so today we are back for lecture number 11. this is the cold war and atomic

apocalypse. today we really complete a pivot that we began last week from thinking in terms of religiously framed stories of apocalypse to secular visions of the end of human history. politics has followed us throughout this entire course, and it will continue to follow us through the rest of this last week. of course, content. but now we turn squarely also to the realm of science and technology. which we can imagine as a world apart from organized religion, although really you'll see they overlap substantially and fundamentally in ways that are crucial for understanding the takeaways from this course apocalyptic thought. in our sessions, a couple weeks ago on apocalypse in the european of the enlightenment era's, science took on the guise of natural philosophy, part and parcel of the judeo-christian worldview, which we've seen really shaping western culture in the fundamental way. and we saw in the 1800s, especially, but not exclusively

through the writings of charles darwin and karl marx, natural philosophy transformed the metamorphosed into a secular set of notions of science that empowered human beings to put themselves, increasingly in the role of engineering machines, to do their bidding. the trajectory we've covered this term involves moving from just trying to describe the world around, us, the things of this world into a project of figuring out the optimum rules, for ordering the world and then remaking the world according rules in order to master the world around us. in other words, following the assumption which we've seen again and again and again, first in a religious caste, and now in a secular caste that a progressive view of history understood as human history means that human beings can perfect their own future. other words, it's no longer up to god alone to define perfection as an end state in the afterlife, in divine time or

kairos. but that human beings can create heaven on earth can set the and define the trajectory for the path to that most rational, perfect secular eschaton. and in that case, an apocalypse doesn't require belief, in a separate realm of divine time. it doesn't require belief in cairo, as we have only chronos, the secular linear time of our own world, rather divine intervention or the kind of heavenly jerusalem imagined in the text that started it all for us in this course. john's book of revelation. last book of the christian bible. instead, we human beings can engineer our own optimum end state. so goes the principle of secular, apocalyptic. since the 18th century, the so-called era in european history, spanning from the, quote unquote, enlightened industrial ages onward into, our present digital age and

historians like, to use the word modernity, to talk about these centuries. some historians will focus on the fact that the 21st century has moved this beyond modernity in so many ways. i'm not sure about that. i think that the thought processes were really still show us very similar lines to what we've been covering throughout the last weeks of the course. so we're very much still dwelling for the rest of the course. content this week in a time period that i think we can call modern based on how human beings believe that they can engineer their own perfect world without needing to leave it behind and move on to a god given place called capital h. heaven. now, if you look at the title slide of today's lecture, you see us still from the film dr. strangelove, which i asked you all to watch for today. this film, made in 1964, came

out the height of the cold war. we'll talk about it at some length today. i hope you all watched it and got a good deal out of it because it's really extraordinary film. one of the most famous films by the late, great director stanley kubrick. what you see here, this title image is one of the major characters in the film named major kong, actually riding a nuclear warhead being launched to start world war three, which more or less was understood to equate with nuclear annihilation. and thinking in terms of nuclear catastrophe, what cold war political scientists on the u.s. side refer as mutually assured destruction, where there's one side in a comfort two has the power to completely annihilate the other side. but then again, the other side can respond by annihilating the first side. so the idea fundamentally, when we talk about mutually assured destruction and the history of nuclear technology in the cold war, is that rationally neither

side should launch those weapons first. what's called the first strike, because both know that would be game over for everybody. this movie, dr. strangelove posits instead that rationality dropped out and the consequences were predictable and completely catastrophic. now, this is an assumption that really has been guiding a lot of talk about the apocalypse, the coming of end of the world stories. in 2022 and now 2023. some of it has to do with current world politics. certainly, u.s. politics play a role too. right now, the top issue seems to be the us place in the world as understood through the lens, especially of president biden's stance on russia's full invasion of ukraine. we saw the ukrainian president just before christmas visiting washington, d.c. volodymyr zelensky. so ukraine remains as russia for

its steamrolling of sovereign ukrainian soil and the really ukrainian response to that full scale invasion. it's not just about russia and ukraine, though. persistence of. fears of nuclear epochal collapse in our world. we could talk north korea and indeed north korea has been a serious part of the conversation about nuclear threats continually for years, since it debuted its nuclear technology or iran, especially with the u.s. withdrawal a few years ago under then president trump from the iran nuclear deal or the people's republic of china certainly on the ascent and certainly in the headlines, always regardless of your ideological convictions within u.s. politics. all of these have made for plenty of conversation among pundits in the past few years about just how realistic it is that we human beings will

imminently meet our demise collectively. beneath the mushroom cloud. but without even getting into contemporary politics, we can stop for a moment and think in terms of where from the vantage point of right now, in january 2023, we see ourselves in a trajectory that started with the development of nuclear technology in the 1940s in the context of the allied effort in world war two. now, let's turn to our next slide. on the left, we have an image from the cover of time magazine. in 1990 of the great soviet physicist and dissident andrei sakharov. for those who haven't heard this word before, the word dissident means a civil objector, someone who is practicing civil disobedience without taking up arms or launching an armed rebellion. it's a word whose historical roots are often found in disobedience against the governments of the soviet union and its cold war era puppet governments across central and eastern europe. though now the word taken on a much wider resonance and we talk about, quote unquote, dissidents

against dictatorships and authoritarian regimes everywhere of all ideological stripes. this man depicted andrei sakharov, worked in the 1940s and fifties when joseph stalin was in power in the ussr to get the soviet union atomic and thermonuclear weapons technology only then to do a complete about face, turning away from everything had done as a younger man and becoming an international campaigner, denouncing soviet union's misuse of atomic technology and suppression of human rights and oppression of categories of its citizens. in other words, sakharov went from being one of the engineers of the soviet atomic arsenal toward being one of its greatest critics. and i need to be clear here, not just of the technology itself, but more generally of the soviet union's place, the world. and something sakharov underscored repeatedly, the lack of moral authority that the soviet union experienced broadcast in spite of the fact

that it claimed to be the ultimate moral state in the world, in the communist pursuit of total equality and justice. according to the theory originally taken from karl marx, now in 1975, andrei sakharov won the nobel peace prize. he wasn't allowed to receive it in person. so his wife came and delivered the nobel peace prize lecture on his behalf. i'm going to quote that lecture at several points in this lecture today. and in front of you are to on this slide would speak, i think already to some of the most important things to consider as we move through today's class. let's connect sakharov first to the bigger trend lines we've been discussing so far in our course. if we take god off the table so to speak for a second, if we take the judeo-christian faiths off the table for a minute, whether or not we still think in terms of a framework of progressive history, moving better and better in fashion

