An extensive “System,” as Pynchon termed it, built to manage two technoscientific wars of unprecedented butchery began issuing commands back up the chain, enslaving its human controllers. You might say, in a paranoid whisper, that the System had fostered a will of its own, a taste for vicarious survival that it satisfied through a growing mesh of incentives and exigencies in which people helplessly ensnared themselves. For our efforts, it gave us savage gifts, like the rocket, and deadlier toys to come. But as the war concluded, the System assumed control of everything we had ceded to it. For those living under the iron skies of the postwar era, history would no longer be constituted of doers and actors, only objects, tools, and targets.

For the VQR, I wrote about M. Susan Lindee’s study of militarized science. (2020)