My new book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, is a finalist for the New England Book Award! And available in North America, UK, and Europe wherever you get your books. I encourage you to shop your local indie, use Bookshop for ebooks, and Libro for audiobooks. There are signed copies of the hardcover at Water Street Books. Loyalty Books has signed book plates for both Edge and The Disordered Cosmos while supplies last.

A few nights ago, I made the mistake of putting on the Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film Fail-Safe as my “last show of the evening.” I only intended to watch a few minutes. If you know anything about this movie, then you know why that was something of a mistake. The film, which has a lot of thematic overlap with Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is a tightly paced bureaucratic thriller about what happens when (broken?) technology sends US Air Force patrollers off to nuke Moscow.

There isn’t really a moment to turn the movie off and say, I’ll finish it later. This is an impressive feat, actually, given that most of the movie is just watching people talk to each other in three different rooms: a military situation room, a meeting room at the Pentagon, and an underground emergency bunker at the White House. The success of the film relies extensively on the ability of the actors to tell us a story with a facial expression and the behind the camera team’s ability to capture those expressions and edit them into a coherent tapestry with excellent timing.

While watching the film I kept thinking about how much of the story rides on the wisdom of the President, played by Henry Fonda as an Eisenhower-like figure. It was Eisenhower who warned everyone about the growth of the military-industrial complex, coining the term in the process. And this is a film about that growing complex overtaking human judgment and creating a catastrophic situation with millions of lives on the line. Much as it’s a meditation on the new nuclear powers, it is also a think piece on what role technology should have in killing people. The setup of the story is that no one can give the pilots an oral order to call off the bombing because they’ve been told to only trust the codes a machine sends to them. Which all feels like a precursor or inspiration for the last two entries of the Mission: Impossible film series, where Ethan Hunt has to stop a rogue AI from nuking humanity.

In either case, the point is a warning: what happens when we replace human wisdom and sense of community with a machine’s compassionless judgment?

It matters who has the power to make a decision in the face of that catastrophe. I worried about this in the lead up to the November 2024 election. Nuclear weapons now seem like the least of our concerns, in a way. Global warming is happening to us now, in real time, a slowly exploding bomb that is killing and destroying, everywhere now but in some places faster and more catastrophically than others. In a way, nuclear weapons are easier to digest mentally because in the public imagination, they are an up/down thing. Either they are exploded or they aren’t. Of course this doesn’t take into account the safety challenges that storing them presents, the risk their very existence presents, and the danger that mining for uranium and building the bombs present. But stopping a nuclear weapon from being deployed feels like a short term problem that can be addressed quickly, while global warming feels like a wide spread existential catastrophe that is hard to grasp and even harder to slowdown.

Even so, in the lead up to the election, I worried about whether voters were thinking through the question of who has the nuclear codes? I posted about this on social media a few times, with little traction. In July 2024, a group of Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry led the 2024 Mainau Declaration on the threat of nuclear weapons, which I signed as a Lindau alum. The statement got little press. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists continues to do its work, but I think not enough people are familiar with it. And in either case, the way people voted, I don’t think nuclear catastrophe as a serious concern was on their radar.

A few months after the 2025 inauguration, Nobel laureates came together for the Nobel Laureate Assembly on Nuclear Prevention, which I think again has gotten little attention. One hundred and twenty-nine laureates have signed the declaration that emerged from that meeting.

I understand why people aren’t worried about nuclear weapons. But I also think we still need to be. I also understand why scientists aren’t necessarily gaining much traction in their attempts to raise awareness about it. One problem with using Nobel laureates as a staging ground for organization is that it is necessarily an elitist, disproportionately older, white and male group. They are simply not connected with the grassroots.

But there is also another problem. In an attempt to maintain unity, these statements tend to veer away from an intersectional analysis that would put opposition to nuclear weapons into conversation with other connected struggles. Nuclear weapons production is about colonialism because the uranium has to come from somewhere. It is about Palestine and Iran because nuclear targeting is certainly one threat that Israel can make against their enemies. It is about the way Americans do and do not remember the legacy of nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific Islands and the impact of their wartime use on the entire Japanese diaspora.

And so there’s another piece to the film that interested me, which was Walter Mathau’s performance as an academic theorist of war and peace. As the situation escalates, Mathau advocates for decisive aggression to capitalize on the impending nuclear destruction. At a key moment he argues that he learned from World War II — that it is better to strike first than to be slaughtered the way Jews were. He has a very firm sense of “us” and “them.” I could not help but think about the way Zionists (Christian, Jewish, and otherwise) have justified the repeated massacre of Palestinians, in these same terms. But I also thought about how academics — including PhDs at think tanks — become key theorists who shape our world. Scientists, ultimately, are also the ones who develop the technologies that have the capacity to kill us all.

What lessons about pedagogy and mentorship can scientists take from witnessing the plot of this film? What responsibility do we have to prevent our students from contributing to the destruction of our species? If you’re a scientist wondering where to start, here’s a useful interview with physicist Laura Grego about how the people in power have created what is effectively a “doomsday system.”

Returning to the wisdom of the President, right now the president is a person who has had the reflecting pool painted blue, which has caused algae overgrowth while the paint peels. More recently, he had some statues memorializing war and peace coated in gold — this after coating the Oval Office in much the same. We can’t have metaphors anymore because everything is literal. They are tastelessly throwing literal gold at lifeless statues while people from Los Angeles to Gaza starve and while people around the US struggle to afford healthcare because the President and his comrades slashed Obamacare subsidies.

Are these the people you can trust with the nuclear codes? And whatever you think of the US as a political construction and historical entity, the answer to that question should matter to you. Because whatever future you’re hoping to build, it depends on our ecosystems not being bombed and radiated to high hell. Voters need to understand that — and so do the people seeking our votes and claiming to be the so-called “opposition party.” And importantly, scientists need to understand then, who it is we make a deal with when we compromise on our values in order to get funding.