May has been a month of deregulatory debacle, of machines running out of control in the Wall Street meltdown and the Gulf oil spill, both of which could have been averted by some prudent rule-making. Such massive mishaps were prefigured, in a sense, by the Doomsday Machine -- the Soviet device, in the concluding scene of "Dr. Strangelove," that reduces the world to a cinder. Designed to automatically detonate so many atomic bombs if just one nuclear weapon is fired at the U.S.S.R. that it would deter any foe from dropping the big one, it works perfectly, with one small hitch: A U.S. B-52 drops the bomb on Russia before Americans learn of its existence, and mere humans are powerless to intervene as it blows up the planet.
Last week Wall Street stumbled upon its very own Doomsday Machine: computers programmed to go into automatic selling mode when a share price plunges unexpectedly. When the prices of several stocks declined Thursday, the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in those stocks. But they continued to plunge on multiple other exchanges. Within seconds, stocks everywhere were tanking; within 15 minutes, the Dow Jones industrial average had dropped a thousand points.
In September, 2009 Atlantic Monthly named 
