In 1991, at age 18, the author skipped graduation and flew to Kuwait to work reconstruction after the Gulf War. Oil wells were burning, mines were buried in beaches, and hand grenades were snaked into plumbing. Hungarian engineers mounted MiG-21 turbines onto a Soviet T-34 tank chassis to blast 220 gallons of water per second at the fires. Carl Sagan warned the smoke could replicate the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption, which dropped global temperatures 0.4 to 0.7 degrees Celsius. It did not. Predicting what moves the climate needle is hard. That point is not incidental.
This is the editor's letter for the MIT Technology Review July/August issue, and the Kuwait story is the frame for three editorial bets: undersea tunneling, ASML's chip lithography monopoly, and deliberate stratospheric aerosol injection to cool the planet. The Tambora reference comes back around. The issue argues these problems, ranging from nanoscale semiconductor physics to planetary-scale geoengineering, share a common structure: solvable through coordinated human effort, but only if the ambition matches the scale.
Read the full piece for the argument underneath the memoir, specifically how the author connects 90 days of post-war reconstruction to the logic of taking on problems before they become irreversible. The geoengineering thread is the one to watch. Intentionally engineering a volcanic veil over the Earth is no longer a fringe idea, and this issue treats it as an engineering problem, not a thought experiment.
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