The decrease in people is quite perceptible. There are still tourists in the tourist areas, of course. But the rest of the city has a sort of ghost-town like vibe in it that is hard to pin down — it’s not truly empty, there are still plenty of people walking and driving and biking around, but it certainly does not feel like it is at its usual capacity. Which gives it a sort of wistful, magical quality that I very much enjoy.

A few weeks ago I (finally) got my act together to figure out how the bike share systems work in Paris, and did a few bike trips around town. These were very “functional” trips, with the motivation being in part to get around the fact that one of the main metro lines I used was closed for a few weeks for maintenance. So less about having a joyride and more about getting from point A to point B.

There are several different bike share systems here, each with their own pricing schemes and technological dimensions. The one I have tried is called Vélib’ Métropole, and appears to be the largest in the city. It uses a docking system similar to the Citi Bikes I used in NYC/NJ and the Capital Bikeshare program in DC (as opposed to the Lime bikes, which you can leave anywhere, for better and ill). The bikes and their stations are quite well-saturated in the core of Paris, including one large set of docks within steps of my front door, which is why I went with it.

I used the electric “assist” Vélib’ bikes, which are a little more expensive than the unassisted ones, but I really enjoyed the assisted bikes in NYC, which make you feel like a champion bicyclist. The Vélib’ electric bikes do not make you feel like that. They make you feel like you are on a normal bicycle, as opposed to an extremely heavy and rugged bike share bicycle. That is still a significant improvement — I find the unassisted bicycles to be a lot of work, like trying to ride a tank — but it is a lot less “speedy” than the electric Citi Bikes. Which maybe is a good thing, I don’t know. The Citi Bikes really allowed one a sense of speed and mastery that is, perhaps, misleading. The Vélib’ electric bikes, while not nearly as fun and easy, still feel like real bicycles.

(And, before you ask, yes, I always wear a helmet. I bought an Overade Plixi foldable helmet several years back, which I like much more than standard foam helmets, and brought it with me to France. It can be folded up into about 1/3rd the normal volume of a helmet and fits into a little bag that comes with it. This makes it much easier to deal with after one has arrived at one’s destination than a full-sized helmet. I also like to believe it looks less dorky than standard helmets. Which really shouldn’t come into it — nobody is going to mistake me for looking cool on my electric bike share bike, and looking cool isn’t really worth brain damage anyway — but it does help encourage me to wear it.)

As evidenced by the fact that I prefer electric bike share bicycles, I am very much not a serious cyclist. I am happy to forego performance in exchange for a lack of responsibility for maintenance, and am mostly using the bikes just to go distances that would be inconvenient to walk and as an alternative to taking the subway or a bus. So how does Paris compare, on those terms, to either DC or NYC/NJ, the two other cities I have the most experienced with this kind of cycling?

In terms of bike infrastructure, Paris is better than NYC and northern New Jersey by a considerable margin. On large roads, there are frequently dedicated bicycle lanes that are physically separated from traffic, and cannot be used as places for cars to idle or double-park. This is a major issue in NYC/NJ, where bicycle lanes are often treated as “free parking,” with apparently little enforcement. Bicyclists are also given more “rights” in Paris — on many one-way streets, it is explicitly indicated that bicyclists are allowed to travel in either direction. Whether one feels secure in doing that is another issue (and as a pedestrian, it means you have to always look both ways before crossing a one-way street), but at least one doesn’t feel like a criminal if one does that, which is important in a city with lots of small one-way streets.

There are also many areas where bicyclists are explicitly indicated as being allowed to take up the entire car lane, and are allowed to use dedicated bus and taxi lanes, which themselves are physically separated (with concrete barriers) from other car traffic. All of which is good for reducing the cases in which cars and bicycles are competing for the same space. In this sense, it is more similar to DC than NYC, although my memory (perhaps out of date) is that DC has more dedicated bicycle “corridors” than does Paris.

Parisian traffic, while not exactly “calm,” is not nearly as intense and constant as the NYC area. Or the DC area, if I recall correctly. There are lots of anti-car measures in place which try to reduce the appeal and the number of cars, and they largely seem to have worked (to the detriment of car owners, of course). All of which is to say that it doesn’t feel like biking in either of those cities, where other cars are a constant menace (esp. in NYC).

The downside of this, though, is that the bike infrastructure in Paris is basically attached to the car infrastructure, and so some of the same things that make driving a car in Paris presumably frustrating also apply to cyclists. One is constantly stopping at red lights — I only had one instance in which I had a “green run” that lasted a couple of blocks. (There are no stop signs in Paris. They just don’t have them. Just stop lights. And they have a lot of stop lights.) And so what feels like it should be a very quick trip always takes a bit longer than one expects because one is stopping constantly.

Which feels like a mixed bag — it definitely reduces the sense of menace, but it also means that it’s not all that fun or that fast. Stopping every single block is a drag. I’m not confident enough with my understanding of Parisian driving to run a red, although plenty of other cyclists do it. A compromise is to avoid the large streets and instead take the smaller back streets, which either lack lights or have lights that one feels more confident ignoring if there is truly no one else around (which is often the case).

Anyway, like so many things, it is not terrible, not perfect. I found the bikes reasonably easy to use. The Vélib’ bikes felt like they were in need of refurbishment, and the associated app is kind of terrible, though, and its ability to give information about station locations seems pretty spotty, which did delay me in at least one instance (I knew more or less where my destination station was, but not exactly, and the app was very buggy in giving me the information — the station was hidden behind some trees and not obvious from the main street I was on). But overall it was not a profoundly unpleasant experience, just one that felt like it was in need of some refining. So in the future I may give one of the other systems a try, just to see how they compare, and if they help out with these rough edges.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing and work the last week, catching up on projects and deadlines and things like that. I managed two Doomsday Machines posts this past week, one that was very brief, and one that was more significant.

The brief one is about the famous “human shadows” at Hiroshima, which I was spurred to quickly write by being alerted to the fact that there was a tie-in with a date given in Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story, “There Will Come Soft Rains”:

My longer post was an article I wrote for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, about the scarred “Hiroshima Maidens”:

The story of the “Hiroshima Maidens” has been told by others — who I credit in the footnotes, and am very grateful for — but I tried to give it a slightly different gloss. As I discuss at the end of the article, there are basically two “modes” in which this story is discussed, the celebratory and the cynical. I found myself coming down somewhere in between the two, ultimately.

Read more

On May 7, 1955, 25 young Japanese women arrived by airplane at Travis Airfield in California. They had flown there from Iwakuni Airbase in Tokyo a few days prior, with a layover in Honolulu. In California, a crowd greeted their arrival by showering them with flowers—and four women who, to the discomfort of many involved, used the opportunity to give a speech about the dangers of the hydrogen bomb.1

All of the women had been schoolchildren in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945, when the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the city. Many of them had been at work building firebreaks at the time of the bombing, and had all been severely burned by the attack. They were known in the press as the “Hiroshima Maidens,” and they were part of a trip, organized by a Japanese reverend and an American journalist, and with the hesitant blessing of the US State Department, to bring the women to the United States, so their scars might be healed through the power of American plastic surgery. The primary intent was to ease their individual suffering, but the trip was understood by all involved to be more than that: the wounds being healed were not just physical, but political.

Keloid scars are raised, thick, and irregular slabs of collagen. They can form after any injury, and can appear long after the injury itself. They generally do not hurt, but they can itch. They can also constrain muscle movement, decreasing mobility dramatically, depending on where they have formed. And they are disfiguring. For reasons that are apparently still not well-understood, such scars are more prone to develop in people of Asian, African, and Hispanic descent than in other peoples, and their heighted incidence among survivors of the atomic bombs has suggested that radiation exposure may increase the chances of their forming.

Photographs of the scarred bodies of atomic bomb victims are a common, if still controversial, accompaniment to discussions of the atomic attacks today. But in the immediate years after the end of World War II, they were much rarer. While an October 1945 story in LIFE magazine did feature two photographs of atomic victims, nearly all other popular photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 1940s featured only photographs of the ruined buildings, not ruined bodies.

Less popularly, the bodies of victims were visible in official, technical publications on the “medical effects” of the bombs, with photographs of the victims months or even years after the bombings. These photographs were meant to display, cleanly and clinically, the effects of atomic bombs. They were not intended to provoke a sense of guilt, or even empathy, except as relates to how their audience might be interested in “effects data” for planning for the possible use of atomic bombs against themselves in the future.

Information about the survivors was tightly controlled within Japan by the occupation authorities, who feared that widespread discussion of the atomic bomb could lead to anti-American and pro-Communist sentiment.2

John Hersey’s Hiroshima, published as a full-issue of The New Yorker in August 1946, was the first publication to really give international audiences a view of what the atomic bombings were like from the perspective of the bombed. One of the six survivors that Hersey profiled was an American-educated Methodist reverend, Kiyoshi Tanimoto. Tanimoto’s account is gripping, and prominently features his inability to render the help to others that he wished that he could:

After crossing Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge, having run the whole way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he approached the center, that all the houses had been crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always stopped him. Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them.

Hersey’s account showed Tanimoto trying to help whom he could, but the magnitude of the disaster was overwhelming. Tanimoto himself suffered from a bout of radiation sickness, but recovered.

At the time of Hersey’s book, there was no agreed-upon term to use for those people who were at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of the bombings but who had not died. The term “survivor” was common in English usage, but the Japanese have tended to shy away from their equivalent (seizonshai), apparently finding it to contain a bit of guilt or blame in its focus on those who did not die. Conversely, the term “victim” appears to have been used more commonly in Japanese (higaisha) than in English, perhaps again because of its apparent connotation that the violence done to the Japanese was unjust. It is not clear exactly when the term hibakusha—“explosion-affected person”—became the preferred term; it seems like it was used in Japan by the mid-to-late 1950s, and became well-known in English only in the early 1960s.3

In the months after the bombing, his church destroyed, Tanimoto worked as a street preacher in Hiroshima. His message was both theological and political: Looking for someone to blame for the atomic bombing—whether the Americans who had dropped the bomb, or the Japanese military leaders who had started the war—was futile. Seek salvation through God alone. With parishioners, he began the work of rebuilding the church building, but the work was slow, for there was no money and few resources available. In 1948, he traveled to the United States to meet with an old classmate of his, in an effort to raise funds for a new church. While on the ship to San Francisco, he had an idea: He could dedicate his life to peace, and the rebuilding of his ruined Hiroshima would be the focal point for that. Without consulting anyone back home, he began to give sermons around the United States, taking up a collection for Hiroshima’s rebirth. By the end of 1949, he had visited over 250 American cities, and raised about $10,000 for the church.4

Tanimoto ultimately made a connection with the editor of the Saturday Review, Norman Cousins, who enthusiastically supported his plea, and ran an editorial proposing the creation of a World Peace Center in Hiroshima. Although the article claimed to be in the name of the inhabitants of Hiroshima, no one but Tanimoto was ever consulted. A Hiroshima Peace Center Foundation was set up in New York by Cousins, in order to receive American donations.5

A few years later, as part of his peace center efforts, Tanimoto began a Bible study class for a group of women that he apparently called his “Keloid girls.” He had offered other classes to victims of the bombing; the Keloid girls were special because their deformity and their sex was seen to demand a level of social exclusion that went beyond that of other Hiroshima victims. He would eventually petition the Hiroshima government for funds to give them plastic surgery, but was rejected. He then went to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, the American-run effort to study the medical effects of the atomic bombings, but he was told that this was outside the commission’s scope. The commission was not in the business of “treatment,” and keloids were not unique radiation effects.6

Eventually, Tanimoto received some funding for surgery on the Keloid Girls within Japan, bringing a group of them to Tokyo in the spring of 1952, just after the end of the American occupation. There was also one male victim in the group, Kiyoshi Kikkawa. The Japanese press, to the surprise of Kikkawa, became completely focused on the women, dubbing them the Genbaku Otome: “Atomic Bomb Maidens.” The women were attractive because of their symbolism of peaceful Japanese resilience. Kikkawa quickly felt it was going too far: At one point in their trip, the “maidens” were taken to tour a prison that held Japanese war criminals, and two of the “maidens” chosen as delegates proclaimed that while they had once held grudges against the Japanese militarists, they now saw them as being in the same situation as the survivors.7

The surgeries were at least somewhat successful. Tanimoto had been in touch with Cousins about the “maidens” ideas, and with this pilot project completed—and its publicity value proven in at least the Japanese context—Cousins was ready to push for an American side of it. This would be larger and grander: more “maidens” (no men, this time), and the surgeries would be done in the United States, where plastic surgery was state-of-the-art. Cousins is credited for transforming their name: Having changed from “Keloid Girls” to “Atomic Bomb Maidens,” they were now the “Hiroshima Maidens.”8

For six months, Cousins sought funding for the project from foundations. It would be expensive: the transportation and lodging alone would cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the operations would drive the cost into the hundreds of thousands. He saw little success, apparently because the foundations blanched at the possible negative publicity that might attach to the project.9

Changing tactics, Cousins then attempted to see if the operations might be performed pro bono. Through his personal physician, he made a connection to Dr. Arthur Barsky, who ran and had founded the plastic surgery departments at Mount Sinai Hospital and Beth Israel Hospital in New York. Barsky had literally written one of the primary reference books for the field, Principles and Practice of Plastic Surgery, in 1950. Barsky had dedicated the book to “the soldier patients of World War II,” on whom Barsky had practiced as a lieutenant colonel. The art of plastic surgery had long been associated with war injuries, and the “Maidens” project would be no exception.10

Barsky agreed to the work, so long as he could be involved in the selection of proper candidates, as keloids were tricky, as his textbook explained. “The possibility of post-operative keloid formation is an ever present one,” and certain parts of the body, and certain races of people, were more prone to them than others. “The cause and treatment of keloids are vexatious problems which have not been solved,” he lamented. But experience had given promise that many could be treated, particularly with high doses of radiation, either directly to existing keloids or after the tissue had been excised.11

Barsky, along with his colleague William Hitzig — Cousin’s physician — would fly to Japan to select the candidate “maidens,” alongside Japanese physicians. The initial plan was to look only at women who were part of Tanimoto’s Bible classes, but it was decided it would be more appropriate to widen the pool to any young woman who had been disfigured by the Hiroshima bombing. Although that would be a very large potential number, fewer than 50 actually showed up for the screening, perhaps because of rumors that the women would be subject to experimentation. Ultimately, 25 were deemed suitable candidates. The Mount Sinai surgeons had agreed to donate their labor, and the hospital agreed to provide bedding for little to no charge.12

After hearing about the project, Gen. John E. Hull, head of the US Far East Command, gave orders that a plane would be provided to bring the “maidens,” Tanimoto, and the surgeons to the United States. The flight landed first in California, where it was met by journalists and a small protest, and then proceeded onward to New York. Before the operations would begin, there was publicity to attend to. Three days after landing New York, Tanimoto, and two of the “maidens” flew back to California to appear on the popular television show This is Your Life, with the goal of making a public appeal and raising perhaps a million dollars.