toward a perfect and state in our lives and in our world, whether or not like german philosopher whom we read in the first week of class, can it in his book meaning in history we attribute that kind of progressive approach to broader questions of secularization and the construction of narratives of history and thinking about, the broader shape of how history unfolds past to present the future that we get from john's book of revelation originally. what's gives us one way or another is a basis for both applauding and critiquing. we denounce it the way progress has been defined in the context of the rise of global mass technology, especially weapons of mass destruction in the 20th and 21st centuries. and that really is the key to this week's material in our course. what saddam had to say in 1975 was as follows is the first quotation, you see it in front you. on this slide, mankiw signed at

the threshold of the second half of the 20th century and to the particularly decisive and critical period of its history. and second quotation there is no doubt that industrial and technological progress is the most important factor in overcoming poverty, famine and disease. but this progress leads at the same time to ominous changes in the environment in which we live and, the exhaustion of our natural resources. in this way, mankind faces grave ecological dangers, end quote. so these are lines from suharto's 1975 nobel peace prize lecture. and this was not simply a critique of environmental dangers or the dangers of mass famine, but sakharov was launching what he was saying is that humankind in the course of the 20th century had reached a point where all of a sudden it was transforming and reshaping every dimension of life on earth. aspirationally would, in fact, be transforming the whole of the secular realm. the universe in

quotes, if we could get that far according to its own taste and its own plans. if we go back to the lecture a week ago about isaac newton and apocalyptic thinking during the enlightenment, you can jog your memories and maybe think about what voltaire was saying. so how off seems confirm voltaire as prophecy from 200 years earlier. about being able to build what carl becker described as the city of the 18th century. philosophers of the enlightenment. but if we read and if we think closely about suharto's words, we realize there's also a caution, a warning, unlike the unbridled belief in rational progress that we saw in voltaire. so hoddle says there's no doubt that we've achieved industrial and technological, and this is crucial to improving day to day lives of human beings. whether we're talking about thinkers on the u.s. side of the

cold war or the soviet side of the cold war, we can understand this idea of progress wanting to improve, or at least declaring a to improve the day to day lives of human beings, to aid in relieving material privation, whether for the industrial workers of europe and the americas or the resource imbalances in the regions of the world from european decolonization. so how do was looking at the global south the global north as a a world, an integrated world where disease and famine needed to be overcome and technology was necessary for that. but humankind in pursuing this technology, frankly, had become too big for its britches.

and frankly, we have passed the point where we can anticipate the consequences of our collective actions. this was so had us thinking. i want to underline it because it's a key part of how i want you to understand the. last 50 to 70 years worth of material that we're covering this course. we can say that we've given up on caring about the consequences, something, for example, we see quite regularly in the 21st century, in the ebb and flow, the back and forth of policy decision making about environmental regulations, for example, in the us supreme court ruling. in 2022 or the selling off of the amazon rain in brazil. right. the threat is global and i think we can be forgiven if not entire entire supported in our concern for the future of what progress

means and what exactly is going to yield for humankind collectively in the end. so how do saw this coming already 50 years ago in the mid 1970s, more generally what we find is that humankind cannot or at least has not been able to keep up with the broader balance to achieve some kind of equilibrium relative to the longer term issues of progress, of history. in other words, unless we assume we're living in the end times right now, pretty daunting. then there's still a ahead of us. there's still trajectory to be pursued and progressive history, if we choose to see that way as. an unfolding, continuing process leading toward better and better instincts. sadat's point is that we haven't reached that final endpoint at all. there's still clearly so much more to do now, even if we were

to buy completely into the general plan laid out by enlightenment thinkers about humankind's ability to use reason to keep improving the world around us, then should continue to see things like so out of date. more and more work ahead of us. to be frank, though, you know, why should we give that much credit to or to voltaire on the score of human perfectibility when we see so much injustice, human perfidy, even genocide, still ongoing today in our world of 2023. the conversation we're having today i mentioned, is a departure in many from john of patmos book of revelation, the biblical apocalypse with which we began this course. and yet, please keep in the back of your minds a quotation i raised at the very beginning of lecture yesterday from nazi era german legal theorist carl schmidt, commenting, among others, precisely on john's book of revelation. i quote you can see it on the

slide all. significant concepts of modern politics are secularized. theological and quote. in other words, even if we're talking about issues that seem to be exclusively secular in the background concept, purely or as an underlying layer in the electoral intellectual foreground lurk, religious ideas and their forms that have come down to us in the way that we read from karl lovett, for example, in his book meaning in history that we've read this course through centuries and millennia of the judeo-christian worldview. now, you don't have to buy in hook, line and sinker into either live it or schmidt's points about how those concepts from theology have been secularized. and obviously that's okay. but what i want you to take away from this course, among other things, is the fact that these things are connected in talking about an apocalypse or conceiving of the possibility of an atomic apocalypse. we're not just appropriating, maybe misusing the word from the

greek about stories foretell our collective doom or, stories of meaning found through progress in history. that's, after all, the textbook definition of apocalypse as we've been using it since the start of this course. and you should have that clearly set in your minds if you want to do well on the final exam on monday. but more than just revisiting key definitions studying apocalypse involves making sense of a range of narratives about the coming of the end of history the end times, which become progressively more and more human, more and more secular, and put progressively more more power into the hands of human beings, as opposed to wrestling within the framework. exclusive within the framework of a divine entity, the judeo christian god. this is why i will pay attention this week to the destructive potential historically empiric, certain, certainly during world war two, but not exclusively of atomic weaponry. and why for tomorrow, for

example, we'll watch the film the matrix and think also about the long term dangers of how societies transformed in a way that automates the relation between human beings. this is something that the hegemonic takeover of civil discourse in the 21st century by online social media has accelerated in a way that i think very few commentators can really keep up and feel like they have a grasp of all the dynamics of how we interface as human beings with each or less and less so certainly the next generation maybe not just maybe not even your generation, but the next couple follow you say someone 15 or 20 years younger than you. how on earth are they going to learn to interface with each other as human beings in a world that is so determined by consumption of technology, which so much of our contact with the world is mediated by tech. and i realize, of course, i'm not saying anything here, but it

is something worth restating again and again and considering in the context a long term trajectory of apocalyptic thinking that social and how we become disconnect from one another and how we mediate human contact through technology and through impersonal third party realms that changes and that changes our own understanding of what comes next and what we seek and collective and at the bottom of this slide, what we discussed on friday. i know you don't call eugenics the ongoing project belief in the perfectibility of humankind and humankind's ability to remove within our own species and, replace negative traits with positive traits, or to cut out negative. it sounds innocent enough, but in fact that was part and parcel of the national socialist, the nazi project of forcible sterilization and murder of

