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Nuclear Accidents Will Happen

Part of: Into the Stacks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2019

Gretchen Heefner
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Extract

In January 2018, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) moved its Doomsday Clock closer to midnight: it now reads 11:58. The last time the minute hand was this close to the hour of Armageddon was 1953, just after the United States and Soviet Union tested thermonuclear bombs. Since then the stylized clock has ticked backward and forward, each year metaphorically registering civilization's proximity to global catastrophe. “To call the world's nuclear situation dire,” the group warned in its January statement, “is to understate the danger—and its immediacy.”

Keywords

Post-1945Cold WarScience and TechnologyPolitics and GovernmentMilitary and Warfare
Type
Into the Stacks
Information
Modern American History , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 111 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press 

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References

1 Rachel Bronson, “Statement from the President and CEO,” in John Mecklin, ed., “2018 Doomsday Clock Statement Science and Security Board,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jan. 25, 2018, https://thebulletin.org/2018-doomsday-clock-statement/ (accessed Sept. 12, 2018).

2 Ellsberg, Daniel, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 20Google Scholar; Schlosser, Eric, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York, 2014)Google Scholar.

3 Schell, Jonathan, The Fate of the Earth and the Abolition (Palo Alto, CA, 2000), 65Google Scholar.

4 Schlosser, Command and Control, 485.

5 Ellsberg, Doomsday Machine, 346.

6 Schlosser, Command and Control, 338.

7 Kirk, Andrew G., Doom Towns: The People and Landscapes of Atomic Testing, a Graphic History, illustrated by Purcell, Kristian (New York, 2016)Google Scholar.

8 Kirk and Purcell, Doom Towns, 47.

9 Kirk and Purcell, Doom Towns, xxi.

10 Nevada Test Site Oral History Project, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, http://digital.library.unlv.edu/ntsohp/ (accessed Sept. 12, 2018).

11 Brown, Kate, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York, 2015)Google Scholar; Heefner, Gretchen, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman and the Arming of the Heartland (Cambridge, MA, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Findlay, John M. and Hevly, Bruce, Atomic Frontier Days, Hanford and the American West (Seattle, 2011)Google Scholar; Fiege, Mark, “The Atomic Scientists, the Sense of Wonder, and the Bomb,” Environmental History 12, no. 3 (July 2007): 578–613CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Edgington, Ryan, Range Wars: The Environmental Contest for White Sands Missile Range (Lincoln, NE, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For international examples see Hecht, Gabrielle, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA, 2012)Google Scholar; Lauren Hirschberg, “Nuclear Families: (Re)producing 1950s Suburban America in the Marshall Islands,” OAH Magazine 26, no. 4 (October 2012): 39–43.

13 Bronson, “Statement from the President and CEO.”