The time was right for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a Hyde Park-based magazine with the most famous clock in American publishing.
It won a prestigious National Magazine Award last week, even if it was by far the smallest of 13 winners in 10 categories.
A circulation of 25,000 (in 70 countries, no less) places it behind the likes of Texas Fish & Game, Performance Horseman, Railroad Model Craftsman and Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques. In taking the ”single-topic issue”
award, it beat finalists Esquire (700,000), Texas Monthly (285,000), Food & Wine (715,000) and Personal Computing (480,000).
Its entry was ”Chernobyl: the Emerging Story” and, said the judges`
citation, ”Months after one of the world`s most frightening industrial accidents, this thought-provoking issue stands as a towering model of reflective reporting and writing.”
A special section on a nuclear accident was imperative for what`s generally conceded to be the most influential journal on the nuclear age. Of the 46 members of its board of scientific sponsors, 19 are Nobel Prize winners, with Canadian John Polanyi winning the prize in chemistry last year. Its first board included chairman Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller.
It was the mid-1940s and the Manhattan Project was under way, aided by work at the University of Chicago. In December, 1942, in a laboratory beneath the U. of C. football stadium, Enrico Fermi and colleagues created the first controlled nuclear chain reaction.
Len Ackland, a former Tribune reporter who became editor of the Bulletin in 1984, says that many of the scientists troubled by implications of their 1940s work couldn`t go public at the time because of the strictures of wartime secrecy. ”Once the war ended, they felt the public should be warned of the dangers of nuclear war.”
They founded the Bulletin (in December, 1945) to demystify the technology and inform people of the dangers facing them. At the same time, in the early days, the magazine was a way for scientists at various labs to communicate among themselves.
The Bulletin aims to be nonpartisan and nonpolitical, though some argue that its crystal-clear bent to arms control has manifested itself in left-leaning propaganda.
If there is a body of shared assumptions, says Ackland, it includes challenging the view that peace can be attained only through military might; a belief that the nuclear arms race can`t be stopped by a technical ”fix,”
like the so-called Star Wars plan; and a conviction that negotiation and rational discussion is needed to solve the basic nuclear dilemma we`ve birthed.
The Bulletin started at six pages and is now usually 58 pages, 10 issues a year. There`s a full-time business and editorial staff of only 7 people and a yearly budget of $700,000.
Its name is so frightfully dry, it naturally conjures up images of complex mathematical equations with the vitality of a Gregorian chant. Look closely and it really isn`t that bad. One finds the most weighty of topics dealt with in spirited, accessible and provocative fashion.
In 1985, two physicists argued that the U.S. deliberately had adopted a process of weapons design that requires continuous testing and thus created an artificial barrier to reaching a full-fledged test ban on nuclear weapons. That same year, it revealed that American intelligence concealed the Nazi records of hundreds of former enemy scientists to try to get them into the U.S. after World War II.
Its January-February issue included an article by a Stanford Univesity historian, contending that a World War II plant near Terre Haute, Ind., produced bombs loaded with anthrax in an early preparation for possible biological warfare. The Army responded that no bombs were manufactured, while admitting such production was the intent.
The May issue considers ”Castro phobia,” arguing that the Pentagon opposes normalizing relations with Cuba in part to justify higher military expenditures in that region of the world. The Bulletin also has delved into subjects such as the population crisis, believing that nuclear war could stem nearly any imaginable problem.
Finally, there is the ”doomsday clock,” a timepiece as notable as, say, John Cameron Swayze`s beloved Timex. It`s always at the top of the cover, a symbol of the threat to nuclear war.
It was originated in 1947 and first set at 7 minutes to midnight. It has been changed 10 times since, looming most precarious in 1953 when set at 2 minutes before midnight after the development of the hydrogen bomb. It was last switched in January, 1984, advanced then from 4 to 3 minutes before midnight.
The magazine`s new award clearly makes this a nifty year. Only a month earlier, it received a $225,000, three-year grant from the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. When you`re this small, that`s a fortune.
Meanwhile, it`s trying to raise $1 million, Ackland says, ”to strengthen us for the next 10 years.” The Bulletin`s survival thus seems assured, assuming, of course, that its offices, and the surrounding planet, don`t melt away ($24.50 for one year, 5801 S. Kenwood, Chicago, 60637).