targets whom the described as not worthy of passing on their genes. even if we're not sterilizing so-called undesirable populations, even we're not preventing the reproduction of groups, certain groups within, our human population. we're still talking about an attempt to engineer better human beings. when we talk about genetic engineering and that itself exposes and unfold the danger disrupting the evolution of our species. but let's turn back to start off here for a second. was he saying that science too dangerous to remain the very center of our lives? and how how are we supposed to feel about that given how science obviously so much of our daily realities. when we saw this in the context of the covid 19 pandemic, couldn't have been possibly clearer, both in practical terms of how food and other consumer

goods were delivered to us by amazon or other delivery services. and in terms of how we ultimately sort vaccines that would let us reenter the world and how do you feel more generally about stepping back and questioning the role of science? well, let's read what sakharov had to say in his 1975 nobel lecture. this we cannot the idea of a more more widespread use of the results of medical research or extension of research in all of its branches, including bacteriology and virology, neurophysiology, human genetics and gene surgery. here's the key part no matter what potential dangers lurk in there, abuse and the undesirable social consequences of this research and no, sir. howard was a nuclear physicist at heart. he was a rational believer in the power of secular science and the power in particular of secular science to improve mankind. he had been a willing participant in the political

projects of the soviet union and leadership's attempt to make their country the global scientific powerhouse. true, sakharov had become disillusioned by his role in the weaponization of the soviet state. but that didn't mean that he didn't believe that humankind had the power to use reason and philosophy to master the world. but science could still hold the key. so then the question i would pose to you would have to be how far is too far? you saw in yesterday's lecture what the destructive eliminationist potential of eugenics could mean, how it translates into nazi germany's approach to destroying entire swaths of the german populace to racialized mental and physical disability, to trying to identify a genetic code and attributing. we saw this in friday's lecture even aspects of that genetic code to religious communities and national communities to various peoples and above all, to europe's jewish community.

so at the end of the day, it's a question that remains open here and will remain open throughout this final week of the course. is science too dangerous, as a vehicle for promoting progress in human history? in other words, if god is brushed to the side, if the concepts are fully secularized in the pursuit of political and technological advancement, does that necessarily spell disaster? and this is something i'll say another in a moment about this. does that spell the of disaster part ecological part anthropological that we see out in that short story. very short, but so powerful and compelling from 1950 that i asked you to read for today by legendary figure ray bradbury called rains. as i mentioned even though we've moved away from religious belief, it is always in the background. think back and keep the medieval mystic joachim of fury pictured here in the back of.

your minds as we consider extent to which the narratives we're exploring in class today really may, may not derive in some way, or at least to some extent from the kind of progressive of history which you pioneered for his idea of the third age of the post-crisis change in which 500 years after joachim death, enlightenment philosophers began secularized in full earnest. think back here again to the book we read, meaning history by karl louv. it. the anti nazi philosophers. writing after world war two based on his exploration of the apocalyptic writings of joachim of fury concluded. you can see the quotation here the mere fact that christianity interprets itself as a new testament superseding an old one and fulfilling the promises of the latter necessarily invites further progress and innovations either, religious or irreligious and anti-religious. hence the derivation of the

secular in religions of progress from the eschatology of the church, together with their theological pattern. in other words, by end of lecture today, you should ask yourselves, keeping in mind live words, this question is the atomic apocalypse is the threat of global nuclear annihilation and the product of a secular era religion of progress. and if so, can we translate it? can derive that from the general tragic tree. the broad historical pattern that we've traced so far in this course from judeo christian eschatology to a euro-american secular and boundless progress that we make for ourselves. as you think about this, i wanted to encourage you to keep in mind specifically again, that one key word progress. again, i'm quoting from soviet physicist andrei sakharov's, 1975 nobel lecture. progress is indispensable. and to it to a halt would

involve the decline and fall of our civilization. very yochai this speech and also very wedded to an enlightenment narrative of humankind's to build our own rational or secular end state of on earth next quotation. in actual fact all important aspects of progress closely interwoven not one of them can be dispensed with without risk of destroying the entire set up of civilization. progress, indivisible and sort of one time progress is possible and innocuous. only when it is a subject to the control of reason and hitler's idea of progress. and hitler did clearly have an idea of progress. we saw this when we discussed hitler at length in last week's material in sahara's size. that was a perverse mockery of the enlightenment ideal, but in some sense this is in the eye of

the beholder. hitler, as you read in the table talks, believed that he had followed and was following. still, even in 1945, just to his suicide, a rational framework of progress for aryans, at least as saw them. what was tantamount to genocide to the capital h of the europe's jewish population, to eugenics, to total war, and ultimately turned proved to be a catastrophe for. germany, addition to the catastrophic death tolls and scale of genocide to hitler, seemed rational. in any case, he surely would not have admitted to or seen himself as being beyond the control reason. as sakharov would think about those terms. and in fact, hitler could have fallen back, among others, on his 19th century icon, friedrich nietzsche. and that quotation and you've now read several times this course from nietzsche's 1882 book, the geek science shall.

we not ourselves have to become gods merely to seem worthy of it. there never was a greater event, and on account of it all, who were born after us belonged to a higher history than any so far. end quote. in other words, that the death, god, and the death of organized religion flipped the eschaton in a way that really empowers science and empowers scientists specifically to become a new breed of gods for humankind and for human civilization. now, that's something we really see the topics we're tackling this week. i return to here for a moment to a quotation from my university of maryland colleague vladimir simonyan, from whom you read for yesterday's, because for the rest of this lecture, we're going to be dealing squarely with the historical context of the cold war and the atomic age that it ushered in the second half of the 20th century. remember from yesterday's lecture we were talking about warfare and i quoted from testimony on his book, the devil

in history, the passage that i had assigned you to read. quote, when i demand justice, i seem to be asking for hate, end quote. this is a broader judgment, though his opponent pronounces on totalitarianism and how once in power, almost any once beautiful sounding ideal could turn into a way of exercising and master total control over other people and persecuting and killing many of them. it's also a product of seeing in that secular flipping of the eschaton that we've been talking in the past weeks of material of our course the belief that humankind its own final judgment and builds its own perfectibility types that frequently the design goes off the rails and cannot be in fact to follow its along that linear path because at the end of the day, human beings just aren't perfect. and as such, we cannot be

