Contributors

For Joseph Masco, 1963 represents an important demarcation point in the nuclear age. With the advent of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, it's the year nuclear testing went underground, leaving the government's film footage of that era's atmospheric tests as the lasting images of the bomb's effects. Masco, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, argues in “Target Audience” that, although dated, these films still shape the way in which the American public thinks of the bomb. For evidence, he sleuths about the country, tracking down hundreds of declassified Cold War films from the Energy Department and National Archives. “Many more films remain classified,” he notes, “leaving much work to be done in understanding how U.S. perceptions of nuclear power and danger were crafted during the Cold War.”

Husband and wife writing team Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger (right) set off on an unusual vacation in 2005–a tour of nuclear weapons sites. They document their travels in their new book A Nuclear Family Vacation, from which “The Ever-Ready Nuclear Missileer” is adapted. Their investigation exposed them to the legacy and the ongoing activities of the U.S. nuclear complex, which chugs along years after the Cold War, and took them far afield, to the Marshall Islands, Kazakhstan, and Iran.

Fascinated by the hidden world of nuclear weapons, Hodge and Weinberger aim to spark a similar interest in the broader public. “I hope they want to become engaged with what is seen as an esoteric issue,” Weinberger says. “These weapons can end civilization as we know it, and to make decisions [on their fate] without public debate or involvement doesn't make any sense.”

Before David Greising. the chief business correspondent at the Chicago Tribune, began looking closely at the inner workings of the Chicago Climate Exchange, he believed that most of the misgivings about the international trade of carbon credits had been settled. “What became apparent as I dug into this issue is that the questions have not been resolved… it looks as if there will be new and significant issues coming ahead. This is a topic people will need to pay attention to for quite some time,” he says. Despite the uncertainty he uncovered while reporting “The Carbon Frontier,” he believes that a tumultuous carbon market is better than no system at all for promoting emissions reductions. “It does at least provide incentives and some accountability to industrial emitters, and it's encouraging to see the [Clean Development Mechanism] board has cracked down on abuses instead of circling the wagons,” he says.

COVER ARTIST: Martyl

Call it a tradition. For the second straight year, noted Chicago artist and Doomsday Clock creator Martyl provided the cover art for the Bulletin's July/August issue. The timing is not coincidental. Fifty-one years ago this July, her Clock illustration first appeared on a bright orange Bulletin cover; variations of this cover ran for many years thereafter. Always fascinated with the intersection of art and science–she once painted pictures of cyclotrons and radio oscillators–she infused the Bulletin's aesthetic with her sensibilities, even guest-editing a February 1959 special issue of the magazine entitled “Science and Art.” “Except for J. Robert Oppenheimer, I was the only artist any of those scientists ever knew,” she has joked. For this issue's cover, Martyl revisited a painting from her 1971 Synapse Series. Permanently in the vanguard, she says, “I did that when no one knew what the word ‘synapse’ meant.” Once again, science served as her muse, as the painting is her interpretation of an electric circuit: “Almost everything in our technological society involves circuitry, and our brain and nervous system also have circuits. So I found that the interconnections of the synapses of the circuits were fraught with symbolism.”

When researchers, government officials, reporters, and activists look for information about global nuclear stockpiles, they invariably turn to the Bulletin's Nuclear Notebook. Data on nuclear weapons isn't typically freely available (that's particularly the case with this issue's notebook subject, Chinese nuclear forces), and getting ahold of open-source reports is just the first step in compiling the notebook. “Turning often confusing and contradictory information into reliable estimates can be an almost insurmountable challenge,” says coauthor Hans M. Kristensen. the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

The notebook's importance to the public's understanding of global security is motivation enough for its authors. “The perils of the nuclear age remain,” says Robert S. Norris, a senior research associate at the Natural Resources Defense Council and coauthor of the notebook since its inception more than 20 years ago. “We're trying to carry on the Bulletin's founders' purpose of warning and educating readers.”

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

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