Magazines: Turning Back the Clock

The clock face was intended to scare the world. Its hands, spanning the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, were originally set at an ominous eight minutes before midnight. After the Russians exploded their first H-bomb, Bulletin time read two minutes before the hour of doom. Today the clock is still on Bulletin's cover, but it has shrunk to an inconspicuous size, and registers a relatively unfrightening 11:48. The minutes that, in the editors' view the world has gained, measure a strange triumph for the magazine. Now that there is less concern about Armageddon and less shock value to the power of the atom, the clock is ticking mostly for the Bulletin. Its funds low, the magazine is once more passing the hat.

Cheerful Smile. The little man who has wound the Bulletin's fateful clock for all its 18 years is unbothered. From his jaunty blue beret down past his ineffaceably cheerful smile to his ground-hugging overcoat, Eugene Rabinowitch, 63, bears small resemblance to a prophet of doom. He seems much better suited to his other roles: professor of botany and biophysics at the University of Illinois, world authority on photosynthesis, a Russian-born poet who composes in his native language and has translated Pushkin into German.

But in 1944, in a makeshift laboratory beneath Chicago's Stagg Stadium, Eugene Rabinowitch heard the tick of the future.

There, scientists were well on their way, in wartime's secret Manhattan Project, to devising the world's first atomic bomb. Rabinowitch, whose impressive reputation had preceded his arrival in the U.S., was asked to join them. Like many of his colleagues, he was appalled at the project's goal. Soon after the war ended in the holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he and 200 other scientists formed a committee called The Atomic Scientists of Chicago. They felt deeply guilty about their role in unleashing the atom, and they longed for atonement. In 1945 the committee spawned the Bulletin, which was dedicated to stopping the clock before it tolled the midnight of atomic war that they feared.

Mendicant Life. Editor Rabinowitch did not expect the Bulletin to prosper, and he was right. "To say that the Bulletin was founded on a shoestring would be to describe it as overdressed," he says. Despite one of the leanest budgets in the business—currently $24,000 a year—it has lived a mendicant's existence, begging office space from the University of Chicago, money from foundations, handouts from subscribers, art work from a physicist's wife, and articles from the leading scientists of the world. Its admonitory pages bristled with urgent crusades: for disarmament and against military control of the atom, for world government and against overclassification of military secrets. From the start the young magazine boasted authors whose names were international currency: Einstein, Szilard, Oppenheimer, Teller, Urey, Beadle.

In lieu of prosperity, Rabinowitch happily settled for an audience that amounted to a handful of impressive clock watchers. The Bulletin's 27,500 subscribers girdle the globe—36 in Russia—and they can muster more scientific, diplomatic and statesmanship credentials than any world conference in Geneva.