At the beginning of the Cold War, the artist wife of the physicist Alexander Langsdorf came up with the image of the “doomsday clock.” It appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to illustrate the fear of many physicists—including some who had been involved in the creation of the atomic bomb—that a “technology-induced catastrophe” might be terrifyingly close. Midnight on the doomsday clock meant nuclear Armageddon.
I have no doubt that somewhere in academia someone is busy devising a civil war doomsday clock. Any day now they'll publish it under the headline: “Two minutes to Fort Sumter.” But just how close is the United States to the kind of internecine slaughter that began in April 1861?
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