trusted to a perfectibility, consistent goal. obviously one of the key examples i've already that this is what tishman yahoo! had in mind with that particular quotation in modern history is what by all accounts was a certain beautiful utopian vision propounded by karl marx. you wrote about this at length last week marx's proposal that the old socialist idea of shared ownership, the means of production being especially concentrated in the hands of industrial so men and women working with their hands and suffering because of that work you see in the lower right hand of the slide. the reorientation of life around the assembly line in the modern. well, the russian revolutionaries known as the bolsheviks, when they took power in russia in the fall of 1917, really took message to heart seeking to build the utopian angle to bring to bear in this world the secular eschaton of the classless society in a way that would flip justice and as

testimonial to put it, frequently redefined justice to look like we at a glance might instead call hate in so far as the bolsheviks were replacing gods and organized religion. since after all, marx had demanded a commitment to scientific ethics and among others, organize religion is out either co-opted, manipulated by the state or made and pushed underground. and as a replacement, we have a new narrative of salvation, a secular anti metaphysical entity and segment narrative of heaven on earth. as tishman yano put it, communism was a story, purity and regeneration that motivated, fanatical commitment to the still promising future and a visceral opposition to the real or imagined squalor of the old dying order, end quote. that all dying order was seen to be the past, to present with progressive history at the core of the movement here on earth. now, obviously, i'm retracing some ground that we've already

explored, but i'm doing so because i want to bring together for you the different ingredients that mix together to produce the atomic age. you don't get the atomic age without the communist side of the equation. there is an american side. there is a soviet side. the original context for the american development of atomic weapons came in the world war two era fight against nazi germany. but the full on development of an atomically driven civilization, a civilization on the brink of being destroyed by nuclear annihilation, and on a global scale that resulted from the clash between americans style capitalism and soviet style communism. so the narrative from the soviet side is essential to keep in mind as a continuation of what we have studied so far throughout course. it's not just about idea. it's not just about what karl schmidt would have called secular ized theological concepts that went into building the politics of the soviet union. it's about trusting there was a certain path to humankind's and

having that vision, the path to salvation, confront another the us based vision that really became so powerful globally after the second world war. by november 1917, the bolsheviks had conducted their own bloody and really dealt the coup de grace to the parliamentary revolution. russia of february 1917 that initially replaced the imperial government. it half a decade of bloody and brutal civil war until 1922 to formally institute the country called the soviet union. and barely two years after that, joseph would consolidate power and hold it for three decades until his death. 1953. stalin was taking on the role with this magnanimous called the eschatological. in other words, the supposed or the self-proclaimed in bringer of the end times of in this case a perfect, classless society. and we saw the masses of victims

in yesterday's lecture that resulted spanning agricultural collectivization, forcible bringing famine with millions dead in ukraine and kazakhstan in the early to mid 1930s brought over a million dead in the great terror campaign that was waged throughout the soviet union and the half of the 1930s decimating soviet society, especially its upper echelon. and it also created something that we discussed on friday, this idea of the heritability of class identity. in other words that you had passed down to you from your parents or your grandparents generation. whatever negative traits the bolsheviks like to call these counter or reactionary traits that those generations were considered by the soviet political authorities have held. so where does that bring us in terms of the context for today's lecture? well, the soviet union was to it very mildly, not a friendly

place to live by the start of world war two already. joseph stalin had been conducting mass purges, leading to the deaths of millions range, different methods, in some cases, famine, others arrest, torture and execution. in other cases, mass deportation. a whole wide spectrum of practices. this is the country that would ultimate come to compete with the united states for control over atomic technology. beginning in the 1940s. and that competition would then define the next half century and arguably actually still defines the global order to day, something that we see even barack obama won a nobel peace prize in his first months as president in, 2009 for supposedly being responsible for the imminent dismantling of the nuclear arsenals of the u.s. and russia. more than a decade, we see that, in fact, things have gotten so much worse with. the russian full scale invasion of sovereign territory in february 2022, leading among others, to constant fears.

russian president vladimir putin could be on the verge of, launching russian nukes and triggering global armageddon already in 2017. the doomsday clock. one of the key topics we're discussing today, inched closer to what its architects call midnight, which represents the expected moment of humanity's extinction. in january 2022. we were supposedly 100 seconds to midnight, the same as one year before that, and that's the closest that we've ever been to our own collective demise at the start of 2017. the clock had advanced half a minute from 3 minutes to two and a half minutes, and it does not look to be pulling back any time soon. there are a range of explanations, but at the top of the list are climate change and the declining trends within the us. russia relationship. the doomsday clock setting for this year is actually going to be announced in the coming days

and i think it's a safe bet that, given putin's crimes in ukraine and his ongoing nuclear saber rattling, the doomsday clock will be moved even closer to the end. so the origins of all this, if we go back to the 1940s, really come in the reluctant forging of an allied partnership during world war, too, and i say reluctant because remember in august of 1939, nazi germany and the soviet union had in fact concluded an alliance with one another. the molotov ribbentrop pact, it's not until hitler broke that alliance in june of 1941 and invaded soviet union, reviving the long standing antagonism that the nazis shown toward communists, that the soviet union, under the leadership of joseph stalin, pictured here on the right, was driven into the arms. winston churchill's. britain. churchill here on the left and in the middle. franklin delano roosevelt, president of the united states. theirs was the allied

partnership with many other countries involved. well, but these being the, quote, big three, the real decision makers of the war's final years at the february 1945 yalta meeting, pictured here. i should add, by the way, that yalta on the crimean peninsula in the soviet union location was chosen, among other reasons, a little known fact josef stalin was afraid to fly. so wherever possible, he tried to his allied partners, to places that were within striking distance for could get ideally by ground transportation. now this particular meeting was not an auspicious for the other countries. churchill was very much involved in the dealmaking at yalta sort of thinking through the lens british domestic politics above all, with an upcoming election to fight. and in the he would actually lose that election the first election to be held after the

second world war despite having led the united kingdom really successive throughout the war. and franklin delano roosevelt was not long for the world. as of february 1945. within months he would be dead following a massive and he would be replaced as president of the united states by harry truman. so really yalta, as the consensus of historians understands, was the playing field above all of joseph. and it said yalta that the allied leaders with stalin really calling the shots and roosevelt not putting up much resistance, and churchill having other on his mind that stalin provided for what would become a durable division of europe and more generally of global political interests in the between the us dominated u.s. influenced blue half here on the western side and the communist dominated soviet influenced read half in the east. now if you to see the specific countries that were involved in these divisions or that were the

