Scientists have long been intimately connected with warfare, called upon to supply fighters with tools of killing. Some scientists have attempted to reorient the morality of their disciplines. Rational Fog takes stock of these efforts and explores the quandary of scientific productivity today, in an era of perpetual war.

Rational Fog demonstrates that [scientists’] expertise is remarkably effective when combined with militaristic goals…One may doubt the ‘science’ of climate change or vaccines, but the power of science is displayed every time a drone carries out a remote strike, a jet breaks the sound barrier, or a nuclear warhead ‘explodes’ inside of a computer simulation. It may be inconvenient, but those truths are neither nebulous nor negligible. They are lethal.

Lindee…begins her study of technoscientific warfare by observing that the eroticism of modern weaponry has mesmerized the public…Lindee’s plainest ambition in Rational Fog consists in what she calls an ‘audit’ of the key moments in history when science was regrettably appropriated for warfare. Her unflinching examination abrades a naïve picture of science…as ‘uniquely neutral, universalistic, and benevolent…a calling, not a profession.’

Offers the reader a journey through some of the most prominent examples of the ambivalent achievements of human scientific and engineering ingenuity: machines and technical and organic systems of destruction…Casts the history of modern scientific expertise as a process of groping in the fog of war…Lindee goes on to offer a set of arguments to bolster her call for opposition to the militarization of technoscience.

Lindee has not written a typical monograph on the relationship between science and warfare. Rational Fog is a long essay on the systematic relation between the growth of scientific knowledge and violence and an insightful reflection on the ultimate consequences of this closeness…A book for all those intrigued—and let’s be honest, who is not, right now?—by the daily paradox of the achievements of science and technology, which simultaneously threaten and open possibilities for the Earth and humankind.

There is a voluminous literature on science, technology, and warfare, but most of it focuses on a particular science, a particular technology, or a particular war. In this ambitious, synthetic work, M. Susan Lindee explores the relationship between technical knowledge and violence across a wide historical expanse. A highly original and fascinating book.

This book brilliantly illuminates how the ‘fog of war’ creeps beyond the battlefield, engulfing the collaborative and analytical systems of scientists and engineers in the production of weapon systems for the modern age.

This fascinating book compels us to reckon with how science has been developed and directed by the military—and how scientific knowledge and technology underlie the ghastly deadliness of modern warfare, from gunshot wounds to the atomic bomb. M. Susan Lindee presents the coupling of science to the defense state as integral and systemic, not a matter of a few bad actors or the corruption of research. Vital reading.

M. Susan Lindee is Janice and Julian Bers Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima and Moments of Truth in Genetic Medicine and coauthor of The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon.