It seems slightly unbelievable now, but the scientists who developed the nuclear bomb didn’t want it to be used in an actual war. After the first test bomb exploded in New Mexico in July, 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Los Alamos lab, said he was reminded of a quote from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Later that month, 70 scientists who’d worked on the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the bomb, signed a petition begging President Truman not to use it against the Japanese.
When the clock was first set back in 1947, it was at seven minutes to midnight, though the reasons for that were not purely scientific: Martyl Langsdorf, the graphic artist who designed the clock, liked the angle the hands made at 11:53.
After all, she points out, even though the atomic bombs of 2017 are 100 times more powerful than the bomb that fell on Hiroshima, there are 14,900 nuclear weapons in the world today, as opposed to 70,300 in 1986. And still, no one has used them since the U.S. bombed Japan in 1945.