object of these divisions, you have a few examples here. the crucial examples for the of the so-called soviet bloc after war two were poland, czechoslovakia, hungary romania and bulgaria, east germany. that's a special case arguably the defining special case of the entire cold war. i don't have time to go into all the here but germany was a divided country throughout the the entirety of the cold war. and within the divided country. if you look at the little dot of great insight, east germany was a divided city of berlin. west berlin was a little enclave of west germany that was contained within, as you can see here, the territory of east germany and east germany simply means what was left over after. in 1949, the communist refuse to reunite their postwar occupation zone of germany with the zones of germany occupied by american, british and french troops. the german zones were linking back together to create an

independent capitalist federal republic of germany. so east germany would create a communist country under the thumb of the soviet union. these countries would pay lip service to the pursuit of karl marx's inspired ideology of communism. the rhetoric and the general philosophy of history, and i use the term advisedly, thinking through one of these secular eschatology that we've been exploring throughout the past week, the move toward a classless society in the day to day, especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the new soviet backed communist regimes in power behind the iron curtain borrowed some of the most perverse and destructive practices of the soviet union, particularly when it came to the destruction of human life show trials, the punishment of even good faith, communist. what played a role in leading the newly communist countries, but who then became scapegoats as new leaders started for each other and jockeying for power and trying to claim who was most

stalin and who was doing best at advancing the revolution. the rapid industrialization plans five-year plans. to borrow a term again pioneered by stalin, the 1920s and thirties in the soviet union. worst of all, the secret the individuals who would be interrogé torturing, killing and brutal ways. and above all, enforcing an ideological discipline, a system of terror. so if this, what we just described, represents a move to a secular eschaton enforced by means of mass terror, something we saw, for example, in the middle of the french revolution. we consider the revolution again to have followed the blueprints of jean-jacques rousseau and other latent philosophers as reform, reflecting a rational mastery and understanding of humankind. and this is a grim and brutal way to redefine the secular order. ironically, a brutality that

didn't seem to have any end in sight, hardly a picture of a perfect and progressive human in state. now, in march 1953, stalin died. stalinism. the system of government ideology that he had spawned within the soviet orbit spanning half a dozen countries borders by the time of his death in 1953 survived, the man himself, germany, would remain divided until 1990. the european continent would also remain divided and stalin's successor depicted here, nikita khrushchev, proved to be a man of political. on the one hand, he denounced stalin at the 20th congress of the communist party of the soviet union, held in february 1956. you see it depicted here calling a political criminal who betrayed the communist vision of the future, working against the

classless piety, against communism itself by wrongly indicting loyal communist activists and wrongly rounding up millions of people and, sending them to the gulag labor camps and penal colonies, exact shooting hundreds of thousands of others. but it was stolen individually who was blamed? not communism as a whole, and certainly not the secular eschaton lying at the heart of the whole project. khrushchev doubled down actually when it came to a gop conflict with the united states that emerged over 15 years earlier in the final of world war two, with the beginning of what was called the cold war. the war was called cold because it would involve the constant risk of turning to full blown war without actually bringing those ultimate catastrophic consequences. and you'll see in a minute this metaphor of cold and cold being a sort of frozen phase of war to borrow a keyword from earlier in this course, imminent with an egg, always already in progress

here, already all around us, but not fulfilled as opposed to the hot war imminent with an so you see the eschatology language actually has a clear role to play in thinking conceptually through the way the cold war played itself out in history. the main ideas underlining, the cold war translate very well into our story of apocalypse rewind to august of 1961. if you haven't taken any courses in 20th century history, you may not know this that within the country of east germany there was the divided city of berlin. in other words, to get from west germany to the noncontiguous territory that it controlled of west berlin, you either had to fly or basically take a sealed train. it was extremely complicated and extremely arduous, logistically speaking, but on at least getting from east berlin to west berlin was actually not that

hard. which is how east berlin and east germany more generally experienced tremendous brain drain, especially younger generations of talented people who felt like they were seeing their lives begin to rot and waste away behind the emerging iron curtain. so there's torrential outward migration was stemmed beginning in august of 1961 when nikita khrushchev, head of the soviet union, after stalin's death, and his east german counterpart and you see here on the right hand side of upper portion of this slide vault, it well believed, worked together to start building the berlin wall. and this was maybe the most direct image flying in the face of the idea that the communists were pursuing and successfully building secular eschaton, a global advertisement for how the ussr and its satellites were moving in the wrong direction. instead of a classless society emerging, we have physical walls

dividing different parts of humanity off from one another. just a year later, october 1962, there's the cuban crisis when the ussr had placement of missiles in cuba. newly communist cuba matched by the u.s. placement missiles in turkey, a nato's country like the united states. but perceived as being dangerously to the ussr. the result was a 13 day crisis in october of 62, where fear of nuclear war gripped centers of power. both sides of the atlantic you see at the bottom of this slide, by the way, this telephone never actually existed. the proverbial telephone symbolizing, the hotline between the kremlin and moscow when the white house in washington, d.c., that was an active line of communication between us president john f kennedy and soviet premier nikita khrushchev in end, it was brushed off.

who quote unquote blinked. kennedy face and the soviet union's seemed to recede ever further into the distance now we'll get to what exactly it was that created such a risk and made the cold war so important. the cold so meaningfully cold, rather than face the devastating destructive potential of the alternate to hot scenario that alternative scenarios. i've spelled out several already in this lecture was annihilation already the context of world war two. after the united states entered war in december 1941, following the japanese attack on pearl harbor, the u.s., a program known as the manhattan project featuring some of the world's finest and engineers working together in new mexico to work on the of a new master that would, if necessary give the united states the ability deal a final blow in the war believed be necessary in part because of

intelligence that german were also at work on an atomic weapon. in fact some of these german scientists would later be absorbed by the u.s. defense establishment after world war two. the idea being that the nazis had been defeated and now the soviets were the threat in terms of advancing weapons technology in the atomic age. the movie dr. strangelove offers a telling illustration of this pivot from photo of friend made by many german atomic scientists, the name of the movie's title, played by peter sellers. after all, dr. strangelove, it's an anglicized portion of what's to be a german name. mcavoy digging deeper, and he is made to be emblematic of ex-nazi scientists who played a role in the american defense and policy establishment during the cold war, distinctly showing how even though atomic weapons technology had really emerged over and against germany, it would

actually take advantage of the skill set of formerly german, formally nazi, even scientists. back to the origins of the u.s. atomic weapons program. the of the manhattan project was university, california berkeley physics professor j. robert oppenheimer. what you see here at the bottom of the slide is the team of physicists who worked at los alamos laboratory in new. they're depicted with the cyclotron where so many of their experiments were performed. and the result. in july 1945, just one month before the dropping of actual bombs by the united states, the japanese cities of hiroshima and nagasaki. what was the trinity test in the desert in mexico, the first ever actual field test for atomic weapons technology in the history of the world. and really the beginning of the nuclear age at this point in world war two, with germany having surrendered but with victory in japan's still proving elusive.

