Turkey’s 1960 military coup d’état set in motion a wave of reform initiatives. Coming after a decade of rule by the populist Democrat Party, the coup was received by Kemalists in the army, courts, bureaucracy, and universities as an opportunity to reinvigorate Atatürk’s interwar ideal of a centralized and rationally organized state. But if Kemalism was to be reestablished on a more secure footing, its emphasis on national unity and corporatist solidarity had to be adapted to the new era of democracy and human rights and to an increasingly urbanized and complex society. When the army’s National Security Council established the State Planning Organization (DPT) and initiated the “Project for Researching the Organization of the Central Government” (MEHTAP) in September 1960, therefore, it prompted debates about how to reconcile technocratic control with democratic unpredictability, debates that were to continue well into the 1970s. This paper investigates how a handful of particularly avant-garde thinkers sought to ride the post-1960 wave of reformism by promoting a techno-utopian solution to its dilemma of combining centralization with responsiveness to the demands of a rapidly changing society. Cybernetics, they argued, offered a paradigm of governance, adjudication, and administration unblemished by association with the ascendant ideologies of the Cold War, whether socialist or conservative, and constituted an approach to reform that was fully in keeping with Kemalist aspirations. Through an examination of the newspaper coverage, conference proceedings and other literature on cybernetic approaches to public administration, I show how they seized every opportunity to suggest that cybernetics combined dynamism with meta-stability, posthuman apoliticism with humanism, and deontology with sensitivity to the nuances of each particular case. Although it remained largely at the stage of fantasy, I argue, Turkish cybernetics became a Kemalism for the atomic age: a focal point around which state thinkers from several political camps found each other, facilitating the broader shift that occurred within the state during the 1970s away from the rights-based pluralism of the 1961 Constitution and towards an effort to depoliticize Turkish society.