For Tanimoto, it appears to have been an agonizing experience. He was apparently unaware of the format of the show, in which various “surprise” guests from his past would be shown, and the studio’s approach was disrespectfully sensational. One of the guests was Capt. Robert Lewis, the copilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber which had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Lewis was, by a later account of someone backstage, extremely drunk: Lewis had thought he would be paid for appearance, and when he discovered he would not be, he went on a bar crawl.13

While the host, Ralph Edwards, appeared to find the entire episode jovial, Tanimoto was rigid and uncomfortable-looking for almost all of the show. Lewis slurred and struggled through a stiff speech, but appears to have been genuinely affected. Supposedly, before his segment, he looked into the room where two “Hiroshima maidens” were waiting. “And there are a hundred thousand more who look like that?” he is reported to have asked. During his segment, he recounted what the bombing of Hiroshima had looked like from the air, and recounted that he had written in a log book at the time: “My God, what have we done?”14

The two “maidens” were shown in silhouette only. A public solicitation was made for their cause, with Lewis giving the first check on behalf of the crew of the Enola Gay. The New York Herald Tribune denounced the episode as a “new low in poor taste” and “commercialized sadism,” while the Associated Press judged it “morbid and maudlin.” Former American servicemen jammed the telephone lines afterwards to complain about Lewis’ appearance, believing him to have disgraced the United States for expressing anything that sounded like guilt. Ultimately the episode only attracted $55,000 in donations — a meager sum compared to what had been hoped for.15

Back on the East Coast, Tanimoto and the women spent several weeks resting in a Quaker retreat in Pennsylvania. They were objects of intense scrutiny and paparazzi attention; no activity that the “bomb-scarred” (as the newspapers called them) women did was too mundane to avoid attention from journalists.16

Soon, however, the actual surgeries began. Over the next year, a team of surgeons at Mount Sinai, led by Barsky, performed over 140 operations on the women. When not in surgery, the women lived with host families. The operations were difficult. In some cases, there were dramatic improvements in mobility and appearance. One of the women, Tomako Nakabayashi, age 26, died of a heart attack during her third operation—a point that American newspapers made little of, but led Japanese newspapers to accuse the Americans of treating the women as guinea pigs.17

By the June 1956, 10 of the women were deemed ready to return home. The rest returned in late October 1956. The surgeries involving the women who survived were considered successful, although the reactions of people seeing them for the first time would often be to focus on the scarring that was still visible. But the women appear to have found the physical transformations a great boon, even if, as one later said, “there are lingering wounds in our hearts that have not healed.”18

The story of the “Hiroshima Maidens,” which has been told many times over the years, comes in two distinct modes. The “original” mode is optimistic and, perhaps, a bit naïve. It is the version of the story pushed by Tanimoto and Cousins and most of the press who eagerly covered the women once they arrived in the United States in May 1955. This version is one of rebirth: just as Hiroshima, the city, was in the process of rebuilding after the atomic bomb, so could Hiroshima’s inhabitants rebuild their lives, even their very flesh.

City organizers in Hiroshima embraced their own version of the narrative of the city’s rebirth. Starting in the 1940s, and accelerating in the 1950s and 1960s, they emphasized that the destruction at Hiroshima would be not its end, but its new beginning. There was a tactical element to this: They needed to attract resources for development and rebuilding, and leveraging their status and fame was a potent part of this appeal. It was not an approach that denied that the past destruction had occurred, obviously, for this could not be denied. The “rebirth” narrative would be a way to lean into that story and change its trajectory. Among the hibakusha, there were understandably mixed feelings about the approach. The famous “Atomic Bomb Dome”—the ruin of the former industrial exhibition hall near ground zero—ended up being the only preserved “monument” to the destruction, serving a focal point for Hiroshima’s peaceful rebirth activities, but its preservation was contentious.19

There is a more cynical read on the “Hiroshima Maidens” and the rebirth mode of talking about the bombings. For one, this version of the story almost exclusively focuses on Hiroshima, at the expense Nagasaki, even though the case for the use of the second atomic bomb, only three days after the first, has always seemed much weaker than the case for the use of the first.

The focus on “maidens” also creates additional places for critique. There were married and divorced hibakusha who were rejected from Tanimoto’s project, and after the pilot project’s single male hibakusha, the rest were all women. The exact reasons for this have not been articulated by the players involved, but it seems that Cousins and Tanimoto felt the maidens made for more sympathetic figures and gave the project more of an apolitical appearance.20 As Robert Jacobs has put it, the “Hiroshima Maidens” were:

…generally depicted as childlike, innocent and grateful. They were uniformly spoken of as being “almost pathologically shy,” and then “blossoming in the warmth they shared in the homes of American ‘parents.’” […] The use of the term “maiden” reveals the focus on the lack of romantic prospects for the women while reinforcing the image of their innocence and childlike nature. […] The Japanese women were all students when they suffered the atomic attack, thus sparing them of any complicity in the Japanese war effort, and casting them as victims themselves of Japanese military aggression.21

While the “Hiroshima Maidens” project was being planned, the discourse about the atomic bombings in Japan radically shifted. In early March 1954, the United States tested its first deliverable thermonuclear weapon at the Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. The detonation resulted in a massive plume of radioactive fallout that contaminated thousands of square miles of ocean and islands downwind of the test site and exposed a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon No. 5, which had inadvertently strayed close to the test site. After they returned to Tokyo, the crew began showing the symptoms of radiation sickness, but not before their tuna catch was offloaded in Tokyo fish markets. Thus followed a tuna boycott and massive global attention to the issue of nuclear fallout. One of the crew would eventually die. Within Japan, this Bravo test became a major focal point for an emerging anti-nuclear political activism and generally led to an opening up of long-suppressed public discourse about Japan’s status as a “nuclear victim.”22

The “Hiroshima Maidens” project, however, was not part of this political movement. Tanimoto’s politics were far more conservative, more pro-American, and definitely not anti-nuclear. His was a politics of restoration and “moving on,” and, if anything more specific than that, about suppressing the anti-H-bomb sentiment of the Japanese that was being used to fuel protests against American military presence in Japan.23

Cousins had a more left-leaning approach, but his goals were focused on a bland humanitarianism and universalism, with a dash of world governance thrown in. While earnest, this was not particularly threatening to the status quo. As Ron Zwigenberg notes, Cousins “unwittingly promoted the American expansionist agenda with his outreach projects in Japan and elsewhere.”24

Still, this cynical read of the Hiroshima maidens effort feels, well, cynical. There is nary a humanitarian project in the Cold War that does not vacillate between these two readings, the earnest and the cynical. There is always some truth to each of them. All humanitarian aid was, arguably, part of some side of the Cold War project, and anything that came out of the United States could be justifiably considered a promotion of an American expansionist agenda, part of its bid for “soft power,” and part of the explicit attempt to foster public attitudes in the United States and abroad that would serve as to damper more radical calls for change. It is of interest to note that in the case of the “maidens,” the United States was not the only superpower with the idea: Physicians from the Soviet Union had offered to provide reconstructive surgery to the “maidens” in 1952, on the condition that they speak out against American imperialism and nuclear testing.25

Similarly, while it is certainly the case that the “Hiroshima Maidens” were part of an American attempt to assuage feelings of culpability and guilt, they were also actual people, with actual suffering. That it required maudlin public relations efforts to make the project happen, and that the aid was so selectively applied, constitute the most apt critique of the project. And there are certainly worse narratives for a devastated city than Hiroshima’s self-conscious “rebirth” and self-fashioning into a symbol of international peace.

There is also a critique to be made about the politics of memory. The mono-focus on Hiroshima has been at the expense of Nagasaki. This has had practical effects, including differences in care received by survivors. It also changes how we regard and remember the attacks. Modern surveys show that among Europeans, around 85 percent can correctly identify Hiroshima as the first city attacked by atomic weapons. That number drops by 20 percent when asked about the second.26 The exclusive focus on Hiroshima for the “maidens” project is both a product of its circumstances — Tanimoto was in Hiroshima — and a sign as any that for all of its appeals to humanitarianism, it was intended, primarily, as a symbolic gesture.

Above: Excerpts from a film made by the US Air Force on the medical effects of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, 1946. I have only included the least invasive of the images. Source: NARA.

After their surgeries, few of the “maidens” sought additional attention. In the 1980s, Shigeko Sasamori lent her voice and authority as a hibakusha to a growing anti-nuclear movement. But most appear to have sought privacy after their period having their bodies and identities subjected to extreme focus, both positive and negative.27

The hibakusha, as the psychologist Robert Lifton observed in his in-depth study of them, have a complicated relationship with their status as victims. It is a no-win situation: If their victimhood is remarked upon or treated as special, they fear that any assistance rendered is inauthentic and confirms that they carry a stigma. If, on the other hand, they are ignored, they feel abandoned.28

Barsky, the plastic surgeon, continued his own kind of ministry. In 1969, he organized a clinic in Vietnam to operate on Vietnamese and Cambodian children who had been horribly burned by American munitions. The clinic operated on over a thousand children, including Kim Phuc, the famous “napalm girl.” After American surgeons fled during the fall of Saigon, the hospital was kept running, and still operates to this day.29

Scars are a sort of archive of a body’s experiences. They fade, and they can sometimes be healed. Scars in the mind are harder to see. But the scars of history, as played out in politics and attitudes and cultural creations, can outlive the people who experienced them firsthand. What does it mean to remove scars, or to preserve them? What story do the scars of history tell?

Most of the “Hiroshima Maidens” seem to have truly desired to be apolitical, which in this case seems primarily to mean non-controversial. This desire was, of course, impossible to fulfill. Their bodies were, by virtue of where they had been on the morning of August 6, 1945, inherently political. Plastic surgery could hide some of the scars. But being hibakusha appears to have thrust survivors of the bombings into a political position: One’s existence is some kind of statement about power, and so an object for others to use in making their own kinds of political statements. To gaze upon the body of a hibakusha is a political act—but so, also, is looking away.

The “shadow” on the steps of the Sumitomo Bank, not far from ground zero, above is the most famous one. The above photograph was taken by US military forces in the city in November 1945. The initial identification of the shadow as being caused by a human being was made by an earlier survey of the bombed city.

The “shadow” in the above, as with other “flash shadows” in the city, were caused by the intense-but-brief thermal pulse from the atomic bomb. Depending on the exact surface on which it acted, the physical behavior of the “shadow” varied. In the above, crystals in the surface of the polished stone steps expanded, changing their appearance. And any dirt would have been burned off. Except, of course, where that thermal pulse was blocked — in this case, by the body of a sitting man.

(The man, contrary to popular misconception, was not “vaporized” by the heat. In this case, his death probably was quite quick — he would have been intensely burned, and then the blast wave may have scattered him into oblivion. But vaporization — being heated to the point of changing into a gas — requires more heat than was delivered by the bomb onto the ground. The actual identity of the person on the steps is unknown and probably will never be known.)

The image of the atomic bomb searing the memories of its victims onto the surfaces is a potent one. In a short story he wrote for Collier’s in 1950, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the science fiction author Ray Bradbury uses it for horrific effect. In the story, we see the remains of a house after a nuclear war set in the far future, and see how the automatic house persists despite its owners being quite gone:

The garden sprinklers pelted the windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down.

The five spots of paint — the man, the woman, the children, the ball — remained. The rest was a think charcoaled layer.

Well, that is disturbing enough. But I am glad (although not surprised) that he correctly identifies that the shadow is the inverse of the thermal effect: that is, the shadow is what was preserved (the paint images of the people) and not what was burned (the rest of the house). The shadow is not the burned part; the shadow is the unburned part, which is only visible because the area around it has been burned.

The story has some additionally disturbing elements, such as what happened to the family’s dog after the nuclear war, and the ways in which our automated robots might just outlast us all.

The kicker for the present-day reader is when Bradbury’s far future was set: “Today is August 4, 2026, the city of Allendale, California.” Bradbury’s future is our present, and will quickly be our past. We’re doing somewhat better than Bradbury guessed, although one wonders how frustrated someone like him would be at the fact that so many very basic problems from his time, problems that do not require any high technology or scientific research to address, still remain on the table.

I feel like this week has just been writing and reading and some programming (for the Oregon Road ‘83 game). All of which is fine, but it sped by so fast that I cannot really believe it is Sunday already. What do I have to show for it? Well, the article I wrote, I guess. That’s something. And the game is incrementally improved. The problem with working on the game is that every time I come close to finishing something, I realize there are like 3 more things I need to actually finish it. So I go in and finish those things, which creates 3 more things to finish… and so on.

For example, I programmed over the last couple of days, as an example to the students and also to just increase the population of the “pool” of events that can happen while driving your car, an event in which someone else with a car tries to get you to pull over, by driving behind you and honking. Do you stop? Do you ignore them? Do you try to escape? I enjoy this kind of thing, because going through the “tree” of possibilities leads to all sorts of neat little ideas and creations.

Ultimately, I decided that if you tried to escape (by speeding up) there would be some chance of getting into a car accident. So then one has to work out a table of chances, and maybe severity of the accident. But if the accident is bad, it should harm both the car you’re in and perhaps the people in it. But to harm the people in it, I realized I had to make some new health conditions, like “concussion” and “cut_head.” And then I thought, well, “cut_head” is not too bad, unless it brings with it the chance of infection, and now I’ve got to program a little condition called “infection.” And so on, and so on. Oh, you want to damage the vehicle? How does that work? Oh, you want to make it so that the other NPCs in your car might give you advice? How should that work? Etc.

And half of the time as I work on these things I get a “clever” idea for a function that would speed things up a lot (in this case, an easy way to say “pick me a random NPC who has the trait ‘afraid’,” which is not hard to do in code, but if this is a common thing to do, shouldn’t there be a way to do it automatically?)… which is great, and I am happy to use the function once I’ve written it, but now I’ve added yet another thing to the endless list.

My goal this week was to flesh out some more random events that could happen while driving on the highway. Here’s the little list I came up with. Think of each of these as completing a sentence that starts with “As you are driving down the highway…”

• …you see what looks like a deliberate barricade across the road in the distance.

• …you turn a blind corner, and are forced to hit the breaks as a barricade has been made across the road.

• …you suddenly find yourself pursued by a pickup truck, whose driver is honking wildly at you.

• …you suddenly find yourself pursued by a police car, whose lights and sirens are on.

• …a deer suddenly jumps across the road! (This would be biome-appropriate.)

• …you see that a massive truck has jackknifed itself across the road, and been abandoned.

• …you see a truck stop/gas station/diner coming up on the side of the road.

• …you see a lone person walking.

• …you see a large group of people walking.

• …you see a sign advertising a tourist trap at the next turnoff.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? That’s the fun of all of these. In some of them, you can just ignore the thing safely (don’t want to check out the tourist trap? No problem!), in some of them the player is forced to deal with the situation. Some of them are probably one-off things, some of them are likely going to have practically unlimited variations (like truck stops and gas stations and diners), most of which will be boring but useful (e.g., the possibility of getting food or fuel). Some of them are going to be possibly deadly. (Have ideas that should be added to the pool? Just post them as a comment, and I’ll consider them…!)

