The Doomsday Machine

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock has never been closer to midnight, yet the nuclear panic of the 1960s feels like history. Jackson Lears, who served as a naval officer on a nuclear-armed ship during the Cold War, discusses how we have embraced the myth of technological prowess to detach ourselves from the horrors of war. “War is the most unpredictable, least controllable enterprise that human beings are capable of, and yet it’s the one to which we pay the most technological homage,” he writes. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Behind the Veil of Indifference,” Jackson Lears’s story in the July issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/07/behind-the-veil-of-indifference-lessons-from-a-nuclear-life 2:35: 9/11 security state and its doomsday undertones 6:40: The government has “given up on diplomacy” 10:25: Stalin was less demonized than Putin today 13:45: “The media is more like a stenographer for the security state now” 16:45: “There was genuinely more interest in, curiosity about, and public awareness of the danger of nuclear war in the 1960s.” 21:03: Faith in technology allows for a distance between the soldier and the target 29:05: “Algorithmic rationality” protects the soldier from the “dreaded human error” 37:38: The religiosity of the American military 46:15: Assange, Ellsberg, any hope for whistleblowers?