This talk was part of the "Humanities and Public Life" symposium, a part of the Research 150 Sesquicentennial Conference in Spring 2018. 

ABSTRACT:
Gandhi once wrote, “You can wake a man who’s asleep, but you can’t wake a man who’s pretending to be asleep.” The United States population appears to be largely unworried about the possibility of a nuclear war, despite the fact that various experts – such as former Secretary of Defense William Perry – judge that we are currently closer to a nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The nuclear architecture allows one person to kill many millions in a single afternoon, and to initiate an exchange of weapons that will destroy most land species on earth. This architecture can be dismantled, but only if the citizenry wakes up and demands that it be dismantled. This lecture first tries to account for the population’s indifference to the possibility of nuclear war, and then goes on to show the key part this indifference plays in keeping this towering injustice in place.