The tricky bit is actually getting them into the system, because while it’s easy to think up a basic idea, and even easy to flesh out the basics of it, once you start getting into all of the possible contingencies, it just ends up being elaborate.

So for the pursuing pickup truck one (which is the only one I ended up actually getting more or less done), there are again three basic options: ignoring the truck, driving faster to escape, and pulling over. If you have NPCs with the “wary” or “careful” trait, they will tell you not to pull over. If you choose to try to escape, an NPC with an “afraid” trait will complain, and any with a “careful” trait will tell you that this is dangerous. Choosing either “ignore” or “escape” will roll a dice to find out if the guy chasing you gives up. For “escape,” it also rolls a dice to decide if you crash. If the guy doesn’t give up and you don’t crash, nothing changes (the guy is still following you), and now you get to decide again. Eventually he will give up.

If you do pull over, he’ll demand half of your food. If you have an NPC with the “intimidating” or “armed” traits, they’ll offer to tell the guy to buzz off. You can tell the guy to buzz off, you can have the NPC do it (if you have one), you can give him a smaller amount of food, or you can give him what he wants. He leaves no matter what (it turns out he is not willing to actually hurt you). If you ignored an NPC’s advice, they’ll get annoyed with you.

That’s more or less the event. You can see that this involves a lot of checks and contingencies. I like that, because it means that the event will be very different depending on who else is in the car and what choices the player makes — it’s not a simple sort of thing where there is an obvious right answer, and many pathways out of it. Dying is actually quite rare in it — the only way to die in this event is to crash your car and get a bad roll for how severe the accident is. But one still feels compelled to make sure that possibility is there, and that means adding more complexity.

Of course, the only thing driving me to add all of this complexity is… me. And there’s an argument to be made for simpler-as-better, because simpler-will-get-done… but anyway, here we are.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote a very brief post on a strange thought that I’ve been rattling around my skull the last few weeks: What’s the opposite of the Doomsday Clock? And I’m not sure I know what the question even means, much less what its answer is, but I had some thoughts, and I wrote them up, for better or worse…

Read more

The Doomsday Clock, of course, is the famous design emblem that has been affixed to the masthead of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947. Since 1949, the first time its time was changed, it has served as a way to indicate how close to “midnight” — annihilation — the clock changers believe we might be. It has never made pretensions of being a scientific instrument, it has always acknowledged itself as primarily a way for Bulletin experts (or its editor-in-chief, pre-1973) to signal to a broader world what they thought the global risk trend was. One can think about it how one wants, but it has undeniably been a potent cultural artifact since the 1940s.1

So what would the opposite of the Doomsday Clock be? I don’t know why my brain popped that into my consciousness, but it has been interesting to roll around in my thoughts.

One possibility: if the Doomsday Clock is a measure of how close one is to annihilation, would the opposite be something that measured how close one was to salvation? To utopia? To disarmament? A generally good time? This would be some kind of Anti-Doomsday Clock. Which might be just the same as flipping the meaning of the clock upside-down, and not that interesting.

Another approach would be to focus on the “Clock” side of things. A Doomsday Barometer? Thermometer? Telescope? Seismograph? Microscope? Some of these seem like they would be effectively the same as the Doomsday Clock, just a different visual metaphor. Some of them make little sense metaphorically, or require an imaginative stretch. A Doomsday Microscope, to allow you to see the eschatological implications of the very small things? A Doomsday Telescope, to see annihilation coming from far, far away?

Of course, a Doomsday Graph is all too clear: the hockey-stick curve of global temperature — which looks more like a scythe than a hockey stick every year — is one version of what that could look like. A line that could, in theory, go down. But probably won’t, not in your lifetime.

Another place my mind goes is to think about avoiding a sense of measurement and countdown altogether. Perhaps an anti-Clock is really just an anti-Instrument, and the opposite of a Doomsday Clock is simply something that doesn’t try to measure anything, and is just a sign that read: doom. We have such things, of course: The End is Near, the signboard says, in the numerous classic New Yorker cartoons poking fun at sidewalk Jeremiahs. The real sidewalk Jeremiahs usually have a real goal, unlike the cartoon ones: the end is near, you can do nothing about it, so (insert whatever their religion tells you to do here).

A slicker version of the doom sign is the Extinction Symbol, which was was created in 2011 by a London artist who goes by the nom de guerre of ESP. It is simple enough: a stylized hourglass within a circle, along the same simple graphical lines of the peace symbol (which, you may be aware, is composed of the semaphore for N and D overlapped — for nuclear disarmament).

There is a website dedicated to it, that is currently down, but one can view its various iterations on the Wayback Machine. Here is how the oldest version on there, from 2012, describes its meaning:

The symbol above represents extinction. The circle signifies the planet, while the hourglass inside serves as a warning that time is rapidly running out for many species. The world is currently undergoing a mass extinction event, and this symbol is intended to help raise awareness of the urgent need for change in order to address this crisis. Estimates are that somewhere between 30,000 and 140,000 species are becoming extinct every year in what scientists have named the Holocene, or Sixth Mass Extinction. This ongoing process of destruction is being caused by the impact of human activity. Within the next few decades approximately 50% of all species that now exist will have become extinct. Such a catastrophic loss of biodiversity is highly likely to cause widespread ecosystem collapse and consequently render the planet uninhabitable for humans.

The use of an hourglass is what brought the Doomsday Clock to mind: an hourglass is a timekeeping device, of a somewhat different sort than the mechanical clock used in Doomsday Clock imagery. To “reset the clock” for the Doomsday Clock implies some intervention, because time always marches forward, but we are all familiar with setting mechanical clocks to specific times. But hourglasses don’t get reset to earlier times; they are simply restarted once they run out.

Thus I think the hourglass carries with it a much more obvious sense of finality to it. That, and the weight of tradition, is probably why hourglasses are far more heavily represented as symbols of memento mori — “remember death” — in artwork, on gravestones, and anywhere else that people might want to reminded that life is a finite thing.

The Extinction Symbol isn’t a clock, even if it invokes time. It isn’t saying how close we are. The people who made and use it treat it like a warning: they believe there is yet time to change the outcomes. Because it is not just about human extinction, but the extinction that humans cause. All things turn to dust, eventually, but we don’t have to be so directly responsible for it.

I find extinction fascinating. Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a lovely essay on the anatomist Georges Cuvier and his work cementing the concept of “extinction” into the scientific vocabulary for the New Yorker way back in 2013. When I teach about the history of biology, I love to ruminate on the fact that the very concept of extinction is so relatively recent, and was radical. To be able to say, with definition, that there was both a long, lost world of the long-dead (like dinosaurs), and that it was possible, in our modern time, to see such things occurring (as the case of the dodo clearly indicated).

To then extend it to the possibility of human extinction is quite radical yet, and indeed, there are many people who find one way or another to avoid accepting that such a thing is quite literally inevitable, one way or another, at one time or another. It is, essentially, a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Don’t get mad at me, I don’t make the rules.

A photograph of an activist’s use of the Extinction Symbol, shown above, includes the text: HOPE DIES, ACTION BEGINS. It is a rather bold idea. Both the Doomsday Clock and the Extinction Symbol are seeking action — but only the latter wants you to first abandon all hope. That may feel contradictory, but I can see the argument, I think: when talking about the climate, in particular, one needs to move beyond denial and bargaining, and into some kind of acceptance, before one can tackle it realistically. (“What if we just stopped pretending?,” Jonathan Franzen asked in 2019, to the revulsion of most people trying to do climate change messaging.)

I’m not sure any of the above are really the opposite of a Doomsday Clock, which might make as little sense as asking what the opposite of a clock is in general. If you have your own ideas, feel free to let me know.

Check out this trailer — which in true French fashion stubbornly refuses to let the watcher put subtitles on it, much less translated ones! De Gaulle would approve…!

It hits all of the Spielbergian World War II notes, that is for sure. It’s Saving Private Ryan, but for the French. And I have to say, I thought it was really entertaining. It does that perfect little dance of building and releasing tension that good war movies do, where it makes things feel hopeless and then, at the last moment, victory is obtained. It is also pretty funny at times — despite its at times dour subject, it manages to keep things moving along. (Thank goodness for Simon Russell Beale’s portrayal of Churchill, whose appearances are almost always a form of comic relief.)

Is the film historically accurate? I am not an expert on this side of World War II, and found myself having to look up a lot of things afterwards, and my sense is that aspects of it are accurate, aspects of it are fictionalized/streamlined/simplified, and that the overall argument of the film is one of several ways to interpret these events. Which is to say, not so different from pretty much any plausibly accurate historical drama, where “accuracy” is a tricky standard to apply.

Read more

The spring of 1950 is an interesting moment for thinking about US capabilities just at the end of the American nuclear monopoly. The Soviets had tested their first atomic bomb the previous fall. The Korean War had not yet started — that would happen in late June. As I write about in my most recent book (obligatory plug), the Korean War was an important turning point for American nuclear policy, and the start of the serious arms build-up that we tend to associate with the Cold War. While the Joint Chiefs of Staff had begun to take the possibility of war with the Soviets more seriously after the Berlin Crisis of 1948, President Truman himself was still opposed to re-militarizing and hesitant regarding anything like that looked like either conventional or atomic expansion. So this is before the US was actually on a true “Cold War” footing, even though the US Air Force was already beating that drum very loudly, at least internally.

We can get an unusually good glimpse of how the Strategic Air Command (SAC) viewed OFFTACKLE, because many of the presentations for a Commanders’ Conference at Ramey Air Force Base in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, from late April 1950 have been declassified. They make for interesting reading in and of themselves, particularly for their ideological content — the head of SAC intelligence, Maj. Geneal Charles Cabell, for example, was adamant that the Soviet Union was planning world conquest via direct military hostilities against the United States, a position he realized was deeply at-odds with how the CIA’s view that the Soviets would use subtle and sneakier tactics (subversion, playing allies against each other, etc.). Cabell urged the other SAC commanders to accept that they were not truly in peacetime: “we are at war right now and … an all-out national effort designed to maintain permanent military and political superiority over the Soviet Union is required.”1

The war plan at this time was known as “OFFTACKLE” (sometimes rendered with a space in the middle). It was a “Joint Outline Emergency War Plan” commissioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in November 1949, and meant to replace their existing war plan, known formally as JCS 1844/32. There were a succession of “plans” from 1946 through the 1950s with “colorful” codenames of this sort: PINCHER, BROILER, BUSHWACKER, GRABBER, SIZZLE, and so on.2 Unlike some of these, OFFTACKLE was a realistic “war plan,” as opposed to, say, early studies of what nuclear war might look like that were used for planning arsenal sizes, and were thus unrealistic when it came to actual US capabilities. (OFFTACKLE would itself, a few months later, be renamed SHAKEDOWN.)

As Maj. General S.E. Anderson emphasized in his presentation of it at the conference, OFFTACKLE was the first war plan developed with the fact that the Soviets also had atomic bombs in mind. It planned for a two year war, based on the imagined capabilities of the US and the USSR starting in December 1949. It would proceed in several phases. The first would start with “D-day,” the beginning of the war, and continue for the first three months. This would be based around securing major US launching points for Soviet attacks: above-all, the preservation of the United Kingdom, but also Japan (particularly Okinawa), and the oil-producing states of the Middle East.

To do this would require a fast and massive movement of US forces, because the deployed forces in places like the UK were considered inadequate to the task. By the third day of the war, the SAC forces, a bit over 500 bombers largely based in the continental United States, would be shuffled around to the UK and Eielson base in Alaska. Only 256 of these were “A-carriers” — nuclear capable.3

The first atomic strikes would not take place until the sixth day of the war, when medium bombers (B-29s and B-50s) would attack targets in the Soviet Union from bases in the United Kingdom, and heavy bombers (B-36) would attack from either Alaska, Canada (Goose Bay), or the Middle East (via South Dakota).4

Over the course of four hours, 26 “target areas” would be bombed by the UK bombers, who would then withdraw to bases in the UK and the Middle East. Six targets would also be hit by B-36s from the North American bases. A second strike was tentatively imagined to take place no more than three days later. If the UK bases “remain tenable,” then over the next 30 days, a total of 123 “industrial centers” would be bombed. By comparison, a previous plan, TROJAN targeted 70. Note that the US stockpile at this point was about 300 atomic bombs, with an average yield of about 30 kilotons.5 One report from February 1950 that I have says that the full plan at that moment was to drop 17,610 tons of high explosives on Soviet targets as well as 292 atomic bombs, 72 of which were set aside for “re-attack” of targets presumably not destroyed by the first wave.6

A later presentation at the same conference by Brig. General John B. Montgomery, SAC director of operations, displayed the above map of the 123 targets. It noted that adequate intelligence only existed for 60 of the targets, and that the other 63 would require pre-strike reconnaissance before they could be successfully attacked. The targets ranged across the whole of the Soviet Union, although most were concentrated in its western parts, and some where in Warsaw Pact nations.7

The second phase of OFFTACKLE would take place between the 3rd and 18th months of the war. During the period, the US and Europe would be recovering from whatever the initial Soviet atomic attack against them was, to continue efforts at defending against further Soviet attacks, to continue a “very greatly reduced” strategic air campaign against the USSR, and to maintain control of key assets like the UK and the Middle East. Very interestingly, securing Spain against invasion was also listed — it is clear that they believed that the Soviets would effectively occupy all of the rest of Western Europe up until the point. If the UK fell, SAC would move their forces to North Africa.

The third phase, from the 18th through the 36 months of the war, would involve the Allied forces pushing the Soviet forces out of Western Europe. After 24 months, they would have also created a “build up” of strategic air units for another major attack phase. The SAC presenters have very little to say about this and the previous phase, because this wasn’t their part of the war — they were the bombers. But this was clearly envisioned as a major effort that would require a significant conventional effort as well.

During a “fourth and final phase,” from 36 months until the end of the war, would involve “re-entry in force into Europe, defeat of the USSR, and the establishing of control over the defeated enemy.” There is an understandable vagueness to this stage of planning, given the unknowns and how much is dependent on how things worked out in the previous phases. And, as noted, this part plainly this would not be SAC’s job. There were, as another presentation emphasized, also many “soft spots,” places where there were need for improvements if an optimistic outcome was to be assured.

What we have here is a war still measured in months and years, not hours and days. It is World War II on nuclear steroids: an initial period of heavy bombing, but one assumed to be taking place while a massive Soviet army is invading Western Europe. Like World War II, logistics was key: you can’t fight if you’re not close-enough to do so. Holding territory, rebuilding infrastructure in real-time, continuing to put pressure on the enemy — these kinds of issues, ones which seem relatively quaint compared to the imagination of nuclear war that would dominate in a decade, still hold sway in an era where most of the weapons are being delivered by relatively short-ranged bombers, where the number of atomic bombs available is still relatively limited (to the thousands and thousands it would soon become), and where a Soviet attack on the USA is assumed to be something the US could recover from in a few months.

