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LEONARD M. RIESER, 76, WHO CHAIRED the board of the Bulletin from 1985 to June of last year, died in December of pancreatic cancer. His tenure as chairman spanned a tumultuous era. When Rieser took the chair, the Bulletin's "Doomsday Clock" stood at three minutes to midnight and "Evil Empire" rhetoric still ricocheted back and forth across the Atlantic.
But by late 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union had signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, a coup attempt in the Soviet Union had failed, and the United States and Russia had begun to withdraw thousands of tactical nuclear weapons from forward deployment. That fall, the board voted to move the minute hand "off the scale"-from 10 minutes to 17 minutes to midnight.
In speaking to the press after the meeting, Rieser displayed the rooted-in-the-real-world optimism that characterized his life. The Cold War was clearly over, Leonard told the audience, as was the East-West arms race. That was a cause for celebration, and it surely justified the unprecedented seven-minute move. "But the world is still a dangerous place and governments continue to pour vast sums of money and intellectual capital into weaponry. The Bulletin has much work left to do. It will continue reporting on the destructiveness of seeking military solutions to the world's ills."
He was surely right about the Bulletin having more work to do. In 1995, the board moved the minute hand back onto the scale, to 14 minutes to midnight, in part because of the slow U.S. and Russian pace in cutting back nuclear arsenals. And last June, the board moved the hand to nine minutes to midnight, partly because of nuclear tests by India and Pakistan, and partly because East-West arms reductions were still agonizingly slow.
IN DECEMBER OF 1942, RIESER, AN UNDERGRADuate in physics at the University...