Potsdam, Germany, July 1945 After the day’s formal session had concluded, as Harry S. Truman casually hinted towards Joseph Stalin that the Americans have a weapon of highly unusual destructive force, he was expecting more than a nod from the General Secretary. “Put it to good use against the Japanese,” Stalin said, without the slightest indication of surprise, shock, or confusion. Winston Churchill was observing this interaction only a few feet away. Like a hawk on its prey, he was looking for at least a wince or a furrowing of Stalin’s eyebrows. He left hungry, perhaps even more confused than he had expected Stalin to be. The hawk lost his intuition. This would not be his only miss. Unbeknownst to him then, in two days’ time, he would also be ousted as Britian’s Prime Minister and miss out on a photo op of a lifetime. As Stalin returned to his quarters and started taking off his off-white military suit, he sat with the truth Truman was subtly threatening him with. Of course, he had already known that the American had a bomb, a big one. Klaus Fuchs had been consistent with his reporting, and he had passed along news of a successful, small-scale proof of concept of an atomic bomb. Trinity, the Americans called it. At that point, Stalin knew that Potsdam, then and there, was only the beginning of a great struggle for power in a post-war world order between the trinity in the conference room only a few hours ago. Indubitably incensed but calmly contemplative, like a retired Red Army officer who had seen war in a previous life, now forced to make his return to the battlefront for another, Stalin sighed and muttered under his breath to his personal aide: “Get me Beria. Now.”

Chicago, United States, July 1947 It’s 7 minutes to midnight. Martyl Langsdorf, the designer of the first magazine edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, only thought that “it seemed the right time on the page … it suited my eye.” It was in this whimsical manner that the Doomsday Clock was unveiled. The Smyth Report, published two years prior and broadly meant to shape public thinking and discourse, had not been able to provide Americans the moral cleansing they didn’t know they needed. A project their own government was undertaking, named after a borough in New York City, had managed to kill a six-figure number of faceless Japanese civilians in two hits, Little Boy and Fat Man. The destructive extent of these animatedly named bombs was unclear to the American public. It was unclear to even the United States government, the curtain only partially lifted by their sending of survey teams in late 1946 to assess the damage they had caused a year earlier. Yet there was something ineffable about this new nuclear, atomic science. Americans were joyous that the war had ended, for how many more young Americans had to launch amphibious attacks on Pacific islands for this brutality to cease? But did it have to be this way? For if they could use it against Japanese, what was preventing others from using it against them? Pandora, taken over by her curiosity, had unknowingly unleashed disease onto her world.

Semipalatinsk-21, Kazakhstan, Soviet Union, February 1949 It’s 6 minutes to midnight. When Lavrentiy Beria picked up his phone four years ago, he had been expecting some news from Potsdam, but not the urgency conveyed by Joseph Stalin himself. At that point, Stalin assessed Truman to be somewhat of an amateur. For what did Truman know about politics until his predecessor passed away? It had only been a stroke of luck that had gotten Truman in that room with the greats of Stalin and Churchill. What did, Harry S. Truman, previously a Vice President who had not been made aware of his own nuclear program, know about the new world order? Stalin viewed Truman’s nonchalant mentioning of the American nuclear program as a manifestation of the American’s disrespect, akin to a rookie telling a veteran what he ought to do. Something had to change. Beria was told, on that phone call, to make a strategic shift with regards to the Soviet nuclear program. And so he did. Now standing over an observation panel, shoulder to shoulder with Lavrentiy Beria, were Igor Kurchatov, the Chief Scientist of the Soviet bomb program, and Manfred von Ardenne, Director of Institute A. They just witnessed the successful test of RDS-1, which yielded an estimated 100 kilotons of TNT, five times the yield initially scheduled, in half a year earlier. The Soviet shift worked: Beria had dropped his mistrust of the German scientists, and along the way his insistence on replicating Fat Man’s design. He had offered von Ardenne not just an institute of his own, but also a lifestyle that he wanted on a beautiful coastal city on the Black Sea. Von Ardenne’s fellow German scientists had followed suit, vastly accelerating the Soviet program, bypassing the basic plutonium implosion design in the process. As these three men laughed and shared a Zakuski platter, the reverberations of their detonation would make their way to Washington D.C. At the Resolute Desk, Truman shuddered as he was briefed on Semipalatinsk. He reminisced about Potsdam and lingered on whether intimidation by demonstration (via Hiroshima and Nagasaki) had been the right course of action. It was too late now. It would take him a month to find the words to break this news to his fellow Americans.