There was no discussion of casualties from what I can see. This is hardly surprising, but seems worth noting. This is a vision for how SAC saw its job in the event of a nuclear war at the time. It was not something that would be easily to implement. At this time, the US military had access to exactly zero fully-assembled nuclear weapons — their nuclear cores were still being kept by the US Atomic Energy Commission. Assembling the weapons had gotten a bit easier since the early days of the atomic arsenal, but there were still a limited number of trained teams who were capable of doing it, and a limited number of both weapons and atomic-capable aircraft. SAC was planning to use only six “assembly teams” available to put the weapons together for OFFTACKLE.

The atomic bomb was definitely a central part of this war plan, as can be seen, but it’s an ugly, gritty-looking war. There is no sense that the atomic bomb would be decisive in and of itself. There is no delusion that the Soviets would be totally destroyed by the initial atomic assault, nor that they would immediately sue for peace. In this period both Soviet and American planners agreed that atomic bomb alone “would not win the war,” as David Holloway puts it.8

One can readily see why even the SAC commanders had little enthusiasm for this kind of war, little belief that this was something one would want to voluntarily get into. I mention this because a frequent question online is: why did the USA not use its atomic bombs to preemptively destroy the Soviet Union? Aside from the political and moral aspects to the question (nothing could be further from Truman’s intentions at that time), a strategic answer is that doing so would hardly be a walk in the park, and an ultimate victory, defined as a total elimination of the Soviet Union, was hardly assured. OFFTACKLE was one of the more optimistic plans they had considered at the time, and it’s not all that optimistic, as the commanders themselves recognized.

How did the Air Force commanders receive this information? We have limited sources to answer this, but one is interesting. Immediately after the conference on OFFTACKLE, General George C. Kenney, who had until 1948 been the head of SAC, wrote a letter to General Hoyt Vandenberg about it. He was blunt in his assessment:

It was quite evident to all the conferees that Plan “Offtackle” was decidedly unrealistic. The one conclusion that almost everyone seemed to reach was that if we waited until Russia hit us, Europe, very probably includ[ing] the United Kingdom, would be lost to us. To repeat the Normandy Beach operation is something that is almost inconceivable. The problem of gaining air superiority over the beachhead two or three years after the shooting war started and after Russia had organized her defenses against such an invasion, the overcoming of the submarine menace in order to embark the huge number of troops and supplies for such a landing, and all the other complications in the face of atomic weapons or even conventional air operations, would seem to rule this type of warfare into the realm of impracticability.

He then went on to criticize nearly every aspect of the plan. He did not think that the US would be able to hold an inch of Western Europe, and that it would take “years” to gain adequate bases in the Middle East. He continued:

I believe that any plan looking toward July 1, 1952 as the probable D-day of a third World War should visualize that we will have no holdings on the other side of the Atlantic. Our primary move will be made by the Strategic Air Command against targets in Russia itself. If our air defense is good enough to prevent the Russian A-bomb attacks from knocking us out of the war and the attacks of our Strategic Air Command are powerful enough to bring Russia to terms, we will win. If not, we will either lose the war or get into a long-drawn-out contest that we certainly will not win and which will probably result in a stalemate with both sides exhausted and civilization as we now know it a thing of the past.

Which is both depressingly realistic as much as it is dire: World War III, Kenney is saying, needs to be predicated on the “wargasm,” on the total and utter destruction of the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, and no nonsense about holding territory and playing at a World War II redux. More than that, he felt that the assumption that the US would not initiate a nuclear war would have to be banished: “We have got to do something about the conception that we must wait until Russia hits us before we can start shooting. … By all previous definitions, we are now in a state of war with Russia. Whether we call it a cold war or apply any other term, we are not winning. … It would not be a preventative war, because we are already at war.”9

I did not come away with a real sense of what Edinburgh was like as a city, as I was really there just for the conference. I did drink some Scotch and some haggis, as one does. (I have had haggis before. The haggis I had in Edinburgh was not the best haggis I have ever had, but it was fine.) I thought the architecture was all a bit grim and austere for my tastes. I did appreciate that it was a lot less hot than Paris — it was around 60ºF/15.5ºC while it was 90ºF/32ºC in Paris. I was actually cold at times, owing to my lack of having brought appropriate clothing for the weather. Which was a nice break.

I had the oddest hotel room, as a hotel very close to the hotel. When one entered the room (see below), it looked like it was a small, European-style room with a large window. But… there was no window. It is a fake window. Behind the curtain is a blank wall. The “sunlight” spilling over the top is an LED strip. Super strange. I did not mind it too much — I just used the room to sleep — but there was a strange internal prickling in my mind, which for no very rational reason abhorred the idea of a windowless room/tomb.

I had many people at the conference ask me what I was working on next, which is standard academic-speak (and also a little annoying when one has only recently published a book and moved to another country), but it did give me an opportunity to think a bit more about whatever my “next big project” should be. I have a few ideas. I am in the process of trying to finish up some other “smaller” projects, first, though. But it was useful to think about these things, to think about what the next few books ought to be, over the next 5 years or so.

I did not watch the World Cup, but I kept track of the scores. La France est mort; vive la France. The force de M’bappé was not enough for them to overcome their opponents, alas. While disappointing in a way, I have reverted to my former state of not caring at all about sports very easily. C’est la vie.

I’ve been trying to catch up on various work-related things since I returned. But I did have a chance to go with my wife and some friends to see an exhibit of Leonora Carrington’s (1917-2011) surrealist artwork at the Musée du Luxembourg. I was not aware of Carrington’s work at all prior to going. The exhibit had everything from little scribbles she made as a very young child and teenager, up through her work as an older woman living in Mexico. The museum texts were entirely in French but my reading French is basically at a level where I could understand almost all of it (there was some art-specific terminology that I had to look up) and read it at a reasonable pace, and so that felt like progress.

Carrington’s early work was interesting to see because one could see how a schoolgirl interest in very-British-looking fairytale imagery gradually morphed into surrealism as she became older and more serious about it. Her early surrealist work also seemed to take the form of trying on a variety of different artistic styles. Some of it reminded me variously of Edward Gorey, Marc Chagall, Georgia O’Keefe, and Hieronymus Bosch. Eventually it settled into a sort of style that felt very much of her own, playing with themes taken from various “mythological” and “mystical” sources ranging from the British/Celtic through Zoroastrianism and the Old Testament.

The exhibit also had a lot of details about Carrington’s personal life as well. She was very well-to-do British, fell in with the surrealists, had a notorious affair with Max Ernst, and ended up in Mexico during World War II. It seemed like she had quite a full life. It was an interesting exhibit.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I posted a mirror of my latest article for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which is a selection of films (with my commentary, and my selection of a short clip from each) that I have arbitrarily designated as “essential to understanding the nuclear age”:

In truth it was not entirely clear to me what the organizing principle was until quite late in the game. My list of 13 was down from around 40 possible candidates that I considered for this list. It was initially labeled as the “best” nuclear films, but I didn’t really want that to be what I was claiming, because there are arguably “better” films by other criteria (and certainly, as I mention in my accompanying text, this is a very Anglocentric selection). I am also aware there is a conspicuous jump between the 1980s and the 2020s, and that the final two inclusions are obviously a form of recency bias (I am not sure I would count them as being “as important” or “as essential” as, say, Dr. Strangelove). But I was pleased that while many of them are well-known and obvious, some of them are more obscure. I will probably be writing about at least one of them (Testament) in some more depth in the near future on here.

What will I be writing about for Doomsday Machines next week? I am not totally sure. I think by rights it should be something that is less cultural, just because I’ve had a few films-related posts in a row. So probably something either related to a document, or something related to research for Oregon Road ‘83. We shall see what grabs me…

Read more

Nuclear films are both reflections of the zeitgeist in which they are made and shapers of it. They feed off of both popular and expert anxieties, while also helping to solidify the terms on which these anxieties are engaged. While some themes are apparently universal (how many ways there are to blunder into nuclear war), some feel very much of their particular time and place.

In creating this list, I was cognizant that there are dozens of films that incorporate some sort of “nuclear” elements into their plots. Narrowing it down to 13 required implementing arbitrary criteria. Ultimately, I decided that any film on my best-of list needed to be explicitly engaged with nuclear themes in a serious and sustained way. (And so no films in which nukes are merely “MacGuffins” that could be swapped out with other “dangerous objects” would be included. Nor would there by any films which could only be allegorically understood to be about nuclear issues—no “the-dragons-are-nukes,” unless actual nukes also play a role in the plot). I focused on films about nuclear weapons, not nuclear power, with one important exception. I arbitrarily limited the scope to fiction, not documentaries (but if I were including documentaries, Errol Morris’ 2003 The Fog of War would be first in line). I also excluded all television and streaming series (sorry, HBO’s 2019 Chernobyl).

And, finally, any film on the list would have to be a “good film,” one that I felt I could recommend people watch without reservation or qualification. The was the trickiest and most subjective criterion, particularly for a historian, because there are many films that I think are profoundly interesting as artifacts, or have historical importance, but are not, in fact, great films. For example, while MGM’s The Beginning or the End (1947) is historically fascinating—it was made in collaboration with Manhattan Project officials—it is actually quite a tedious watch, in my opinion.

This list has a strong Anglophone bias, and with a few notable exceptions approaches the topic from largely American points of view. This is a reflection of its author’s limitations and relative accessibility for an American. Undoubtedly lists could (and should) be created from different cultural and national perspectives. The list is presented chronologically and can be thought of as an unfolding of the nuclear perspective from the early nuclear age to the present.

Godzilla

1954, Toho. Directed by Ishirō Honda. Released in the USA as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, in 1956.

Inspired in part by the 1954 Castle Bravo fallout disaster, which killed a Japanese fisherman and led to a boycott on tuna in Japan, Godzilla (Gojira in the Japanese original) is a more complicated film than just “radioactive monster attacks Tokyo.” Godzilla, the monster, is less of a metaphor for the atomic bomb itself than a representation of Japan’s submerged psychological reckoning with the horrors experienced by its civilians in World War II. Such discussions were officially suppressed during the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), but, like the monster, emerged as a consequence of US nuclear testing in the Pacific. The sequences with the rubber monster costume have probably aged the worst, but the films of how the people reconcile themselves with their destruction and their duty still hold up extremely well.

On the Beach

United Artists, 1959. Directed by Stanley Kramer.

The premise of On the Beach, adapted from the 1957 novel by the British author Nevil Shute, is that a future global nuclear war using cobalt bombs has both eradicated most of human civilization and created a massive, deadly cloud of fallout that is gradually circulating the globe, killing all in its path. Those in the southern hemisphere are momentarily safe, but the cloud is coming. An American submarine crew pursues one last-ditch hope to discover a path to survival, but it turns out to be spurious. All must make peace, in their own way, with the fact that the Earth will soon be dead. Although the underlying premise is technically dubious, the psychological resonances made it one of the most potent nuclear-themed films of the 1950s, and highly representative of a strain of fatalism that surrounds nuclear war.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

1964, Columbia Pictures. Directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy about the risk of unauthorized and accidental nuclear war fundamentally altered the lexicon with which we talk about nuclear weapons, and the performances of Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and Slim Pickens created durable cultural archetypes. While loosely adapted from Peter George’s 1958 novel Red Alert, Kubrick’s own sensibilities both about nuclear war and how to talk about it run through it. The themes of unauthorized nuclear use, mutual assured destruction, and the dangers of automation are all deadly serious, but wrapping it all in a farce makes it a work of genius and helps it stand the test of time. When Daniel Ellsberg, then still at RAND and having just completed a classified study into the command and control problems central to the plot, saw the film in theatres, he was amazed — it was, he wrote later, “essentially, a documentary.”

Fail Safe

1964, Columbia. Directed by Sidney Lumet.

Fail Safe might be remembered as the film of mid-1960s nuclear anxiety had it not come out the same year as Dr. Strangelove and overlapped so significantly with its themes — so significantly that Kubrick sued it for copyright infringement and caused it to be released after his own film. Lumet’s film, a fairly faithful adaptation of Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s 1962 novel of the same name, plays the subject of accidental nuclear war and lack of control straight. Although rendered a box office flop by its circumstances, and while certainly the lesser of the two films, its management of tension has led to its retrospective status as a critical success.

The China Syndrome

1979, Columbia Pictures. Directed by James Bridges.

The sole film specifically about nuclear power on this list, The China Syndrome is a taut thriller that was elevated into something even more by its historical moment. The film, starring Michael Douglas, Jane Fonda, and Jack Lemmon, is about the threat of a meltdown at a nuclear power plant in Southern California. The threat wasn’t the reactor, per se, it was the corner-cutting and coverup perpetuated by a power utility more concerned with profits than safety. The film would work on its own merits, but the fact that the film premiered less than two weeks before the Three Mile Island accident catapulted it to the position of prophecy—for better and for worse.

Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen)

1983, Kyodo Eiga. Directed by Mori Masaki.

Barefoot Gen, first a manga (Japanese comic book) published in 1976, is a fictionalized version of writer and illustrator Keiji Nakazawa’s experiences of being a six-year-old boy growing up in Hiroshima before, during, and after the atomic bombing. It is powerful, rich, and moving. Much of the story is a preamble obscure to most Westerners: what life was like in the city before the attack, with its food shortages and political repression. The “cute” manga style fits the worldview of the child protagonists, increases the dread for what the viewer knows is coming, and contrasts starkly with the nothing-held-back depictions of the aftermath. The anime (cartoon movie) version was released in 1983, and is an exceptional adaptation of the form, content, and message of the original.

The Day After

1983, ABC. Directed by Nicholas Meyer.

This classic made-for-television movie about the run-up to nuclear war and its immediate aftermath aired on ABC in November 1983 and was seen by nearly 100 million people—over 40 percent of the entire US population. Coming at one of the highest points of Cold War nuclear anxiety in the United States and Western Europe, the film attempted to show what nuclear war would look like from the point of view of average Americans. Even though it was substantially toned down from what it could have been (see Threads), it was still disturbing enough that ABC advertised hotlines with psychological counselors. President Reagan watched The Day After at Camp David, and wrote in his diary as ringing an endorsement as one could imagine: “powerfully done,” “very effective,” and “left me greatly depressed.” The film is sometimes cited as a factor in Reagan’s willingness to initiate talks with the Soviet Union and initiate “the golden era of arms control.”

Testament

Paramount, 1983. Directed by Lynne Littman.

Among the crowded field of “the day after nuclear war” films of the early 1980s, Testament stands out for its relative quiet, reasonableness, and lack of sensationalism. The fictional suburb of San Francisco where it is set is well outside the blast radii, but the tight-knit community is devastated nonetheless: Family members who worked in the city never came home, people turned hostile and anxious in the face of rationing and looting, and nuclear fallout begins to take a slow but steady toll on the young, the elderly, and eventually all those in between. There is no chaotic descent into anarchy, no hordes of motorcycle gangs, no “lone survivor” fantasies. It plays out in living rooms, bedrooms, churches, queues for food and gasoline, and the memories of the deceased. The focus on the domestic aftermath of cities that “survived” the immediate spasm of war, but still suffer its consequences in the weeks and months to come, distinguishes Testament from nearly every other American nuclear war film.

