Alex James Taylor: What first drew you to working with the Bulletin and particularly the Doomsday Clock?
Rachel Bronson: My background is American national security and global affairs, I’ve worked in different American think tanks and my area of expertise is the Middle East. I’ve always known the Bulletin and I read it in graduate school like many people. But what interested me to make the jump to the Bulletin was not so much the Doomsday Clock, which is of course incredibly important and one of the most powerful images around the globe, but it was the issues the Bulletin works on day in, day out: nuclear risk, climate change and disruptive technologies. Both from what I was seeing in the Middle East and what I understood as the need for policies and better engagement around key issues, for example, with the Iran deal, what Iran’s programme was doing, and how other countries were responding. So questions of nuclear weapons were really important to me and fast-changing in the areas I was looking at. Then pulling my head up and seeing that globally there were such changing realities on the nuclear landscape. Climate was having a serious effect in these countries too, and we know that it contributed to the Syrian crisis. I took the job around February, 2015 and then in March that year The Economist was delivered to my door and the cover was, “A New Nuclear Age” – this notion that the architecture that has kept us safe for at least 50 years is collapsing, and we’re pulling out of arms control agreements because we don’t feel like they’re doing their job but we aren’t replacing them with anything better. So thinking about the role of the United States and its relationship with Russia, and the two nations controlling more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. These issues are so important, especially for someone so interested in global security and the future of war and peace.

In this moment, the subjects the Bulletin focuses on were vital, so I wanted to be a part of that. Then the Doomsday Clock enters into that because – as I said before – it’s one of the most powerful graphics on the planet. I certainly knew of it when I got here, but I didn’t fully appreciate its power. I’ve worked at a number of different think tanks and idea generators and policy-related organisations, but I’ve never seen anything like the power of the Doomsday Clock to stop the global news cycle and generate a conversation around something really complicated and pivotal. The enormous power of it and the responsibility of presenting it is very compelling. What’s important to me is that we always connect it with the daily work of the board who set the time and the work of the organisation. The conversation that the clock generates is unique and powerful, and we take our responsibilities of that extremely seriously.

Alex: That level of citizen engagement and openness is what initially led the Bulletin to be founded, would you say that’s your main aim, to communicate this information to the public?
Rachel: Absolutely, we really see our role in this as connecting the engaged and interested public with the science and policy experts – serving as a conduit, translator or engagement vehicle. When it comes to nuclear weapons – similarly with climate – it’s incredibly complicated and, certainly on the nuclear side, often quite boring, intentionally so. You want nuclear policy to be very slow in order to reduce actions that might be taken. The technical aspects can also feel very out of reach, so our founders built us to engage the public in a way that is accessible because these issues are so important and policymakers do ultimately respond to their citizens, at least in democracies. So there was a time when the fear and the threat felt more real and we were closer to the use of these weapons when there was an interest in learning more.

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