Shinkolobwe, Belgian Congo, November 1952 It’s 5 minutes to midnight. It was a month ago that Britain’s Operation Hurricane had gone underway on the Montebello Islands of Western Australia. The yield of the bomb was only around that of Fat Man seven years ago, but it put the UK back on somewhat equal footing with the US and the USSR. Stalin was not particularly bothered by this, for the Soviets had achieved a much greater yield three years prior. What did bother him though, was Ivy Mike only a week ago. Ivy Mike was the first iteration of a new generation of thermonuclear weapons that made use of both fusion and fission. These f-words didn’t mean anything to Stalin; he was a numbers guy. The number was 10 megatons of TNT. 10 megatons were 10 too many acceptable to Stalin. Progress had been slowed and slow for the Soviet nuclear program. With the urgency of the Second World War behind and economic realities set in, the Union’s rush to develop a weapon to end all wars, or rather, to end all attempts at ending the Union, was no longer a top-tier priority once a proof of concept was achieved. For who could ever tolerate another Nagasaki happening? Having Semipalatinsk was enough. Or so it should have been. It was thus on a moonlit night mid-November 1952 that Stalin gave the directive to Marshal Georgy Zhukov to invade Belgian Congo. “These fucking insatiable Americans,” he told Zhukov, “are beasts. They haven’t stopped, they’re not stopping, and they’re never going to stop. All of us are part-man and part-beast; the civilized man part squelches the animalistic tendencies of the beast. Their man parts are dead. They cannot rein in their bestial, limitless greed. It’s time to starve the beast.” The Americans and British had, for far too long, enjoyed the pitchblende of extremely high uranium content from the Shinkolobwe mine. The Combined Development Trust, established by the Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves, had made secret agreements with Belgian Congo to maintain its medium- to long-term control of these mines, and more broadly of the global uranium supplies. It was time to change that.

Kuntsevo, Moscow, Soviet Union, March 1953 It’s 4 minutes to midnight. In his meticulously ornamented restroom at the corner of the Dacha, Stalin took a good look at himself. His face was barely flushed by the alcohol, but the stains of the long years governing over 8 million square miles of land mass were as visible as ever. He had turned 74 only a few months ago in a lavish party at the Kremlin, organized by Nikita Khruschev and Lavrentiy Beria. Lavrentiy made his speech first. Of course he did. The typical enthusiastic and glowing praises, Stalin thought. Then it was Nikita’s turn. Nikita chose to speak about a meeting he had had with Stalin himself a while ago, and how Stalin had personally shown him what great, not just good, but great, governance looked like. A personal touch. Stalin loved it. He reminisced about that night and how much fun it was. How much drinking it was. It was just like tonight. He was surrounded by his apostles: Lavrentiy, Nikita, Georgy, Vyacheslav, and had a lot of wine and food with them. It was now 5 in the morning on the first day of March, a Sunday. He lightly chuckled at the idea that some people would have to wake up for church. If Stalin was faithful, he probably would have decreed his church to start a little later for nights like this. As he contemplated calling it a night, he stared at the reflection of himself in his tired eyes. Was this it? Was this all he had wanted? He had achieved everything he had set out to do. He had won a world war against the Nazis and outmaneuvered a few American presidents. His weapons program had grown to be bigger and better from the over-abundant flow of uranium from Soviet Congo, while the Americans and British remained cautious and petrified. The hardest part, though, was beating Trotsky decades ago. It had been easy since then, and Stalin had a city named after him now. For a second, Stalin indulged in the flash of his own mortality. As the cold water started streaming down his weary palms, it washed away Stalin’s brittle shell of a man part that he had left. The ruthless beast was back in his full form. Jesus had his Last Supper with his apostles on a Thursday evening. In Kuntsevo though, it was a Saturday night, and Joseph was not Jesus. He was not going to be crucified, not just yet.