WarGames

1983, MGM. Directed by John Badham.

WarGames is simultaneously a very ridiculous film and a very intelligent one. A teenage computer hacker infiltrates a government mainframe that, unbeknownst to him, is actually an advanced supercomputer at NORAD run by a highly capable-but-flawed artificial intelligence. And when he engages the computer’s AI in a game of “Global Thermonuclear War” on a lark, he is similarly unaware that the AI lacks the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction (and the generals aren’t so good at it, either). Ultimately he, his plucky love interest, and an exiled scientist have to travel to Cheyenne Mountain to help the machine understand that with nuclear war, “the only winning move is not to play.”

Threads

BBC, 1984. Directed by Mick Jackson.

Widely regarded as the darkest and most dismal of the “day after” genre, Threads was a made-for-television BBC creation that attempted to give a raw, unflinching view of what global nuclear war in the 1980s would look like from the perspective of the city of Sheffield. The world that Threads presents is not great: Aside from the horrific level of death and destruction caused by a megaton-range detonation itself, there follows a complete breakdown in social order. Jumping a decade into the future shows the nation deeply depopulated by the effects of fallout, disruption, and nuclear winter, with the just-hanging-on survivors barely capable of speaking English. Deliberately bleak, it’s a movie that people like to say they’ve seen, but nobody enjoys watching.

When the Wind Blows

Recorded Releasing, 1986. Directed by Jimmy T. Murakami.

This distinctly British animated film, adapted from a 1982 graphic novel of the same name by Raymond Briggs, follows an aging couple living in rural Sussex before, during, and after a nuclear war. Stereotypically British stiff upper lips, enhanced by blundering ignorance, keeps them in largely non-complaining good humor even as the world collapses around them. The unusual mixture of hand-animated and stop-motion animation, with a title song by David Bowie and a score by Roger Waters, adds to the study of contrasts in this dark parody, which ends with the couple inadvertently and cheerfully getting into their own body bags.

Oppenheimer

2023, Universal. Directed by Christopher Nolan.

There have been several attempts to represent the complicated life of J. Robert Oppenheimer on film. Nolan’s is the most stylized and artistic, and it’s based on the best source material (Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus). Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a drawn, anxious, stricken, and deeply flawed figure. His life is depicted less as a hagiography than a cautionary tale, a parable about the extreme possibilities and limitations of human ambition, agency, and control. It deftly uses concerns about accidental atmospheric ignition as a way to depict Oppenheimer’s gnawing dread that his invention had possibly doomed human civilization.

A House of Dynamite

2025, Netflix. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

This recent nuclear thriller depicts the 20 minutes between the detection of an unattributed missile launch heading towards the United States, and its arrival at its target. Director Kathryn Bigelow shows this same interval of time three times, from multiple perspectives. While there is much that one could argue with regarding the particulars of the film’s scenario, the film very astutely highlights the constraints put on deliberation, fact-finding, and decision-making by the short flight time of a ballistic missile and the inadequacy of defensive systems, political and military organizations, and any individual president to cope with those realities.

Honorable mentions

There are many other films one might want to include in such a list. Those that did not make the cut, but came close to it for me, included the suppressed British nuclear aftermath pseudo-documentary The War Game (1966); the ruminative Soviet post-apocalyptic Dead Man’s Letters [Pisma myortvogo cheloveka] (1986); the impending nuclear attack cult-classic Miracle Mile (1988); the Japanese Hiroshima family retrospective Black Rain [Kuroi ame] (1989); the late-Cold War Tom Clancy submarine defection thriller The Hunt for Red October (1990); the Cuban Missile Crisis dramatization Thirteen Days (2000); and the post-Cold War Tom Clancy nuclear terrorism thriller The Sum of All Fears (2002).

Did I miss one that you think is vital? (I’m sure I did!) Or at least an honorable mention? Let me know in the comments!

I am not a sports fan (of any sport, I don’t discriminate), but it has been fun to be in France during the World Cup, particularly as they have been doing so well. One does not need to watch it to know how they are doing — the cheers from every café, bar, brasserie, etc. that has pulled out a big-screen television (which is to say, almost all of them) can be heard from blocks away. But the game last week, between France and Morocco, was interesting, because there are a significant number of Moroccans who live in Paris, and so sometimes the cheers would be for things that worked against France.

I do not have an informed opinion about who “ought” to win the World Cup (I’m happy to root for France because I’m living here, and it is fun to see the people so happy about it, but if I wasn’t living here, I wouldn’t care one way or the other), although like many I was glad that after Trump’s interference on behalf of team USA that they were thoroughly pasted by the Belgians, because there really was no other just outcome.

I feel bad for team USA, because I am sure that they did not want to be cast as the beneficiaries of bully-corruption, but once they were, they were trapped: if they did well, it would be roundly considered as a tainted victory. But that is how it goes when there’s a narcissistic bully heading a country, someone who has just no sense of when he should not try to make everything about him, and who is surrounded by yes-men cultists. As always, he finds the way to squander any possible goodwill that people might have towards the United States, while simultaneously sabotaging it. I don’t think people who are not Americans can quite appreciate how burdensome it gets to have this kind of daily psychological assault. The prospect of having to deal with that, and the acuteness of living under it on a daily basis, is one reason why we wanted to leave.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote about Panic in Year Zero! (1962), a nuclear post-apocalyptic road-trip film that was marketed as a titillating grind-house film but is a bit more complex than that. I liked it more than I expected to, in the end — it is in many ways very much a product of its time, but it is also more complex and ambiguous than it really had any right being.

The film is one of many that I looked at while compiling a list of 13 “essential” nuclear films for an article for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which should be coming out next week, I believe. I will probably just re-post a version of it as my blog post for next week, as I will be out of town anyway (at the History of Science Society meeting in Edinburgh).

The list was a tricky one to compile, because there are some “obvious” films that need to be on there (Dr. Strangelove, The Day After, Threads, etc.) but I wanted to make it a bit more than just the obvious ones. So there are some ones that would be perhaps unfamiliar to even people who are fairly steeped in this stuff. And I tried to give brief commentary/discussion of what I thought made each of them worthy of being on the list, beyond, again, the obvious things one could say…

OK, that’s all for this week — a downside of the canicule (heat wave) is that I mostly just stay inside working/hiding from the heat, so I have little to report! But next week I will be in Edinburgh so there should be much more.

Read more

The setup: Harry Baldwin (Milland), his wife Ann (Jean Hagen), son Rick (Frankie Avalon), and daughter Karen (Mary Mitchel) have left their Los Angeles home early one morning, camper in tow, to go on fishing trip into the wilderness. While on the road and some ways out of the city, they see a fantastic flash of light in the distance. They tune in to an emergency broadcasting station, and learn that it may have been a nuclear detonation.1 They then see a mushroom cloud rising over Los Angeles. Later, a radio report makes it clear that it wasn’t the only victim: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Paris, and Rome are all destroyed as well, and retaliation against an unnamed enemy was also occurring.

For the rest of the film, the (nuclear) family, dominated by the patriarchal Harry, go about the business of “survival.” Harry is essentially convinced, from the first moment, that the world is about to fall apart, and that this will pit all against all. He approaches this in a hard and often condescending fashion, lecturing all who will listen about what the new facts of life are going to be. And he of course sees confirmation in this everywhere he looks, as panic, disorder, and violence start to bubble up almost immediately. Harry’s ethos for most of the film is quite simple: if it’s all against all, then he wants his family to survive, and he’s willing to do anything make that happen. Trust is a luxury he can’t afford.

Ann, by comparison, is the voice of compassion and hope. She’s the one who frets about how her mother, in Los Angeles, is doing. She’s the one who desperately wants to avoid causing more harm in the world. She’s the one who worries that her teenage son, Rick, is all-to-eagerly embracing Harry’s dog-eat-dog mindset, and is likely to become a murderer before all of this is over. Harry has no time for this, and gives her numerous lectures about the new ethos, in a frustrated, smug, and condescending tone of voice:

Ann: Are you trying to scare me? You’re wasting your time, I’m already scared.

Harry: Look, sweetheart: two-and-two doesn’t make four anymore. At the moment it adds up to exactly nothing. For the next few weeks, survival is going to have to be on an individual basis.

A: What do you want to do, write off the rest of the world?

H: When civilization gets civilized again, I’ll re-join.

A: It’s still here.

Harry is portrayed as wanting the best for his family, but he also frequently crosses lines towards that end. Early on, he turns what was intended as an honest transaction (buying supplies from a hardware store) into a robbery when the store owner wants to do the state-mandated background check before selling Harry guns. Harry sees this as madness and, of course, inconvenient, and he even fools himself into thinking that he’s not robbing the man:

Proprietor: This isn’t enough.

Harry: Is this? [gestures with a handgun that he has just swiped and loaded]

P: Well, just about.

H: Give me a receipt for the cash.

P: This isn’t a hold up?

H: No.

P: Then what about the balance?

H: I’ll owe it to you. Write the receipt.

The proprietor and Harry get into a fist fight, which sends the gun flying. Harry cries out for help, and Rick rushes in, grabs the handgun, and jabs it into the ribs of the proprietor. Harry grabs even more guns as he leaves.

H: I owe you $200. I’ll pay you when I can.

P: In my book, you’re just a thug.

H: [to Rick] If he makes one stupid move, shoot him. Come on. [to Ann, outside, harshly] Get in the car!

This is a world on the precipice: people are still paying for things with cash and checks, both of which require a functioning society to have any value. Politeness and social norms are being followed… until they suddenly aren’t. And although Harry seems to be in denial about the fact that he is robbing the man (“I’ll pay you when I can” is a hollow promise if you believe you are about to go into hiding from a coming civilizational collapse), Ann is not.

Back in the car, Ann looks at her husband in horror while they drive.

A: I can’t get over it. All these years, I thought I knew you, but you turn out to be a stranger. Robbing and mauling people like some kind of a cheap hoodlum.

H: We’re fighting for our lives, Ann. Every footpath will be crawling with men saying, ‘no matter what, I’m going to live,’ and that’s what I’m saying, too.

A: Intelligent people don’t just turn their backs on the rest of the world.

H: Under these conditions, intelligent people will be the first to try.

Ann points out that he just enlisted his teenage son in armed robbery, eliciting nothing but any angry snap from Harry, and then Rick chimes in: “We’re on our own, Ma, no rules, no regulations, and no laws.” Harry bristles at this, too: “Don’t write off the law; the law will come back. I just want us to be around when it does.”

The depiction of Harry is quite interesting and complex. He’s clearly coded as a villain in most of these scenes. He’s nasty to everyone, including the family who are meant to be the object of all of his sacrifices and actions. He looks increasingly wild as the film continues. But, the film implies as well, he’s not completely wrong: the society is rapidly falling apart, there are plenty of evil-doers and opportunists around, and his concerns about food, weapons, fallout, and insecurity are borne out again and again. That the actor playing Harry (Milland) is also the director is quite interesting, and one wonders what he thought about it (unfortunately, Milland does not mention the film at all in his autobiography).

The Baldwin family continue on their way, committing other various crimes (in the name of survival) as they go. They run into three men who menace them with threats of violence and hep-cat lingo (“We’re the new highway patrol… someone dropped a bomb, dad, crazy kick…”), but Rick gets the jump on them with a shotgun and they are run off.

Later, the family get into a classic post-apocalyptic traffic jam of others joining the exodus (in amazing period cars). When they find it difficult to rejoin the traffic after having left it for a while, Harry creates a sociopathic “stop sign” by spraying gasoline across the road and lighting up a wall of flame. It stops the traffic, all right, but not before setting at least one car completely ablaze — which doesn’t seem to bother Harry much.

Ultimately they end up deep in the woods, living in a literal cave (to avoid fallout). If this film were made today, one would imagine that this would be seen as pretty bleak living, an outward manifestation of Harry’s internal psychological state. Instead, it is portrayed as superficially idyllic living (and, in general, none of the family’s actors ever look like they are “roughing it” — they’re all pretty clean and kept, and one must imagine that Rick brought a generous supply of pomade to keep his hair looking as well-coifed as it is).

They have access to a radio, so they have some information about the outside world. General war has broken out between the United States and the unnamed enemy, and the United Nations has declared that it is now “Year Zero.” Harry wants to eschew all contact with other people until order has reasserted itself, to Ann’s frustration. “I love you, Harry,” she tells him at one point, “but not more than a future without hope.”

Eventually, the three hoodlums from before resurface. Two of them come across Karen, the daughter, and rape her before Ann can chase them off with a rifle. Harry and Rick track two of them back to a farmhouse and execute them in cold blood. They also discover that the trio had been keeping a teenage girl, Marilyn, as a sex slave in the house, having murdered her parents. Marilyn agrees to come back with the Baldwins after some hesitation.

That night, Harry talks with Ann, sharing self-doubts that he has hitherto kept to himself:

A: Harry, you can’t go on torturing yourself.

H: I killed two men.

A: I tried to kill them, too, but I missed, I just wasn’t a good-enough shot.

H: I looked for the worst in others and I found it in myself.

A: But you brought Marilyn here. That was kind, and good!

H: Even that was Rick’s idea.

Eventually, the radio announcer tells them that “relocation centers” have been established around the state for survivors, with the nearest one being 135 miles away. Ann and Rick are thrilled, but Karen’s experience has made her a newly hardened recruit to the Harry school of distrust:

Rick: People!

Ann: Civilization!

Karen: Some civilization.

A: What’s the matter, dear?

K: All our friends are probably dead. Our house… my school… everything’s… gone. Everything’s changed. Including me!

And she’s right — but of course, that kind of cynicism doesn’t get you anywhere. It doesn’t tell you what you ought to do next.

Harry decides against leaving; he feels they’re better off where they are, for now, and he fears the trip. He worries about “the wrong people.” Ann asks him how safe they are in their cave-forest setup, and Harry explains: “I have some measure of control here. Out there, none. Now leave me alone, please.” That night, after everyone else turns in, Harry sits outside in the dark, with his rifle. He looks stricken, and wordlessly puts his face in his hands.

The final act involves the third hoodlum coming across Marilyn and Rick chopping firewood. In the ensuing confrontation, Marilyn shoots the hoodlum, but not before he shoots Rick in the thigh. The family pile into the car and head to the closest town seeking a doctor for the unconscious Rick. While on the road, the radio tells them that the war is close to over: “Year Zero is drawing to a close.” Ann asks: “Does this mean that the war is over?” Harry replies: “For some people, yes. For us, not yet.”

They make their way through the ruins of a ransacked town (the only specifically post-apocalyptic set in the entire film), and use a phonebook to find a doctor’s house. We get some world-building lore from the doctor, who tells them to be on the lookout for “dope addicts” and notes that he has been without electricity for two weeks. He lacks the necessary supplies to save Rick’s life, and so sends them to the relocation facility, telling them that the Army has set up aide stations there.

The family pile back into the car, driving into the night. They are run off the road by a vehicle, whose occupants demand Harry exits and disarms or they will fire upon them. Harry does so, fearful for his life, but it turns out to be an Army patrol, who tell them they are close to their salvation. “Thank god!,” Ann cries. As the family drives off to save risk, the two Army men look on and chat: “That’s five more.” “Five more what?” “Five more that are OK. They come from the hills. No radiation sickness.” “Yep. Five good ones.” The end.

Panic in Year Zero! is not a terrible film. It is definitely low-budget. The whole thing would have been easy to film on generic sets (some of them have a definitely “Western” look to them), with the sole exception of the single street in the looted town, and the cast is kept improbably small (I didn’t mention it, but along with the hoodlums being repeated characters, the hardware store owner turns out, completely coincidentally, to be the Baldwins’ neighbor while they are living in the forest). But the performances are decent-enough (with perhaps the exception of the hoodlums, who are ridiculous). It is actually a better film than its marketing posters from the time — which billed it as “AN ORGY OF LOOTING AND LUST” and really tried to capitalize on the rape aspect — make it out to be.

The actual post-nuclear world-building is pretty spare. There is only the slimmest discussion of things like fallout, and no context for the war is ever hinted at. This is less a film about nuclear war than it is about the appropriate lengths one can take for survival, a common theme in early 1960s fallout shelter-inspired morality tales. I appreciate, though, that their take on nuclear war is spread out over the first few weeks — that is an interval of time that is often skipped in nuclear war films, who usually focus on “the run up to war” (or near-war), “the day after” (the attack and its immediate aftermath), or “the far post-apocalyptic future.”

It is not a Survivalist/Prepper film, however. Even Harry’s individualism has its limits. He is only trying to get through a few weeks of uncertainty, and is iron-clad in his belief that eventually “the law” will return to power. He also hasn’t prepared for this outcome; he’s playing it by ear as it comes, but he doesn’t know any more about surviving nuclear war than anyone else. He is not truly a hyper-individualist; this is not a libertarian fantasy. None of this is surprising — that genre of “survival” would not become really a thing until the mid-1970s — but it is again a very different film than would have been probably made even a decade later, much less today.

It makes for an interesting comparison with John Christopher’s novel The Death of Grass (1956), which features a very similar sort of post-apocalyptic family road trip. In The Death of Grass, the protagonist becomes a harder man as a result of the world going to hell, but the novel externalizes the most extreme individualism onto another character, an antagonist (Pirrie) who is ultimately punished for his sins.

In Panic in Year Zero!, Harry has some self-doubts, but he’s largely let off the hook. His kids are the only ones who are really abused by the conditions of war. Even with them, it is implied that Rick’s injury will be healed, and while Karen’s rape is treated as an appropriately horrible event when it happens, it is also said quite explicitly that “she’ll get over it.” Even Marilyn, whose situation was much worse than Karen’s, transitions from traumatized, orphaned sex slave into a cleaned-up love interest for Rick in what appears to be a matter of a few days’ time and a shower.

Which is just to say that the film doesn’t appear to want us to think that the Baldwins have been too traumatized by their nuclear war experience. They’ve “changed,” as Karen put its, in more ways than one, but they ultimately find salvation and a happy ending. Which makes the film’s message about Harry a little tricky to parse. Was he right in his cynical, self-interested, and often even predatory approach to survival? Harry himself only expresses a sense of guilt after he shoots the hoodlums in cold blood; he expresses no regrets about his violent thievery or his “stop sign” of fire.

The message of the film, then, is an interesting one. It’s not the everyone-dies fatalism of On the Beach (1959), and it’s not the “welcome to hell” post-nuclear vision of later films like The Day After (1983) or Threads (1984). But it’s also not a Survivalist/Prepper film. It seems to exist in a liminal space that is still largely based in a Civil Defense-approach to nuclear war, but with nascent Survivalist influences. The view it gives of nuclear war is something along the lines of: it’ll be bad, but recovery is completely possible if everyone keeps their cool and allows the authorities to reestablish themselves, but the odds are that until that happens you’re on your own, so get ready to temporarily “bug out.”

I find it an interesting question to ask how Hollywood would likely do this film differently if it was made today. It is hard to imagine that “hurray, we are saved by the Army” would be the happy ending. I suspect the “costs” to Harry would be higher — one of the kids would be killed, for example, and Marilyn would find assimilating into the family more difficult. At the same time, I also suspect that modern audiences would want a somewhat more sympathetic protagonist than Harry. If Harry had expressed more reluctance to do the things he did, and more regret over some of the things he did (I still can’t get over the “stop sign” incident), he’d be a lot more relatable. Instead, he comes off as sociopathic.

I enjoyed the film more than I thought I would. It has a sort of “what if nuclear war happened to the Cleaver family?” quality to it, Millard’s Harry is both terrible and complex in just the right ways, and even its “happy” ending is tinged with some foreboding. It somehow manages to be neither anti-nuclear nor pro-nuclear. Even if its nuclear aftermath is relatively tame compared to the vision put out in Civil Defense literature from the time, it is still no walk in the park, and as Karen points out, “everything’s changed,” and nothing for the better.

So I probably would have regarded the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with some skepticism anyway. Certainly at the moment it feels like a bitter thing: 250 years and we have this monstrosity, this perversion of ideals, this blatant evidence that the system does not work if it is meant to be a bastion of “democracy,” “rationality,” “freedom,” and so on.

I am aware that there are those who say that one should not let the worst of us define how we think about the country, but it feels like quite the indictment to me that not only is the country under the control of “the worst of us,” but that “the worst of us” is such a sizable fraction of the US population. It goes beyond mere differences of opinion about how to run a country — MAGA is not just un-American, it is quite literally anti-American, as it is Americans and the United States who will suffer the most from their policies at every turn.

They are dismantling and defrauding the country with impunity. If a foreign entity were deliberately breaking our institutions like this it would be rightly considered an act of war. And it is hard to imagine any president in modern times who would be simply allowed to sell presidential pardons for a fixed rate, who would proudly set up anonymous personal donation procedures, who would so pathetically and desperately affix his name to everything in reach, etc. If this is what 250 years has led the US to, it is a pretty sorry state of things. We’re in the middle of a long national nightmare, one decades in the making, one that I suspect will take decades to unmake — assuming it gets unmade at all. I’m not trying to be defeatist. But I do get tired of being encouraged by (well-meaning) Americans online that I should pretend I see it differently. As always with these things, I’d be quite happy if my read of things turns out to be wrong. I don’t claim to have any special insights into these things.

For the 4th, we ended up going to see some of my wife’s colleagues (also American expats) who live about 30 minutes by train outside of Paris. We took Lyndon along, which he enjoyed quite a lot. He was a perfect angel on the train (he had his own ticket, of the class “BIG_PET,” and was allowed to just sit between us on the floor), and was positively delighted to discover that the people we were visiting had many cats.

Lyndon has never really gotten a handle on cats. There were stray cats in Jersey City, but he was never allowed close inspection of them. He got a little bit more “cat time” this weekend, inasmuch as he stalked them, and was in turn stalked by them. Lyndon’s situational awareness is not what it used to be (he is 13 and a half!), and so humorously he would be searching for them while they watched him from perches he didn’t think to look at. At one point, shown in the sequence below, he did not realize that two cats were watching him intently as he searched their “cattery” (he did not look up). He walked around their cat trees, oblivious, to search inside of a cat carrier, and while he did so (not photographed, alas) one of them snuck down and whacked him in the tail.

Ultimately although some blood was drawn (all his, and all superficial — no cats were harmed), he seemed quite satisfied with the interactions. There were also some dogs there who were protective of the cats, but Lyndon basically ignored them. I still am not sure what he thinks of cats but perhaps he has understood a little better that they are quite capable of whacking him and that they are also quite lithe.

I was asked by Science to write a very short piece on the Manhattan Project for a feature they ran on American science at 250. It came out last week, and you should be able to read it here if you are interested. It is not profound, but I tried to frame the project’s role in the arc of American science, and highlight aspects of it that I think are overlooked when it is invoked as some kind of “model” for science, technology, and governmental application of funds.

I passed my French A2.1 class final exams last week, and received a “CERTIFICAT DE COMPETENCES” from the city of Paris, entitling me to enroll in A2.2 in the fall, which I was happy about and also thought was amusing. I am official competent! At basic French, anyway.

Perhaps it has given me some more confidence, as I have been told by a few random people I’ve talked with in the world over the last week that my French is pretty good for someone who has “only” been living in France for about 10 months. It’s not that good — I still mostly speak in little phrases rather than complete sentences that flow correctly — but I can usually get my point across and understand the response. And I can talk about more complex things now than I could before (I’ve gotten pretty good at using que and qui to string together phrases a bit, and feel I finally have a handle on lui/leur), so that’s definitely progress. I got my second Parisian haircut this week (I don’t get haircuts all that often, and had gotten one in Cambridge when I gave a talk there a few months ago), and it was a much easier experience than the one I got when I had only been here a month.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote a post I’ve been thinking about for awhile, which was focused on the “on the ground” photos of the bombing of Hiroshima by Yoshito Matsushige:

Much has been written on these photos before, of course, although I think they are still relatively obscure outside of people steeped in bomb things. I think about Matsushige’s account of his difficulty in taking the photos a lot — that blurred line between being a professional and being a participant, photographer and victim. I also used it as an excuse to think about some of the other “visions” of Hiroshima that were available in the United States in this period, and how Matsushige’s photographs contrast with not only the “view from the above” (the “bomber’s eye view”) photos of the destruction, but even the more clinical “on the ground” photos that were taken of the injured in the weeks and months after the attacks.

I suspect that next week I will write (as I mentioned last time) about one of the more obscure (?) nuclear weapons films I’ve been watching, but this last week I ended up dealing with a variety of deadlines (including pulling together my paper for the History of Science Society meeting in Edinburgh, in 2 weeks) and didn’t quite get to that. But we will see! I have also been doing work on Oregon Road ‘83 that has gotten me into some interesting rabbit holes (like the study from 1978 above about the role of truck stops in nuclear war evacuations), and I might write about one of those…

Read more

No photographs from the ground were available until after the surrender documents were signed, in September 1945, and American soldiers, scientists, and journalists, were permitted to enter Japan. By October 1945, some photographs of Hiroshima from the ground were beginning to show up in American publications, like LIFE magazine, although they are interesting in retrospect because they are all relatively close-in, giving very little sense of the scale of the destruction. But the LIFE photos did feature people, including women and children, some of whom were quite visibly injured.

There appear to have been surprisingly few views of the damage at Hiroshima available to the American public until 1947, two years after the attack. At that point, one starts to see many versions of now-familiar photographs of the shell of the Hiroshima Industrial Promotion Building — now usually just called the “Atomic Bomb Dome” — in mainstream publications.

One also gets, in 1947, much more technical discussions of the damage at Hiroshima, and the declassification and release of official reports about the medical effects of the bomb. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey’s The Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Health and Medical Services in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, released in March 1947, contains both broad photographs of the damage, as well as photographs of victims that were taken as part of the general study that was made by the Occupation forces into the effects of the bombings.

As makes sense for a medical survey, the photographs of the victims are clinical and focused on identifying specific categories of injuries. The description of the injuries is clinical and usually concerned with the circumstances under which the injuries were attained, e.g.:

S.N., 37 years old, male. Was working in open at 5,500 feet from center of blast, wearing trousers but bare above waist. Blast came from right. Note area of protection over spine due to shielding by right side of back.

The photographs show wounds that had already healed and scarred. The text says that the Medical Division of the USSBS did not arrive to the cities until several months after the bombings, so the survivors are in much better shape than they would have been immediately after the attacks.

Most photographs of the damage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were taken weeks, if not months, after the actual bombings. It gives them a particularly sterile look: the streets have already been cleared, the corpses have already been buried or cremated. It helps feed the misconception that the atomic bombings, while perhaps horrible in terms of the raw number of human beings killed by them, were fast and “clean” killers, vaporizing victims and ending their torment quickly. While there certainly were many who undoubtedly died very quickly, there were also many who died painfully, who were trapped under rubble that then caught fire, and survivors who suffered grievous injuries.

There are written accounts that give a potent sense of this. John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which debuted as an entire issue of The New Yorker in August 1946 before it was published as a stand-alone book, was potent then and is still potent now. It has no illustrations or photographs: the writing allows one’s imagination to do the violence for it.

After crossing Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge, having run the whole way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he approached the center, that all the houses had been crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always stopped him. Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them.

There were, however, photographs of Hiroshima on the ground taken on the day of the bombing. A Japanese photojournalist, Yoshito Matsushige, was employed by the Chugoku Shimbun newspaper, and worked as an official reporter for the Japanese Army. He lived 1.6 mi (2.7 km) from the hypocenter, and was at home, reading the newspaper, on the morning the attack happened.1

He later recalled the attack:2

At first I saw something shining and sparkling — it was a kind of twinkling light, like you see from a sparkling electric live wire. The next instant there was this huge white flash, like a giant magnesium flashbulb. I couldn’t see anything anymore after that. Then I heard a blast and when the blast hit, my body jumped in the air about one meter and I was thrown against the wall. My wife cried, ”Bombing!” and ran to me. I grabbed her hand and we both got out of the house. We crossed the streetcar racks and went out into the field across the street. I thought the bomb had landed right on my house. […] Everywhere there was dust; it made a grayish darkness over everything. But I could feel the warmth of my wife’s hand, and it was this that made me realize she was alive and also that I was still alive.

Matsushige recalled that in that moment of chaos and darkness, he thought, “I am a newspaper photographer and a reporter for the army, so I have an obligation to make sure where the bomb dropped.” He returned to his house and found his camera in the rubble. “It was time to go to work.”

Matsushige walked through Hiroshima. He took exactly five black-and-white photographs of the city that day with his small Mamiya viewfinder camera. They look dramatically different from the more sanitized photographs, and three of them feature people in them, giving a far more accurate depiction of what the victims looked like, at least in the areas that he was at.

The first, reproduced above, was taken on the Miyuki bridge, and was have been taken about 2 hours after the bomb detonated. The building in the background is a police station, in front of which an ad hoc medical treatment center had been constructed. Officers were putting cooking oil on the burns of survivors. Most of the people were students from the Hiroshima Girl’s Commercial High School and a middle school, who had been mobilized to build firebreaks.

The students are more clearly visible in the second photograph, which moves us closer. It is hard, in black-and-white, to get a sense of their possible injuries. That they are dirty and distressed is, however, obvious. The scene is chaotic.

Matsushige later recalled that he hesitated before taking the photos:

Injured people were everywhere. Both sidewalks of the bridge were crowded with dead and suffering victims. When I saw them I realized I had to take a picture, and I tried to push the shutter, but I couldn’t. It was so terrible. These people were pathetic. I had to wait. Most of the people were students, children. […] I found it difficult to push the shutter. I was standing on the Miyuki-bashi Bridge for about twenty minutes before I could do it. Finally I thought, I am a professional cameraman so I have to take pictures. Then I managed to push the shutter.

Matsushige also recalled elsewhere that: “I felt that everyone was looking at me and thinking angrily, ‘He’s taking our picture and will bring us no help at all.’”

After the second photograph at the bridge, found he could take no more:

My viewfinder was fogged because of my tears. I understand why you ask me why I did not take more pictures, but in reality it was very difficult. When I set my camera at somebody who was asking for help I could not really push the shutter.

After this, Matsushige attempted to visit his office at the newspaper, with little success. Bodies were everywhere. Passing Hiroshima University, he saw the swimming pool was filled with the boiled corpses of people who had attempted to take refuge there while the city burned. Outside of his office, he saw a streetcar full of people posed almost as if they were on their morning commutes, but all burned, reddish-black corpses.

I put one foot up on the street car and looked into it. I put my finger on the shutter for one or two minutes, but I could not push it. I refrained from taking the picture. It was too terrible to take a picture of. This was the only scene I was going to take a picture of but did not.

Matsushige returned to his house. He photographed the barber shop attached to it, which was in shambles, and then snapped a photograph from inside of a destroyed fire station across the street. They feature no injured people, only his wife (in the background of the barbershop) and a passing man through the window.

Hours later, Matsushige returned to the Miyuki bridge, and took one more photograph, this time of a bandaged soldier-policeman writing on a table. The man was writing certificates for people injured by the bombing, which would entitle them to some bread.

Matsushige says that he took a few more pictures that evening, but they did not come out, and so he threw the negatives away, not aware that his would be the only close-in documentation that day.

Matsushige’s photographs were confiscated by the US Occupation forces, who attempted to keep tight control on any Japanese discussions about the atomic bombings (part of a bid to avoid anti-American, pro-Communist sentiment). They were not published until after the Occupation ended in 1952. His photographs were first published by a magazine, Asahi Gurafu, in August 1952, in a sold-out and reprinted issue dedicated to damage photographs that ultimately had a circulation of 700,000.

Two of Matsushige’s bridge photographs (the second and the third) were reproduced along with other post-attack photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the September 29, 1952 issue of LIFE magazine, and referenced out on the cover as “FIRST PICTURES — ATOM BLASTS THROUGH EYES OF VICTIMS.” This was juxtaposed incongruously on the cover with “TV’S BIGGEST, PRETTIEST NEW SHOW,” and photographs of chorus girls auditioning for a Jackie Gleason production.

The article in LIFE was titled, “WHEN THE ATOM BOMB STRUCK — UNCENSORED,” blamed “jittery US military censors” for the fact that it had been over seven years before photographs of the bombings of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) from “below” had been made available either inside or outside of Japan. It misleadingly claimed (based on a selective quotation) that the atomic bombs had given its victims a “quick death, with no suffering.” But it concluded by acknowledging that all of the Japanese speaking for the victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki acknowledged that “the long suppressed photographs, terrible as they are, still fall far short of the depicting the horror which only those who lived under the blast can know.”

How can something on the scale of Hiroshima, as experienced by the victims, be captured? The photographic record is too meager to do the job, and even it represents a version of the event filtered through the experience of the photographer, who was himself a victim, “an ordinary person” (as he put it), and who found himself faced with his own decisions to make about what images he could, and could not, attempt to capture. But Matsushige’s photographs do give our imaginations a bit of additional material with which to understand the bombing, however incomplete.

The temperatures were higher than 40°C, which sounds (to me) much less intuitively impressive than the equivalent 104°F. Whatever one thinks about Celsius versus Fahrenheit (obviously one finds whatever one was raised with more intuitive; I tend to agree with the sentiment that Fahrenheit works better for relating how temperatures feel to people living in them, whereas Celsius is better for talking technical topics), the import of something in the triple digits is more dramatic.

We mostly stayed inside. Lyndon would get his “real” walk early in the morning when it was merely “too hot” and not “dangerously hot. After that we had a battery of fans going (no air conditioning in France!), which did not really cool one but made it feel less unbearable. We occasionally put a wet towel on Lyndon, which he did not really enjoy, but it probably did help keep him cooler and enhance the effect of the fans.

We only had the power go out once for us, and it was a very localized impact (just part of our street), and the utility people fixed it in within about 90 minutes. Fortunately that was at night when it was a bit cooler.

The fact that the days are so long — we just passed the summer solstice, and the sun doesn’t really fully set until about 10pm, and then is up bright and early again the next day — adds to the surreality of the whole experience, and makes it hard to coordinate one’s day. I managed to get some light writing done (a piece on nuclear films for The Bulletin, which should go up in July), but it is hard to be very productive when one is just boiling in one’s own juices. There is much talk about possible changing attitudes towards air conditioning in France as a result of all of this, but I am somewhat skeptical, given how the French have decided that their anti-AC stance is a moral one. Such attitudes are hard to dislodge and alter.

Above: In front of the Musée des Arts et Métiers is a kinetic sculpture of a horse called “Zeus,” created in 2024 to coincide with the Paris Olympics. It gave off Diamond Age vibes.

My French oral exam was cancelled last week — all manner of schools and offices and so on were shut down for the heat — but will happen next week, supposedly. Yesterday I did get some good French conversational practice with an older woman at the local supermarket who decided to critique everything in my basket, which was amusing if not a little absurd. “That’s a lot of yogurt!” “Yes, we eat it every morning.” “Did you know you can buy it cheaper if you buy it in a big jug, like this?” “Yes, but that is not the kind of yogurt we prefer. This type is less sweet.”

I did feel like I am in a much better place in terms of comprehension and speaking in that I could understand this farcical conversation and more or less participate in it. The downside of learning more French is that I can now understand that most everyday conversations in French are as banal as everyday conversations in English.

In a few weeks I will be going to the History of Science Society meeting in Edinburgh, which I am excited for. I will be part of two panels there: a moderator of a panel on global nuclear history, and presenting a paper on the architecture of nuclear weapons laboratories (or something along those lines). I will need to pull the paper together over the next few weeks, but it is a fun topic, one I have been thinking about for a long time.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I did a rather short post, which was about all I could make work what with the other writing I was doing and the heat wave. It is about the video game 60 Minutes!, which came out in 2015, and is a very tongue-in-cheek nuclear fallout shelter simulator:

The game came up in the context of a meeting with my student workers who are developing the Oregon Road ‘83 video game this summer. I’ll describe that work below, but a student suggested I take a look at this game (which I had heard about, and actually purchased on Steam ages ago, but not yet played) as one example of how mechanics of being in a fallout shelter has been done.

I may write about one of the films I watched while writing the nuclear films piece for the Bulletin. I have of course already watched a lot of nuclear-themed films, but (of course) not all of them, and so I was inhaling quite a few additional films while trying to decide exactly which ones to feature. I ended up not featuring a lot of them — there are just too many — but it gave me a lot of fodder for future updates.

Once you get beyond the standards (e.g. Strangelove, The Day After, WarGames, Threads, On the Beach, etc.), and get a bit into the weeds, there are some very curious films. Panic in Year Zero!, Miracle Mile, A Boy and his Dog, Dead Man’s Letters, and Testament are all deserving of some Doomsday Machines attention, I think. If you have a nuclear film that you think I ought to know about, and might have overlooked, let me know in the comments. Heck, even if you think I probably haven’t overlooked it, feel free to post it — it can’t hurt!

Read more

The game has two basic “modes” which can be played concurrently or individually. “Scavenge” is a top-down, 3D game in which you must collect supplies and family members before the bombs go off. One can choose either Ted (the father) or Dolores (the mother) as one’s main character. One may have a few seconds to look around the house before the warning timer starts, which is helpful as the location of objects and people in the house is random on each playthrough. Once the attack warning starts, the player has 60 seconds to grab as much stuff as one can and throw it down the hatch to an underground bunker. If you aren’t near the hatch when the 60 seconds are up, you die, game over.

This is a maddening sequence, as your character is slow and runs into things. Clearly this is deliberate; it is why it is hard. In the house are your three other family members (your spouse, your son Timmy, and your daughter Mary Jane), cans of soup, bottles of water, a radio, a suitcase, a fire axe, a gas mask, a first-aid kit, a rifle, a map, various games and books, and so on. You only have four “slots” to hold things at any one time, and objects (and people) can take up multiple slots (poor Mary Jane requires three slots). So you have to strategically decide which rooms to run to, what items to grab, and be as quickly as possible. The temptation to grab just one more item (and possibly not make it inside the shelter yourself) is high.

If one is playing the two modes concurrently, after “Scavenge” the game then transitions to “Survival” mode. This takes place inside the fallout shelter, and is a 2D, point-and-click, visual-novel sort of experience. Whatever and whomever one grabbed during “Scavenge” mode is now inside the shelter as well. (If one is playing only “Survival” mode, then it is stocked with some random distribution of items. On the easiest level of difficulty, some additional items might be in the shelter as well, even if you didn’t grab them.)

“Survival” mode has a fairly simple game loop. Every day, one must dole out food and/or water to the survivors. People can go for a few days without food or water (the game tells you if they are very hungry or thirsty). Every day there is usually some “decision” that needs to be taken. The most regular of these is that one can send a survivor out into the world to look for more supplies. One can choose the survivor (or decline to send someone out) and an item for them to take with them (e.g., a gas mask, which helps keep them from getting sick from fallout, or a map, which helps them locate better places to scavenge). Once someone leaves the shelter, you won’t know for a few days how it worked out — they might come back with supplies, or information, or a disease. Or they might just never come back.

Other “decisions” include reacting to specific random events. A person might show up and offer to exchange the contents of their bag (which you cannot inspect) for a can of food. Do you agree to the trade? You hear a phone ringing across the street. Do you send someone out to go answer it? You hear a series of knocks on the door. Do you open it? Timmy seems depressed. Do you talk to him?

You seem to be able to do about one “decision” per day, and then it transitions to the next day. The characters in the shelter have essentially static cartoon appearances, but when they get sick, or go insane, their portrait reflects this. The inside of the shelter also changes to reflect different items you have, the amount of food and water, and whether you’ve picked up an additional friends (like a cat or a dog).

Such is the game. This loop continues until some end state is reached, and there are many end states. The most common is a “bad” ending, where you and everyone in the shelter ends up dead from disease, starvation, or dehydration. Womp womp. There are a multitude of other “bad” endings as well, such as having your shelter being taken over by armed ruffians.

One can also get rescued by the army, which is one of the few unambiguously “good” endings. Less unambiguously “good” are some of the stranger endings, like being sent in a rocket into outer space by a mad scientist who contacted you because of your cat. Or being “saved” by the Soviet Union.

The game makes no pretense at realism. It is possible for Mary Jane to get bitten by a radioactive spider and turn into a purple-skinned mutant. There are doomsday cults, Mad Max-style raiders, cats with cloning devices, and much more. The only “realistic” aspect of the shelter experience is that a) leaving the shelter early has the highest threat of radioactivity, b) it lasts on the order of weeks (and not, say, decades or centuries), and c) it is pretty boring, both for the characters and (in my opinion) for the player.

To be even more realistic, it would be even more boring, and take much longer to play through than the 5 minutes or so each “run” requires. I once contemplated making a VR game/art piece, years ago, that would “truly” simulate a fallout shelter experience, in mind-numbing detail, with time passing at exactly one in-game minute per real-world minute. This would, of course, not be fun to play. It would be a sort of nuclear version of the (in)famous anti-game Desert Bus, which simulates the driving a bus for 8 hours along a desert highway in real-time. The fact that it would not be fun would be, of course, the point: even just one week in a small fallout shelter, with little to pass the time, sounds more like prison than salvation.

Of course, if the alternative were really death — something a game could never truly make one believe — then one could imagine doing it. But the only person who would find such an experience fun would be someone who got truly high on the idea of their own individual survival, and how superior that made them to everyone else. Such people, of course, probably exist.

The silliness of 60 Seconds! is, of course, meant to make staying in a shelter actually seem like something one might want to do. Even so, it is a game of endurance, and, presumably, optimization of choices. I can see how a certain kind of player (not myself, alas) would enjoy figuring out all of the ways to improve their odds and length of survival, or figuring out how to obtain all of the different endings.

As far as “shelter games” go — of which there are a few — 60 Seconds! is much more realistic than anything that is more in the Fallout genre (e.g., Fallout Shelter, which has some similarities but lots more silliness). That they incorporate mental health (however unrealistically), tedium, and illness into the game already makes it a good antidote to most “lone survivor” fantasy games. I don’t think many people who played 60 Seconds! would come away believing that a post-nuclear war scenario would be very fun, and that’s better than the alternative.

But, boy howdy, is it different to not have air conditioning, to have the heat be so omnipresent, to have no relief other than perhaps watching a movie or loitering around one of the few stores that has air conditioning. And even places that are air conditioned here are not that cold, because the French believe that you really shouldn’t have that much in temperature contrast.

Many of them (truly) believe that the body will undergo a “shock” (choque) under those conditions, to which I say: a) we are mammals, so we are pretty good at that kind of thing, and b) however uncomfortable it may or may not be to move between temperatures is nothing like the discomfort of just being hot all the time.

When they find that argument is not hitting the mark, they switch to one about energy resources, climate, and — in a last gasp — somehow else up talking about the artificiality of a place like Las Vegas, to which I say: nobody is talking about erecting an unsustainable temple to avarice in the desert, we’re talking about adapting to a warming world. As for resources and costs, sure, everything has a cost. But excessive heat claimed over 175,000 deaths in Europe in 2024, per the UN. That is nearly four times as many people as who died of gun deaths in the United States the same year.

Such are my frustrations with the “air conditioning conversation” here. I have met some French who are more amenable to admitting that sweating while your elderly die is not, in fact, a moral virtue. But they seem, as of now, still rare. Far more common is the “air conditioning is bad, for a variety of reasons, but ultimately, we are just better people because we forego it.” I think the Europeans actually do have the moral high ground on the United States on many issues… but this isn’t one of them.

I would be far more sympathetic if they just gave what I suspect is the “real” answer: they didn’t require it in the near past and did not feel they could afford it, they are as such not used to it, it will be very expensive to upgrade their infrastructure for it at this point, and like most people they are still a bit in denial about how climate change is actively making the world, even Europe, less livable in their lifetimes. That I can empathize with. Pseudoscience, pseudo-morality, and appeals to Las Vegas — no.

In more pro-European news, this week the historian Marc Bloch (1886-1944) is being inducted into the Panthéon. I find that extremely satisfying. When I was an undergraduate, we talked a lot about Bloch in one of my “methods” classes, in reverent tones. He is sort of a secular saint within the field of history.