as august 1945 began, u.s. harry truman, who until recently had no earthly idea that the manhattan project existed, gave the order for a special elite squadron bombers headed up by the plane. see, up at the top of the slide here, the enola gay to fly the bomb. at the bottom of this slide labeled the little boy the first atomic weapon. that would be deployed an act of warfare in human history. so on august sixth, 1945, the japanese city of hiroshima was bombed, approximately 140,000 dead, three days later, following the japanese failure to surrender after the hiroshima bombing, the japanese city of nagasaki was bombed up to 80,000 dead, the numbers a bit depending on the exact time frame that we consider given the long term of radiation exposure, giving roughly maximum numbers. this is a picture of hiroshima right after the bombing, you can see total devastation, a literal

physical disemboweled cut of the space by the way this is the kind of image that you should have in mind when you finish reading. bradbury short story, soft rains thinking about rubble. we're thinking about a lone surviving but also proliferate notion of fire and fire being delivered example through rain. that kind of extraordinary paradox black rain delivering nuclear pollution, radioactivity and ultimately the ability to turn itself into poison. so the atomic race began in earnest as soon the first bombs were dropped. joseph stalin as leader of the soviet union, even before the u.s. bombed hiroshima, nagasaki really had given the order to begin work in earnest on a soviet counterpart. it took years for the soviet union to get its own atomic bombs, but then only took another four years for the soviet union to get a much more powerful version. thermonuclear weaponry known the hydrogen bomb, the hydrogen was

actually the project on which the physicist that i mentioned and quoted several times already in this lecture, andrei sakharov, the future nobel peace prize winner, played a crucial role in helping the ussr soar, helping, in fact, to guide soviet union to that technology. now, let's back for a moment by. the time that the soviet union had acquired first atomic technology in 1949 and then bomb technology in 1953, already for several years, the international english language journal, physicists, chemists and other natural scientists devoted to work on atomic science, the so-called bulletin of atomic scientists, appeared from 1945 onward, worried about the technology that they had helped to unleash the world and its catastrophic potential. so these scientists launched an advertising, an imaginary measuring device that they called the doomsday clock. now, this isn't an actual physical clock, but rather a

thought experiment, a product of international scientific. colaba and debate among the global community of scientists involved in atomic work. and this is a creation has really lasted and been for the most part annually research set its research settings publicly announced since 1947 through the present day you see here depicted the announcement from the year 2021. if look at the graph on the slide in front of you you see the full set of trends terms of how close to the atomic scientists responsible for the doomsday clock believe humankind has been at various points since 1947 to what they call midnight. in other words humankind's annihilation. to be clear, the doomsday clock is no longer just about the likelihood of atomic warfare, but has now long considered also change. epidemiology and other calamities faced by and or manufactured by humanity. now please keep in that.

this is all, of course, subjective. even the scientists who deliberate and collectively reset the clock every year have their own political and ideologue agendas. it's not to say that shouldn't take very, very seriously the protect predictions in their assessments, but there's also a grain of salt you have to take as well when. you're reading and trying to translate these settings into how you look at the world around. you don't make it seem like it's a foregone conclusion that we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust in the coming days. i would but do be critical as we're looking at this data at the same time the doomsday clock considered that 1991 hn the safest moment in world history since the measurements and assessments started in 1947. on the other hand, the most dangerous moments that we've seen include, for example 1953, just a few moments after the u.s. detonated the world's first thermonuclear weapon in november

1952, when the was set to 2 minutes to midnight, then 2018, once again, 2 minutes to midnight and since 2000, 20, steady at 100 seconds to midnight, the most ominous setting in the history of clock. how and how terrifying that the experts consulted for the clock believe that we are presently the closest that we've ever been. 100 seconds to midnight on the doomsday clock to the end of human history. now, in part, this had to do the atomic scientists allergy to. now former us president donald trump. in part it also has to do with an assessment of the dramatic, long failure of a number of that seemed a foregone conclusion after the collapse of the soviet union and the end of the cold war in 1991. maybe you can already see where i'm going with this. if the start atomic weaponry and the launching of the cold war that involved the continuous

imminent within a potential for mutual destruction which on a rational basis meant that supposedly no one was going to use the weapons and no one would invite the other side to annihilate it by launching weapons of its own accord, then with that system gone humankind in principle should have been able to move beyond the risks of total annihilation. for a while it seemed like maybe it would. but you can that basically there's been a return closer and closer here to midnight since 1991, since the collapse of the soviet union and the end of the cold war. the clock operates the assumption that if mankind is not getting better, it's getting worse. this is incorporating 911. it's incorporating the rise, global terrorism. it's incorporating resumed and renewed aggressiveness in the international system of russia. the people's republic of china, and various other global actors. and of course, it takes into account the recent covid 19

pandemic and the systemic failures and inequalities that pandemic exposed in how we think globally about what it means to be human and to live in solidarity or not with others elsewhere in the world. the bulletin atomic scientists board has a whole list reasons which you saw in the reading. i signed you for today about the doomsday clock to explain its criteria for moving the clock one way or the other, every time this announcement is made, there's big press conference with the version of the scene you see on the slide and actual hand on the clock. that suggests in one way or the other, this is how can understand. for example, the maybe not so funny cartoon you see at the bottom of the slide here where says oh hey, spring forward daylight savings time and so doing accidentally brings about nuclear annihilation. let's go back for a second and consider what the word doomsday actually means. doomsday is a long standing interpretation and english

language cultures of the apocalypse. john of patmos, the idea being that doomsday could be used as a synonym for judgment, a synonym for the final second coming of christ, the perusal. if you think back to the vocabulary we in the first couple of days of this as such it's a that really came into common english usage already almost 2000 years ago when the invading duke and subsequent king of england william the conqueror in 1086 decided that for the purposes, knowing exactly what the state his new founded newly enlarged would be at the moment, the world would end when cronus turn into kairos and jesus would come to earth. if you think back the beginning of this course, this was a time period when everyone assumed that just assumed but really was eagerly and desperately awaiting the arrival of jesus on and the arrival of, the judgment in heaven. what they were seeking was

