Here is a little background on it:
The best known symbol of the Nuclear Age--the Bulletin's "Doomsday Clock"--had a hard-to-ignore debut. Early Bulletins were newsletters, lacking magazine-style covers. But when the June 1947 Bulletin arrived, it had a first-ever cover--a pay-attention-to-me jack-o'-lantern orange cover. Imprinted over the orange: a boldly simple seven-inch by seven-inch clock face. The hour hand was at 12; the minute hand at about seven minutes to. Humankind, the clock said, was in dire straits.
The clock dominated most Bulletin covers until 1964, although, thankfully, less garish hues were generally used for the background. The clock, said an editorial in the July 1947 issue, "represents the state of mind of those whose closeness to the development of atomic energy does not permit them to forget that their lives and those of their children, the security of their country and the survival of civilization, all hang in the balance as long as the specter of atomic war has not been exorcized."
And so the Bulletin Clock (first called "The Clock of Doom" and then "The Doomsday Clock") entered folklore as a symbol of nuclear peril and a constant warning that the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union had better sit up and fly right.
Editorial cartoonists in the Western hemisphere and Europe pirated the clock shamelessly, using it as an off-the-rack metaphor for the general madness of the Nuclear Age. In most cartoon incarnations, the clock was either a windup alarm clock or a globe with hour and minute hands. Either way, it was rigged to an explosive--sometimes dynamite, but usually a hulking nuclear bomb.
The clock also became a deadline-friendly factoid for journalists. Whenever U.S.-Soviet relations hit a bad patch, dozens of reporters and editors would call from as far away as Germany and New Zealand. "Are you going to change the clock?" In the post-Cold War era, reporters call and ask the same question whenever someone, say France, does something dumb, like resuming nuclear tests.
The clock has insinuated itself into the brick and limestone halls of academe. How many professors over the years have referred to the clock--approvingly or disparagingly--in history and international relations classes? No one knows, of course. But at least one academic, Joel Slemrod, a professor of business and economics at the University of Michigan, has used the clock in a research study. After postulating that ordinary people are likely to spend more when the international situation looks uncertain and gloomy and save more when it looks as if there will be a morrow, he found a positive correlation between clock moves and savings rates. (Not that the clock caused variations; it merely served as a dandy barometer of East-West tensions.)
Politicians have also used the clock, no matter where they stood on the peace-and-security continuum. For hawks, the clock was a handy reminder of how dangerous the world was, thus justifying yet another multi-billion-dollar arms buildup. For doves, the clock also said the world was dangerous, but that called for conciliatory gestures and arms control treaties. Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and a member in good standing of the olive branch school of international relations, titled his 1990 book on the perils of Cold War thinking, Five Minutes to Midnight.
It Moves!
The clock was the creation of a Chicago artist known as Martyl, the wife of physicist Alexander Langsdorf, a Bulletin founder. Years later, Martyl said she hit upon the idea "to symbolize urgency." She got that message across by using just the final quadrant of a clock face, which clearly suggested that the end of time was nigh. As for putting the minute hand at seven--that was, she said, merely a matter of "good design."
The minute hand stayed at seven minutes to the hour until the fall of 1949, when President Harry S. Truman announced that the United States had evidence that there had been an atomic explosion in the Soviet Union.
The Soviets promptly disputed Truman. In a statement issued by Tass (and reprinted in the October issue of the Bulletin) the Soviet government claimed that U.S. experts had confused a large conventional explosion with an atomic explosion. That was understandable, explained Tass; the Soviet Union was blasting a lot as it built hydroelectric stations, canals, and the like. And, too, did not Western reporters recall that the Soviet Union had announced in November 1947 that it already had the weapon "at its disposal"?
The editors of the Bulletin, always mindful that Soviet leaders often lied, didn't buy the Tass explanation. Truman was right; the Soviet Union had set off an atomic detonation, and that was proof that the East-West nuclear arms race, long predicted by the Bulletin, was well under way.
"We do not advise Americans that doomsday is near and that they can expect atomic bombs to start falling on their heads a month or a year from now," wrote Editor Eugene Rabinowitch in an October 1949 essay. "But we think they have reason to be deeply alarmed and to be prepared for grave decisions."
In the October 1949 issue, the Bulletin moved the clock's minute hand for the first time, to three minutes to midnight.
http://www.paradigmresearchgroup.org/midnightnevercame1.html
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