highest standing from across the world.

• 5. Publication and Reach

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  The Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science incorporated as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization in 1949 to serve as the parent body and fundraising arm of the Bulletin. In 2003, the board of directors voted to rename the foundation the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, aligning the organization's name with the publication it had always existed to support.

  For most of its history, the Bulletin was a print magazine. November-December 2008 was the last print edition; the publication moved entirely to digital that year. SAGE Publications took over as publisher of the subscription magazine in September 2010. Taylor and Francis assumed that role in January 2016 and continues to publish it, issuing six issues per year.

  The organization also runs a free-access website that has been available to the public for several years. An e-newsletter is offered without charge to anyone who signs up through the site. Backfiles of the magazine are available through the John A. Simpson Collection, and the complete run from the first 1945 issue through the November 1998 issue can be read at no cost through Google Books.

  The journal is indexed in the Journal Citation Reports, which assigned it a 2023 impact factor of 1.9. That placed it 44th out of 166 journals in the International Relations category and 26th out of 67 journals in the Social Issues category. From a mimeographed newsletter passed around among physicists in 1945, it had become a peer-recognized academic publication tracked by citation metrics across two distinct scholarly fields.