Baikonur Cosmodrome Site, Kazakhstan, Soviet Union, October 1957 It’s 3 minutes to midnight. As Vseved-1 started transmitting its first radio signals back to the Cosmodrome Site, Sergei Korolev was smiling from brim to brim. The first phase of his finest piece of work was now done, and the Soviets had achieved space superiority. To Korolev in 1954, it was a no-brainer to start working on an artificial satellite. That was the natural progression of rocket technology, and he achieved this next stage. It had not been an easy task, for no one had managed to launch an artificial satellite into Earth’s orbit like Korolev did. And it was especially not easy given the additional asks of Lavrentiy Beria. The fusion-based bombs had only gotten more massive in size, but the technology had also grown more efficient. By 1954, it was already possible for them to be deployed by bombers. Beria thus asked Korolev to design not just any artificial satellite, but one capable of carrying and dropping nukes from orbit, to bypass American early detection systems for intercontinental ballistic missiles. This second phase of Vseved-1 was waiting to be tested, upon the finalization of the name of a Pacific island to be vanished. The point of the test was to simulate war conditions, where Korolev and his team had to be ready under any target selection. Korolev had a good feeling about it though. It felt as if he was the head of the NKVD in the good old days, reigning its terror, only now over small, uninhabited Pacific islands. Poof, and they’d be gone. Maybe states and provinces soon.
Korolev had initially hated the name of the device, but over the years he had grown used to it. The project was originally codenamed Sputnik-1, the Russian word for satellite; but Beria thought it would have been more appropriate to call it Vseved-1. Vse meant all, and ved meant knowing. An all-knowing eye orbiting Earth was what they had launched.

Hanford, Washington, United States, May 1960 It’s 2 minutes to midnight. As Dwight D. Eisenhower visited level B-10 of Hanford, he thought about the day before Normandy. He had had nothing but victories prior to Operation Overlord, but there was something that irked him about sending men onto the French coastline under the line of fire of Nazi machine guns. Something didn’t feel right. His own humanity was bothered, he guessed. His ambitions in life had long been known to his family and friends, but they had never been political, until after the War. Now a two-term President on his way out, at Hanford, Eisenhower felt it again. The things he had accomplished to ascend from a small town in Kansas to be the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Western Europe, and then to the zenith of American politics, had been superhuman. Yet, Eisenhower felt like he had degraded himself to subhuman. For as he was inspecting the state of plutonium production at Hanford, he was cognizant of its intentions. To kill or not to kill, that is the question. Eisenhower didn’t know there was a question. He only knew what the answer was: to kill. The defeat in Belgian Congo had forced his hands into scraping every single Canadian mine there was, and to full steam ahead the production of more thermonuclear bombs. If not now, it would truly be never. For the Soviets had accumulated a few hundred Vseveds in Earth’s orbit, ready to strike. Hanford had become heavily fortified in the omnipresence of Soviet nukes and so had all American critical infrastructure. Only a few years ago, in an address similar to Truman’s, Eisenhower had to tell the American public about Vseved-1 and the threat it posed. Within that short time, for the first time air raid sirens were installed on American streets, and having a nuclear bunker became the new norm. The subhuman in Eisenhower was now permanently living in a subterranean secret residence, out of fear of his assassination from the sky. He had to strike them first.

Washington D.C., United States, October 1962 It’s 1 minute to midnight. The former junior senator from Massachusetts was sitting in the Situation Room, face in his palms. He wanted to get some fresh air, but the best he could get was an oxygen canister. A few minutes ago, he was made aware of a collection of failing and falling Vseveds, due to hit Boston and its neighboring areas. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, unusually shaken in his voice, informed him that they would be unable to stop all of the Vseveds, and that they would need the Soviets’ help. The Chairman had more statistics and estimations to present, but not options. He was promptly asked to leave. John F. Kennedy never had to beg for anything in his life, not even the Presidency. He presented himself as a bright path out of the misery that two terms of Eisenhower and Nixon had brought and won the 1960 election by a landslide. He had to pick up the phone now. On the other side greeting him would be Joseph Stalin, a man who had been in politics for longer than Kennedy had been alive. Kennedy had a few thermonuclear bombs of his own to leverage with, but did he want to use them? When Stalin received the news, he was not particularly bothered by it. Yes, it was an operational failure on the Soviets’ part, but that only meant he himself had plausible deniability, that he didn’t mean for it to happen. Besides, did diplomacy even matter? He might as well had meant for it to happen. As he picked up the phone from his bed to talk to his American counterpart, he wondered whether the sudden relaxation he felt came from the begging words of an American president, something he had never had the pleasure listening to hitherto, or the stream of morphine his doctors had just tethered him to. Or maybe, it was time.

Chicago, United States, December 1962 10…9…8… Just as the countdown for the New Year 1963 started, so did the air raid sirens over the streets of Chicago. 7…6…5… Broadcasts of post-New Year celebrations from New York City had suddenly cut out. 4… Perhaps, John F. Kennedy would have rather had a bullet put through him, 3… than the blood of millions of Americans on his hands. 2…

1…

It’s midnight.