Abstract
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been warning the world about the dangers posed by nuclear weapons for longer than I have been alive, but it is a noteworthy publication for reasons beyond longevity. Since a group of scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project founded it in 1945, the Bulletin has aimed to present the analyses of top scientific and policy experts in language that is accessible to high government leaders and everyday citizens alike, with the rather ambitious goal of saving humanity from itself. The list of those whose work has graced the Bulletin’s pages (printed for the first six decades or so, and rendered entirely in pixels since 2009) gives heft to the term “expert”: Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Mikhail Gorbachev populate only a tiny portion of that roster of great minds.
And the brilliance behind the Bulletin is by no means confined to its past. Its Board of Sponsors now includes 17 Nobel laureates, along with Freeman Dyson, Stephen Hawking, and other luminaries. 1 The magazine’s Science and Security Board, which sets the now-ubiquitous Doomsday Clock each January, is home to a revolving cast of leading scientific and public policy lights who provide the magazine’s readers with expertise on nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, climate change, synthetic biology, and other potentially catastrophic threats to the future of humanity. 2 Over the decades, largely because of the support of these experts, the Bulletin has won two National Magazine Awards, the most recent in 2007 for general excellence which is widely seen as the top honor in US magazine journalism.
Given the achievements of its authors and its less-than-cheery subjects of interest—staving off nuclear Armageddon, or something just as catastrophic caused by other advanced “dual-use” technologies—editing the Bulletin might seem a daunting or depressing task when, in fact, it is an almost constantly exhilarating one. That exhilaration is based on a reality at the focus of this issue: Since the end of World War II, the world’s leading scientists have shown a remarkable and durable dedication to serving an undeniable public interest—the continued existence of humankind.
The story of scientists working for the public good is partly a matter of history—and a fascinating history it’s been—so this issue deals in some detail with those researchers who have spent the last seven decades trying to warn world leaders and world society of the dangers of the Bomb. This history is important to revisit, but not as an exercise in hagiography or mythology. In May 1946, Einstein warned that “a new type of thinking” was necessary if mankind was to survive the advent of nuclear weaponry. Many of the early atomic scientists put their careers on the line in ensuing decades—and fared particularly poorly in the McCarthy red-baiting era—in hopes of making that change in thinking a worldwide reality (New York Times, 1946). Their stories are inspiring, and they achieved a measure of success: Despite a frightening history of nuclear near-misses, we are still here, after all. But the current reality is chastening: Thousands of nuclear warheads remain, many of them mounted on delivery systems kept at high states of alert. Ever more nations seek to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities. Terrorists have expressed clear interest in obtaining and using a nuclear weapon. It is equally clear that those early hopes for tight control and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons are far from realized.
And now scientists of this still relatively new century see not only the continued threat of thermonuclear catastrophe—a threat actually not much reduced by the end of the Cold War, despite public perceptions to the contrary—but also a host of other potentially civilization-ending, technology-based dangers, including climate change and the unintended consequences of advances in synthetic biology, information technology, and artificial intelligence. In many ways, the question today is the same one that confronted the atomic scientists in the fall of 1945: Can humans learn to control the potentially catastrophic misuse of the technologies they create, or will they let those technologies destroy them? Can governance be made to work, when the stakes are at their highest?
For this issue, the editors of the Bulletin have asked a distinguished array of authors to write from many directions on the role of scientists in helping leaders of the world agree on common-sense ways to control and reduce the dangers that advanced technology poses to the future of humanity. Regular Bulletin readers will be familiar with many of those authors’ names and the import of the themes they discuss. Through the workings of the Internet, I hope this celebration of the Bulletin’s seven decades of existence will introduce many tens of thousands of new readers to those themes for the first time.
In the end, however, this issue of the Bulletin aims to elicit two responses from all its readers: Wonder that the world has managed to forestall catastrophe for seven decades, and a new sense of urgency about the need to work in the here and now to control nuclear weapons, to re-imagine world energy systems to combat climate change, and to assure civilization’s future, not for seven more decades but for centuries. The early atomic scientists who risked their professional standing while speaking knowledge to power did their job. Now is the time to be exhilarated by their example and to do some speaking of our own.