conclude, owing to the misery of life on earth now we wanted to know what the forces and which he could count for the purposes. for example, of the final battle at armageddon, otherwise known as armageddon between the forces of god and the forces of satan. today we call the domesday book a census, and you can see sample entries. the bottom of the slide. king william the conqueror of england actually commissioned the doomsday or domesday book in 1086, which provided a comprehensive record of the possession in the kingdom of which he had taken the entries in the doomsday book were without appeal. a royal last judgment following the notion of a day of final judgment. in john's book of revelation. so the vocabulary really fits together, both in of the apocalyptic and the political. so that idea of doomsday is really not all that new, and the connotations may have changed something. you've seen again and again in

this course early on in this course may have been surprised to find that actually the idea was to try to make the end times as soon as possible because. the secular was seen as something negative only with the coming of the enlightenment it was this assumption stood on its head as builders of heaven on earth progressively more interested in staying on a perfected earth, rather than leaving earthly existence behind once and for all. even the puritans who aspired to make the secular world run as much as possible according to god's principles, rather than secular principles, to make a kind of jerusalem on earth. at the end of, they still wanted to be in the real, divine, heavenly jerusalem and not here. but since the enlightenment, the turn has been pretty definitive to seeing dooms day. not as a good thing, not as something be accelerated to be made imminent with an eye right around the corner, but instead to be pushed off to, be at best

considered imminent within. but at the end of the day, imminent in, a way human beings themselves would be responsible for setting the terms. the eschaton is coming and for defining the way in which human would be written as in apocalypse, not as an end to all of history in the sense of death, in the sense of the erasure of the world the annihilation of the world. but the sense of the arrival at the culmination human history, the best, most accomplished, most rational, most perfect form that human history could take. well, well, but what if, as the second half of the 20th century, we flipped that definition once again, if you go back to that old idea of 1000 or 2000 years earlier, the judeo-christian of doomsday being a good thing of being predicated specifically on the physical erasure and mainly notion of the secular realm. that's not what most people want today. i certainly don't want that.

i imagine that many of you don't want that either. but by the same token, when we talk doomsday, there's a basic question to be posed do we that doomsday is a bad thing? do we assume that we should be actively doing everything in our power to prevent the coming of doomsday? and if how do we separate these two different, very distinct but intertwined notions of the end times from one another? and times can mean the one hand that we as a collective community are kaput, erased, annihilated, gone, and moving to a higher. we're not, or instead end times could spell the fulfillment something perfect, the apogee of progressive human history not a new claim, not salvation an elevation to something heavenly beyond this world, but instead salvation by creating the perfect order right here, right now on earth, if we keep that dilemma keep that choice in the backs of our minds, then it becomes possible to interpret

the secular political events, the cold war, in reference to what exactly contributes to thinking the coming of the end of human life on earth because for the bulletin of atomic scientists, the arrival of midnight, the arrival of the if you will, is not a good thing that means an end to humans society. it means progress negated or raised not fulfilled. so a very, very clear distinction has be drawn here. but when we come back especially and this may be most controversially i'd say a lot of not just politicians but also scientists for this reason even disputed the way the clock has been maybe even manipulate it in recent memory. let's talk for a about the short story by. american literary legend ray bradbury entitled soft rains, which i assigned you for today very short, only five pages and devastating i have a small child at home.

and this story always modifies me when i reread it. this particular type of ending. bradbury was only 30 years old when he published this short story. it was in fact one of his first major publications. it became part of what he brought together from serialized as the martian chronicles. now, bradbury is best known his novel, fahrenheit 451, remade recently, once again in the year 2018, as a major motion picture back in 1950, what bradbury was trying do was offer social commentary. there's no human players in the story he's telling the role. did all vaporized. we've all been annihilated in nuclear blast. remember in those photos of hiroshima that it is possible for buildings to survive a nuclear blast and bradbury crafts a story in which there's one house, one structure that has survived and the house is eerily demarcated. this one wall, which is entirely but retains the imprints on it of individual human beings, the

family that once inhabited this house, that was annihilated by nuclear blast, but whose forms imprinted upon the wall as it was hit with that wave of energy, the small boy in the middle of the act of throwing a ball into the air. his sister getting ready to catch it. his mother gardening, a father mowing the lawn all dead in the context, the action that has clearly played out soft is clearly a story of both future utopia and dystopia. in other words, a combination of both the and dark sides of progressive history in the story. it's to have been many days since the deaths of the houses human inhabitants and the family dog shows up and dies very soon after being led into house. now this house is fully automated, the idea being that science and technology have gotten human kind to this advanced consumer where your house smart enough that it will make all of the convenient sources of life available to you without any kind of reprograming

any kind of constant maintenance. tell you when your bills are due, pay for you. provide your food for you, prepare everything for you, even read poetry to you. there's the poem that's read about the destruction of the world. it comes from the woman depicted in the lower hand corner of the slide here, american poet sarah teasdale, considered a brilliant and incredibly poet up until the moment when she killed herself in the early 1930s and her suicide really spoke, i think to bradbury in many ways and would have been part of the reason why chose her poem to mark had happened to the family and to the civilization that they represent in this story a civilization that had really collapsed in on itself. this one house which survived kind of frozen in time in a way that was almost absurd, producing toast and scrambling eggs that were only going straight into the garbage, wiping away the dust, was going to be incinerated anyway. robotic mice going around cleaning a house that wasn't being sullied all up until the

moment when the black reign, as it's called, the nuclear winter that has set in and has brought fire down from the skies, even in context of these soft rains that bradbury ironically terms as being defining trope of the story that ultimately burns house down, that ultimately. everything except that one wall marking silhouettes of the family that had died and that wall maintains a constant loop. the echo date being given on which everything been frozen. bradbury gave the year 2026. and of course, i sincerely hope that he's wrong about that year, given that it's only three years from now, but it's a devastating and really ominous prophecy to consider that the same technology, the same drive for secular, scientific progress that drew humankind bradbury's story to this kind of consumers paradise, where human beings have developed this great way of living, that to all their

material needs, also ended up digging the graves of humankind by providing the same technology that would annihilate them. remember, bradbury was, writing at the very beginning of the cold war in 1950, just one year after the soviet union had its own atomic bomb technology, and bradbury was responding a generalized fear that was taking hold within the us, but also more globally than. maybe the two sides weren't so rational in this emerging cold war and any number of hair trigger points could set off the total nuclear of all humankind. let me read to you two brief passages from bradbury's. first 10:00, the sun came from behind the rain. the house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. this was the one house left standing at night. the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles and next quotation in the last instant, under the fire avalanche.

