After spending the past couple of lessons on movies of the pinnacle of the era of Nuclear Threat I feel that it would be interesting to delve more into the concept of the Doomsday Clock. The Doomsday Clock is so interesting because it takes such a complicated scenario dependent on so many variables, the end of the world, and transforms it into something we glance at on a daily basis, a watch. The Doomsday Clock is a metaphorical clock that is monitored by the heads of the The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago that depicts of close we are to ‘midnight’ or global disaster. It was created at the beginning of the Cold War in 1947 and was first set at seven minutes to midnight. When the Soviet Union began testing nuclear bombs in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s the clock inched closer and closer to midnight. The closest it’s ever gotten was 2 minutes to midnight in 1953 and the farthest it’s gotten was 17 minutes away in 1991 when the United States and Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. This current year in 2010, the clock was moved back from 5 minutes to midnight to 6. While this allegorical clock is not in the best position it’s ever been in the fact that it’s moving back can give us all a brief reprieve and breath. For more in-depth looks and good articles on the current state of the world in regards to nuclear weapons and ideas here is the main website of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: http://www.thebulletin.org/

I would also like to highlight the use of the Doomsday Clock in modern culture, in particular in the wonderful graphic-novel ‘Watchmen’ by Alan Moore. The movement of the Doomsday Clock can be seen in the movie but is particularly important and symbolic in the actual graphic novel, which I personally feel is better than the film. In the graphic novel, which deals a lot of ethical issues and the destruction of the world, each chapter is denoted with a picture of the Doomsday Clock getting closer and closer to midnight and finally, fittingly in Chapter XII the clock does indeed strike ’12’. This shows that the Doomsday Clock was not a mere fade of the hype of the Cold-War era but a lasting barometer of where we stand as a planet with it’s share of feuds.

Also: While watching ‘The Day After’ I would just like to emphasize how I feel that I believe it really struck a chord with me with how horrible all of this nuclear arms war really is and how terrible it could be. I started feeling this way during the scene when the bomb detonates in the city and there’s a good ten minutes of explosions and destruction that is deeply disturbing. When I was witnessing this I shuddered at the thought of something like this ever happening again and the horror that must have been experienced in Japan after the Atomic Bomb drops. The Atomic Bomb was chosen in World War II as the lesser of two evils, the other being a complete mainland invasion of Japan, which would have been catastrophic with death-toll estimates being predicted in the millions. After World War II I honestly have no idea why any country would want a nuclear bomb after the destruction that was seen. Here’s a documentary I found on YouTube about the bombing on Japan. Very interesting. It’s incomplete but unique nonetheless:

Looking at footage on YouTube the best is looking at all of the out of control political rants on the comment boards. I dare not comment but I do chuckle out loud reading some of the absurd things written. Someone even talked about in a really positive light the movie ‘Apocalypse 2024’, which I would guess to be similar to ‘The Day After’. And here is also some nuclear arm testing footage from the History Channel. Powerful stuff figuratively and literally:

Nuclear Tests

I guess it could be a child-like complexity of wanting to have something that someone else has or the insecurity of being at a military disadvantage but after fighting for world peace for years it is still a conundrum to me why countries would even want to bomb another one in peace-time. The world works in complex ways but these movies try to simplify them.