"Disarmageddon” is what The Economist earlier this year called “complacent, reckless leaders” who “have forgotten how valuable it is to restrain nuclear weapons.” The politics of nuclear weapons – deterrence doctrines, mutually assured destruction and so on – have been the obsessive stuff of international politics since the Manhattan Project. There is, as Alissa Wilkinson and I argue in our 2015 book How to Survive the Apocalypse, something unique about the nuclear age, in which it becomes terrifyingly clear that human beings could end up as authors of their own destruction. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has run a clock on the odds, a literal Doomsday Clock, since 1947.
Debates in religious communities have run hot over things like nuclear weapons, regarding not only the use of them (which most are absolutely against) but also the possession of them. The anxiety that we have spent the last 60 years or so in creating the architecture of our own destruction is hard to miss. But nuclear weapons are just the tip of the iceberg of the politics of apocalypse, the most visible and spectacular perhaps, but a piece of a plague of fears and uncertainties about what it means to be human and whether the systems and institutions of our design have not, in some way, changed or challenged basic aspects of our humanity. Underneath tongue-in-cheek headlines like “Is Google Making You Stupid?” or the addictive isolation of Instagram posturing is a kind of technological pessimism that shows our scientific optimism of the post-war period is running out of steam. We have made marvels, great and terrible, and now that our machines are loose upon the world, like Frankenstein, we have a moment of real pause about whether we might have gone too far and whether we can still control the devices of our making – or if they now control us.
Read Full Article »