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Herman Kahn
- Because the aggressor country’s annihilation would in either case be guaranteed, the doomsday machine was viewed as the ultimate nuclear deterrent. The concept was developed by the American nuclear physicist Herman Kahn and discussed in his book On Thermonuclear War (1960).
www.britannica.com/technology/doomsday-machineDoomsday machine | Nuclear Deterrence & Cold War History ...
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A doomsday device is a hypothetical construction — usually a weapon or weapons system — which could destroy all life on a planet, particularly Earth, or destroy the planet itself, bringing "doomsday", a term used for the end of planet Earth.
Because the aggressor country’s annihilation would in either case be guaranteed, the doomsday machine was viewed as the ultimate nuclear deterrent. The concept was developed by the American nuclear physicist Herman Kahn and discussed in his book On Thermonuclear War (1960).
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- What Are The Origins of The Doomsday Clock?
- How Was The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists founded?
- How Was The Doomsday Clock created?
- Where Is The Doomsday Clock located?
- How Is The Doomsday Clock Set?
- What Happens When The Doomsday Clock Hits Midnight?
The Doomsday Clock is a symbol that represents how close we are to destroying the world with dangerous technologies of our own making. It warns how many metaphorical “minutes to midnight” humanity has left. Set every year by theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it is intended to warn the public and inspire action. When it was created in 1947, the ...
Most of the people who were part of the Manhattan Project, the secret government mission which created the first atomic bomb, did not know what they were building. But the scientists did, and some of them had misgivings from the start. Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein were the two physicists who wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939, warning...
The first few Bulletins were mimeographed collections of articles. But as the publication expanded, its editors decided to try to appeal to a wider audience with a designed cover. Bulletin member Martyl Langsdorf, an artist who mostly painted abstract landscapes, agreed to produce an illustration. In response to the urgency she felt from the meetin...
The Doomsday Clock is located at the Bulletinoffices at 1307 E. 60th St., in in the lobby of the Keller Center, home to the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.
Until his death in 1973, Bulletin editor Eugene Rabinowitch decided whether the clock hand should be moved. As a leader in the international disarmament movement, he actively talked with policy experts and scientists around the world; he used these discussions to set the clock and explained his thinking in the Bulletin’s pages. Today, the Bulletin’...
According to Bulletin director Rachel Bronson, when it was originally launched, the clock’s countdown referred to an exchange of nuclear weapons, which would have large-scale consequences for humanity and the planet. Today the threat from nuclear weapons remains, but another equally large threat is climate change. “It’s much harder to have a kind o...
The concept of the Doomsday Clock originated in 1947 with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization that sought to warn the public about the danger of nuclear weapons. The Bulletin was founded by a group called the Atomic Scientists of Chicago in September 1945 at the University of Chicago.
For the first several decades, Manhattan Project scientist and Bulletin editor Eugene Rabinowitch decided when, and how much, to move the Clock. His first decision: October 1949, when Russia exploded its first atomic bomb and he changed the Clock from seven minutes to three minutes to midnight.
The Doomsday Clock is a symbol that represents the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe, in the opinion of the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. [1] Maintained since 1947, the Clock is a metaphor, not a prediction, for threats to humanity from unchecked scientific and technological advances.
The Doomsday Clock wasn’t invented as a metaphorical countdown to our eradication but, as the Bulletins’ Scientists have always attested, as a means to spur humanity into doing something about the state of affairs that has put us in such a perilous position.
