Atomic bomb pioneer warns of continued nuclear threat

On June 11, 1998, the "Doomsday Clock" was moved to 9 minutes to midnight after India and Pakistan each conducted nuclear tests

May 2, 2000
Web posted at: 3:05 p.m. EDT (1905 GMT)

In this story: Countdown to disaster An estimated 31,535 nuclear warheads in world RELATED STORIES, SITES

From Chicago Bureau Chief Jeff Flock

CHICAGO (CNN) -- John Simpson was a leader of a team of scientists that produced the world's first nuclear reaction, a fission of the uranium isotope 235. The event took place on December 2, 1942, in a facility hidden under football stadium stands at the University of Chicago.

An astrophysicist, Simpson also was one of the team leaders on the Manhattan Project, the top secret World War II project to develop an atomic bomb for the United States.

Later, Simpson gained notoriety for another kind of "first" -- he and other scientists began to speak out against the bomb he had helped develop. He was the first chairman of a group of scientists who founded The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The group is now the keeper of the so-called "Doomsday Clock," a symbolic measure of how close the world is to nuclear annihilation.

Simpson, now 83, is a University of Chicago professor. He told CNN that even though the Cold War is over, the threat from nuclear stockpiles is still with us.

"My feeling is we are in a precarious stage in the world," Simpson said.

Old photographs show the stadium at the University of Chicago where the first self-contained nuclear reaction took place

In 1945, Simpson and some of his colleagues, in a Life Magazine interview, spoke publicly for the first time against the atomic bomb. That was the year the first Bulletin was published. In June 1947, the magazine put the Doomsday Clock on its cover as a symbol of nuclear danger.

According to the Doomsday Clock Web page, the clock's hands are moved forward and back to reflect international tensions and the developments of the nuclear age.

"It was set at seven minutes to midnight -- a decision that the Clock's designer, Martyl Langsdorf, said had more to do with principles of good design than with the current state of the world -- the very idea of the last quadrant of a clockface was supposed to represent in itself the urgency of the situation," the Web page says.

Since that first cover, the Web page says, the hands of the Doomsday Clock have been moved 16 times.

In 1953, the clock ticked to within two minutes of nuclear midnight after the United States and Soviet tested atomic bombs. The hands on the clock were moved back to 17 minutes before midnight a decade ago at the end of the Cold War. But nuclear tests in India and Pakistan in 1998 pushed it back to nine minutes until midnight.

John Simpson was part of the team of scientists that produced the first self-contained nuclear reaction

When asked whether people have a sense of how big the nuclear threat is these days, Simpson answers, "I hope not, in a way."

The most recent edition of the Bulletin estimates there are 31,535 nuclear warheads in the world. That's down from an estimated high of 69,478 in 1986 but still about as many as the 30,405 on hand during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Most of the warheads are believed to be somewhere in the former Soviet Union.

"I think personally that the proliferation issue is almost out of control at the present time."

Simpson remembers when nuclear proliferation wasn't an issue -- back when he posed with his colleagues for Life in 1945 and appealed to the world to outlaw the bomb.

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