Doomsday Machines

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The Occasion Instant, 1961
What can be learned from how people responded to false alarms about nuclear war in the late 1950s?
 • 
Alex Wellerstein
8
The Trigger Effect
James Burke's vision of a suddenly un-connected world
 • 
Alex Wellerstein
14
Cinéma verité, cinéma mort
How guerrilla filmmaking and the French New Wave gave birth to the modern zombie apocalypse film with Romero's Night of the the Living Dead
 • 
Billy Middleton

August 2024

Famished barbarians
The very British fears of Sam Youd's The Death of Grass
 • 
Alex Wellerstein
24
How much time will our civilization survive?
A conversation with historian Nasser Zakariya on "doomsday statistics" and other forms of scientific catastrophism
 • 
Alex Wellerstein
7
The perfect horror of Chesley Bonestell's nuked New York
Gritty realism in the artwork for a 1950 article on "Hiroshima, U.S.A."
 • 
Alex Wellerstein
13
Pantex employee photos, 1980s
Team photographs at a nuclear weapons factory offer a glimpse into the mundanity and materiality of the bomb
 • 
Alex Wellerstein
10
Why Oregon? Why 1983? Why a game? Why anything?
On the motivations behind the Oregon Road '83 game project
 • 
Alex Wellerstein
2
Strange games
Even if you can "win" some nuclear video games, maybe it's still good advice "not to play"
 • 
Alex Wellerstein
21
Survival of the Relocated Population of the U.S. after a Nuclear Attack, 1976
The surprising secret to surviving a nuclear war is... to not be near the bombs when they go off
 • 
Alex Wellerstein
22

July 2024

Lord Byron's "Darkness"
One of the earliest works of post-apocalyptic fiction in English, from the "year without a summer"
 • 
Alex Wellerstein
4
The Big Board
How does one visualize the scope of a full-scale nuclear war?
 • 
Alex Wellerstein
6
© 2024 Alex Wellerstein
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