To be honest, even 18 years ago, long before this editor in chief, I found Scientific American rather ideological. Maybe it got more obvious over time, but I don’t see its recent tone categorically different.
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Whatever the correctness of Carl's science, he was an astronomer. Not a subject-matter expert. And the the article was very clearly ideological. In an era when the political winds in Washington were blowing hard in the other direction.
I was rather younger then, but still recall thinking that SciAm's approach had thrown away any chance of appealing to the Washington decision-makers, controlling the nuclear weapons, for the feel-good (& maybe profit) of appealing to the left. Which seemed hard to reconcile with them actually believing the results they published, saying that humanity could be wiped out.
It seems to have worked, though - the biggest nuclear war skeptic in that administration was Ronald Reagan and he's one of the world's most successful nuclear arms controllers and disarmers, whatever one may think of the rest of his politics and policies.
Did it? Or did Reagan have clear memories of WWII - when he was 30-ish years old - and the horrific level of death and devastation which even conventional bombing had inflicted upon Europe and Japan? "I don't want any American city to end up like Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, or Hiroshima" was a perfectly acceptable right-wing value.
My read is that Reagan understood the difference between talking big & tough, and actually starting a war. He obviously had a taste for proxy wars, but conflicts with direct US involvement were very few and small on his watch.
Yes it did. The influence of media and popular depictions of nuclear war on Reagan is very well documented. His experience of WWII was working on propaganda materials, not exposure to the devastation of war. He was convinced nuclear war was likely civilization-ending, an actual Armageddon. In this he was at odds with the bulk of his administration and US nuclear doctrine. His attitudes and interactions with Gorbachov on these issues are also surprisingly well documented.