other courses oblivious, could be heard announcing the time. cutting the lawn by remote mower or sending an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door. a thousand things happening like a clock shop. when each clock strikes the hour insanely. before or after the other. a scene of maniac confuse you yet unity and equal. the clock could well have here to the doomsday clock. the idea being that there was an throbbing pulse of humanity that had been both destroyed, somehow survived in an echo chamber. it's a poetic accomplishment this story and a devastating prophecy in some sense, prophecy in the sense also that we might consider revisiting nostradamus. there detail here but we don't actually have the detailed prediction in terms of what would happen and when we don't have an account we don't have the empirical, measured, scientifically theorized,

rationally worked out equation of any kind. what we have is a broad view broad strokes and paralyzing fear of the prospect fulfillment of this prophecy. so what exactly would this mean? is it an eschaton? sure it is. is it a fulfillment of progressive history? only in the most perverse and negative sense. if we are looking for an example of a kind of perverse fulfillment of the eschaton that came through, not just intellect and cultural trend lines produced by the global cold war, but more generally a global climate of political and material uncertainty with spiritual overtones but totally cut away and totally disconnected from institutional or organized religion as such, you see this movie that i've assigned to you for today, dr. strangelove or how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. from the year 1964, the famous production of stanley kubrick, well-known also of a clockwork

orange, 2001 a space odyssey. on the slide, you see here i am reproducing for you to critical quotations that i would like to discuss first from the general who starts all. the film is a dark comedy, the beginning of global nuclear meltdown touched off by an american general who has decided that he is going to intentionally a soviet nuclear retaliation without orders from the american commander in chief. the rather absurdly named general jack de ripper declares, can no longer sit back and allow infiltration. communist indoctrination, communist subversion. and the international communists conspiracy to sap and purify all of our precious bodily fluids. now, this is a parody kubrick making of the language of the era of joseph mccarthy and his witch hunts against communism in us culture and public. in the first half of the 1950s, over a decade before this movie was produced. it is also a point about

eugenics and our author from yesterday, vladimir simonyan, whose discussion of traits in the context of bolshevik or soviet power. but this movie is also a response to the cuban missile crisis, which had out only two years before the movie's release. kennedy had managed to finagle the united states way out of the cuban missile crisis without triggering a global nuclear conflagration. but the point that kubrick was making that at absolutely any moment a figure like rapper could exercised control over objects of devastating potential that really it was only a matter of time before the us its soviet counterparts brought about the end of human existence, even though the cuban missile crisis had resolved itself peacefully. in a sense, with the creation of atomic weaponry, humankind had already ended itself. so kubrick's apocalypse, both imminent with an a and with an

eye, both true of the coming total devastation. in 1964, the secular eschaton was already upon us. that was the message. the core idea of this dr. strangelove movie. the character name dr. strangelove in this movie offers a key bit of insight. midway the film. again, this is supposed to be a figure emblematic of the many ex-nazi german emigre scientists incorporated into the us defense establishment in the cold war effort to stave off a weapons triumph. the soviet union. commenting on the development of what the us weapons established was calling a doomsday machine, strangelove invokes some of the very we've been discussing in the of the doomsday clock doomsday being two different things at once a dream or fantasy and something to be avoided at all costs. strangelove declared in the movie the whole point of the doomsday machine is lost. if you talking the president roughly keep a secret.

why didn't you tell world? it's an interesting question. very interesting. we see the hotline between moscow and washington, d.c. play out very awkwardly, taking a lot of time to actually set into motion in this movie. then we see nothing. if not, one missed communication after another with the story of dr. strangelove, the physicist inability to weigh in and make any kind of scientific change. but really getting the american policy establishment geared up to repopulate earth after nuclear catastrophe. unwilling to stop that catastrophe, but instead starting to plan for a post-apocalyptic world. in other words, that there might maybe be some life the end. that's an interesting thesis that we have yet to confront. but if we go back to the timeline of the doomsday clock, you look at how the farthest that the doomsday clock has shown humankind since the 1940 to be from collective suicide.

it was 1991 the end of the cold war that was supposed to be it. that was supposed to be an end of human history, not the tragic sense, but in a way you'll see from reading i'm assigning you for tomorrow by the legendary political thinker francis fukuyama about the triumph of liberal democracy over the international communist. that was supposed to have been a good ending. that was supposed to have been in lightning in style, secular fulfillment of humankind's ability to craft its own apogee of progress, the apogee of rational, the self of earth, instead, once that model was discredited, once the idea of having the pinnacle of human development was not to have been the end point and not to have been quite as perfect. everyone had hoped once the cold war had ended well since that moment we seem to be getting farther and farther away and instead closer, closer to

doomsday or to catastrophic eschatological ending. now, perhaps we're at that point, if we think in terms of the apocalypse narrative, of atomic warfare, the atomic era of thinking or trying to move towards that was actually done in the 1970s with a process of detente, french for relaxation tensions really yielded major accomplishment in. 1975. the united states and the ussr led a broad coalition of countries signing the helsinki accords in the finnish capital city in the same year that on the day suharto won the nobel peace prize, he still wasn't allowed out of the soviet to receive it. despite the helsinki. the idea that the ussr and the united states would relax tensions would try, move away, pull back from that nuclear break from the brink of the end and as such, what's so hard of would say. turning back to the that his wife delivered on his behalf at the nobel ceremony is that

progress in human is possible within certain parameters. perhaps progress is indeed if culturally, intellectually, humankind keep up and reinvent itself in secular terms, providing a kind of dignity that once had been suggested by the judeo-christian worldview, even if not really completely fulfilled. i'm from cyrus now. freedom of conscience, together with, the other civic rights provides basis for scientific progress, constitutes a guarantee that scientific advances will not used to despoil mankind, providing the basis for economic and social progress, which in turn is a political guarantee for. the possibility of an effective defense of social rights, unquote. in other words, freedom of conscience has to go hand in hand with taking totalitarian ism off the table, with moving

beyond all encompassing, secular eschatology. that put an abstract goal, even supposedly for the of all humankind ahead the lives of individual human beings. all of that should be made impossible. no secular dream of on earth should the lives of people really living and really working, trying to fulfill themselves now as individuals with human dignity. now, clearly, there's a balancing act to be struck there. and clearly the doomsday clock shows that humankind has a long to go. if there is really to be any hope at all for achieving balancing act. but i, for one, refuse to believe that ray bradbury's prophecy has to come, that it's an inevitable pity that it is, in fact eschatological prophecy with point of return. let us hope, for our own sakes, and certainly the sakes of the generations that might come after us, that human beings can actually pull back from the brink of conflict, and that there is maybe the possibility

for a new helsinki and a new way of trying to square the different elements raised by sakharov that we might preserve the idea of progress, but without taking it so far as to lead to the annihilation of mankind, that we saw in bradbury's account. thank