Bloch was a medieval historian, part of the famous Annales school, which made real strides towards shifting the frame of historical analysis towards long-scale social and economic history and away from just political themes and the lives of individuals. He was a soldier for France in World War I. When the Germans invaded France in World War II, he wrote a famous monograph, Strange Defeat (1940), about what he saw as the cause of that disaster (the mismanagement of the French military). It is a classic example of a historian attempting to understand his own times as they happened. (Like all historians’ works, the scholarship has moved in different directions over time from what Bloch was doing. If academic work doesn’t eventually move somewhere else, it means a field has stagnated or died!)

During the Nazi Occupation, he aided the French Resistance in writing propaganda. He was eventually picked up by the Gestapo and executed. So you can see the whole secular saint thing going its full circle, to martyrdom. He’s a perfect example of someone who ought to be in the Panthéon — I was surprised, honestly, that he was not already in it. One of the things I like about French culture is that they do really seem to value these kinds of intellectuals, to a degree that is hard to imagine in American culture.

In other news, I filmed a “reaction video” for a Canadian online magazine that I’ve worked with in the past (they are mostly Francophone but have been branching into Anglophone content, and they film here in Paris). I had fun doing it, and it has been getting a lot of views (over 1.2 million at the moment, which is a lot for a channel that only has about 3k subscribers), but I do somewhat detest the thumbnail! Well, c’est la vie.

I had fun making it, as I think one can tell. Before anyone suggests that I could have said more about anything, this is cut down from a much longer session, as is necessary for such videos. This kind of thing always takes 2-3 hours to film, and even having it be 30 minutes long is pretty lengthy…!

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote about one of my favorite passages in the Old Testament, where Abraham is negotiating with God over the sparing of Sodom:

As I discuss in the post, I find it really interesting for a lot of reasons. The idea of haggling with God has always struck me as hilarious — Abraham gets God to agree to spare the city if there are 50 righteous men in it, and then haggles him all the way down to 10! Epic work. Ultimately it does not work, of course, but the principle is interesting. I also talked about a short story by Karel Čapek that imagines Lot’s side of the moral question, and creates an entirely different ending to the story, again based around the moral question, but now around the question about whether even the wicked have a right to exist.

As I mentioned in a footnote, there was another aspect of the story that jumped out to me as I re-read it again: God talks to himself at one point (“Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?”). That strikes me as pretty rare in the Bible? I have not done a systemic study of it, but I went over Genesis a bit, and found a few other instances. In the very beginning (Genesis 1), before there is anyone to talk to, God makes some proclamations (“And God said, ‘let there be light’”). But there is one “talking to one’s self” part: “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…’” And in the second creation sequence (Genesis 2), God appears to talk to himself one other time: “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’”

Who cares? (I do not believe any of this literally happened.) As I mentioned in the footnotes, it relates to arguments that the psychologist Julian Jaynes makes about the “consciousness” (“interiority”) of ancient peoples, about whether they considered themselves to have an “inside” space separate from their speech and so on (or something like that — Jaynes is really vague about this), and he specifically talks about the differences between the representations of God in the Old and New Testaments as illustrative of his point. I don’t think these examples disprove Jaynes’ argument (whatever it really even is), because in all of them God is still talking, making little verbal declarations (as opposed to having a truly internal dialogue of some sort), but it’s still an interesting question. Does God think? Is God “conscious” in a meaningful way? What does that even mean? If I were a religious person this is the kind of thing I would spend all of my time wondering about, so perhaps it is for the better that I am not.

Read more

I had not really thought about this before, as even though I wrote a lot about the specific moral hazards that many people (including Henry Stimson and Harry Truman) felt about the destruction of cities during World War II in The Most Awful Responsibility, I had not really considered that moral response in outside of the context of the 20th century.

But the conversation brought to mind something I had taught several years ago in a course for freshman on “The End of the World”: the sections of Genesis, in the Old Testament, about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Most people know the general outlines of the story from Genesis 19: Sodom and Gomorrah were sinning, God was unhappy, and so he sent down some angels to check out Sodom. They found Lot, who took them in, and then the men of Sodom showed up and asked if they could have some non-consensual “fun” with the angels. Lot said no, the angels blinded the men, and then told Lot he and his family ought to head of out of town, because God was going to destroy it. Lot, his wife, and his two daughters left with the angels, who told them to not look back. God rained down destruction on Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot’s wife looked back, and was turned into a pillar of salt. Lot and his daughters end up settling in a cave and then they, er, decide that they ought to get pregnant by him, and so they get him drunk and, er, make it happen. The end.

Now, I am not at all, and have never been, a religious person. I am also not a scholar of either the Bible or ancient history. I am reading this text as a person who is very firmly rooted in the 21st-century, with no more deeper understanding of the issues of ancient context, ancient narrative, or translational differences than being able to proclaim my awareness that expertise in such areas clearly exists but I do not have it.

My sense is that most of the time when Sodom and Gomorrah are mentioned in a modern context, the discussion is focused on the why of it: what exactly was the “sin” that was occurring that was so offensive that they warranted total annihilation, and what kind of moral argument is can be derived from that? The text itself appears fairly vague on this point. Were the denizens of Sodom sinful because they attempted homosexuality, or was it because they attempted rape? Is this a story about sexuality, consent, or being bad hosts? And then these theological interpretations are mapped onto various modern political positions in fairly obvious ways. I don’t have a dog in that fight, in the sense that I do not base my views on the morality either homosexuality or rape on any ancient texts, and I generally believe that trying to dictate public policy on the basis of ancient texts is a bad idea no matter how clear or ambiguous they are. Which is just to say, that aspect of the story isn’t what I want to talk about here.

The parts that I find most interesting about the story, and relevant to my conversation with Ward, are not the basic things from the summary above. They are rather the context of the episode, which shows up as a detour from the story of Abraham, the Hebrew patriarch.

In Genesis 18, Abraham has a conversation with three mysterious men, and, in the not-quite-clear logic of the text, with God. The conversation ends up being about whether Abraham’s wife, Sarah, will bear children. As the men leave Abraham, they look at Sodom. And then we have this (translation is the New International Version):

When the men got up to leave, they looked down toward Sodom, and Abraham walked along with them to see them on their way. Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.”

Then the Lord said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.”

Two things I want to highlight here. One is that God’s interest and concern with Sodom and Gomorrah is a response to “outcry” that has somehow reached God, and that God feels the need to send the angels as part of a fact-finding mission. This is not the omniscient, all-knowing, all-present God of the New Testament: this is a God who needs to get some boots on the ground to see if the complaints he’s receiving are valid.

The other is that God’s has this kind of internal dialogue where he’s wondering whether he should tell Abraham about his plans, and concludes, yeah, I should probably give him the head’s up about Sodom, since I think he’s my guy.1 This again adds to this very “human-like God” interaction, but more importantly, is structured about whether he should “hide” what he’s doing from Abraham. That is, it’s not, “should I tell him?” so much as it is “should I not tell him?”

Why would God want to hide his plans from Abraham? Presumably because God is not sure that Abraham is going to like what God is going to do. And, as it turns out, Abraham is pretty upset by the whole thing:

The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

The Lord said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

Abraham’s argument with God is fascinating. Will you really kill an entire city because some of its inhabitants are wicked? What about the righteous people within it? This is an ancient argument about discrimination, a core concept in many laws of war: don’t be indiscriminate with your violence, don’t sweep away the righteous and the wicked equally. Abraham pushes this point with an emotional appeal, as well: you’re God, surely you can see that this would be an injustice! Surely you, of all things, would not commit such an atrocity!

And… it works! God says, OK, if there are 50 righteous people in Sodom, I’ll call the whole thing off. (I still find it amusing that this whole thing is still tied to the fact-finding mission.) Now, one could question why God is doing this. Does he really buy the moral argument Abraham is making, or is he trying to just make Abraham happier, or is he trying to prove a broader point about how wicked Sodom is? Who can say? I would just note that one of the major irritations of Old Testament God is doubting him and defying him — Cf., Lot’s wife — so it is really quite gutsy of Abraham to try and claim some kind of moral high ground here.

If the above was the end of the interaction, that would be one thing. But this negotiation goes on and on, in a way that, to me, risks becoming comical:

Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five people?”

“If I find forty-five there,” he said, “I will not destroy it.”

Once again he spoke to him, “What if only forty are found there?”

He said, “For the sake of forty, I will not do it.”

Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak. What if only thirty can be found there?”

He answered, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.”

Abraham said, “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only twenty can be found there?”

He said, “For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it.”

Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?”

He answered, “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

When the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left, and Abraham returned home.

The fact that Abraham haggles God down from sparing the city if 50 righteous people can be found down to 10 is amazing. I also love the detail of Abraham repeatedly being self-deprecating: I know I’m just a guy, a little worm, really, and you’re God, the amazing, but I just want to offer one more little suggestion…

Ten people! The moral reasoning on display here is quite interesting. We don’t know the total population of Sodom, so it is hard to derive what proportion of wicked people to righteous people warrants preservation or destruction, but by the end it surely cannot that high. There is also the explicit appeal to the idea that once you have defined some number of righteous, it is not clear that one can make a differentiation of moral “weight” for lesser numbers. That is the heart of the whole, “if you agree 50 is enough, why not 45?” part, and he gets him all the way down to 10 on that logic.2

Thus ends Genesis 18, and we transition to Genesis 19, which is the story (already recounted) of the angels visiting Sodom, Sodom’s destruction, and Lot and his daughters’ cave “incident.” An interesting aspect of this that I did not recount is the return to Abraham’s point of view near the end (post pillar of salt, pre-Lot and his daughters):

Early the next morning Abraham got up and returned to the place where he had stood before the Lord. He looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, toward all the land of the plain, and he saw dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace.

So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived.

The last section is the key part, for me: we seem to be being told that the reason that Lot and his family were spared at all is because of Abraham’s moral argument with God. So the argument was not entirely for nothing — Abraham couldn’t spare the cities, but a few lives were saved.3

So that is the ancient text itself, which makes an interesting argument against indiscriminate destruction of cities, one that even God seems to cosign, albeit only up to a point.

The text leaves much to the imagination. What does Abraham think when he gazes onto the destruction from Sodom? What is Lot’s wife thinking as she turns to look? How does Lot feel, to be an almost sole-survivor of a catastrophe, to know that his compatriots, and much of his family, were sentenced to such a harsh punishment? The text itself does not say. But that does not mean, if we are not afraid of sullying the original story, that we cannot think about it.

This is the task that Karel Čapek (1890-1938), the Czech author and playright who is most famous for coining the word robot in his 1920 play R.U.R., took on in his 1923 story, “Pseudo Lot, or Concerning Patriotism.” “Pseudo Lot” takes the text of Genesis 19 (the destruction of Sodom and its aftermath) and reworks it. Parts of the text, added in italics, are verbatim from the source material. But much of it is by Čapek, and instead imagines how Lot would feel about the destruction of his city, and about the opportunity held out for his own survival.4

And they said unto Lot, Hast thou here any besides? son-in-law, and thy sons, and thy daughters, and whatsoever thou hast in the city, bring them out of this place: For we will destroy this place, because the cry of them is waxen great before the face of the Lord; and the Lord hath sent us to destroy it.

Lot was taken aback when he heard this, and he said: “And why must I go from this place?” Whereupon they said to him: “Because the Lord does not wish to destroy the righteous.”

Lot was silent for a long while, but then he said: “I beseech you, sirs, give me leave to speak with my sons-in-law and daughters, that they may make ready for the journey.” They answered him: “Do so.”

And Lot went out, and he ran through the streets of the city and cried out to all the people: “Up, get you out of this place; for the Lord will destroy this city.” But he seemed to them as one that mocked them.

Lot returned home, but he did not lie down, but pondered all night long.

Čapek’s Lot is a deeper, agonized character than the one of Genesis. Lot is torn by the demand: he does not want to lose his town, no matter how wicked its inhabitants are. He cannot reconcile this request, even though he knows they are wicked. The next day, he refuses the command to leave:

And when the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot, saying: “Arise, take thy wife, and thy two daughters, which are here; lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city.”

“I will not go,” said Lot. “Forgive me, but I will not go. I have pondered this all night long. I cannot go, for I too am one of the people of Sodom.”

“You are righteous,” objected the angels, “but they are unrighteous, and the cry of their iniquities has angered the Lord. What are they to you?”

“I don’t know,” said Lot. “I have been thinking about this too, what they are to me. All my life I have complained about my countrymen, and I have judged them so harshly that it grieves me to recall it now: for they will perish. […]

And an angel spoke and said: “The Lord has commanded that the people of Sodom be destroyed.”

“His will be done,” said Lot quietly. “I pondered all night long, and I recalled so many things it made me weep. Have you ever heard how the people of Sodom sing? No, you don’t know them at all, or you wouldn’t have come like this. When the girls walk along the streets they swing their hips and a song hums through their lips and they laugh as they draw water into their pitchers. No water is more clear than that from the wells of Sodom, and no speech in any tongue sounds more beautiful. When a child speaks, I understand him as if he were my own, and when he plays, he plays the games I played when I was very small. And when I cried, my mother comforted me in the speech of Sodom. Lord,” cried Lot, “as if it were yesterday!”

Lot continues in this vein, appealing to the fact that there is good amongst wickedness, and that God’s demand of him is, ultimately, unreasonable and unjust:

“You will be destroyed with them,” said the angel, frowning.

“Perhaps, but first I’ll try to save them from destruction. I don’t know what I’ll do, but until the last moment I’ll think it my duty to help them. How could I possibly go? I am disobeying the Lord, and so He will not hear me. If He had given me three years’ time, or three days, or even three hours! What would three hours matter to Him? If yesterday He had commanded me: Go forth from their midst, for they are unrighteous — I would have said to Him: Be patient with me for just a little while, I’ll have a word with this one and that one; I have judged them instead of going out amongst them. But how can I leave now, when they are to be destroyed? For am I not partly to blame that things have gone so far with them? I don’t want to die, but neither could I bear for them to die. I will stay.”

“You cannot save Sodom.”

“I know I can’t: what could I possibly do? But I will try, although what, I don’t yet know; I only know that I must persist. Because all my life I judged them more harshly than anyone else, because I have borne with them the heaviest burden: their faults. Lord, I don’t know how to tell You what they are to me; I can only show it by staying with them.”

Čapek’s Lot is making a very different kind of appeal than the one undertaken by Abraham: not about saving the righteous, but about the fact that even the wicked deserve mercy, and that one owes something to one’s people, however imperfect they may be.

Ultimately, Čapek’s version makes a hard turn away from the source material: Lot refuses to flee.

“Sodom, Sodom, art thou not the most beautiful of cities? [says Lot] And if I were to see only one small window, curtained in striped linen, I would know it and say: this is a window of Sodom. […]

“Oh gates, gates of Sodom, where are they leading me and into what emptiness? Where shall I set my foot? For there is no ground beneath me: and I stand as if I stood not. Go, my daughters, and leave me; I can go no farther.”

And they brought him forth, and set him without the city; and they spake unto him, saying: Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed."

The sun was risen upon the earth when they said this.

Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.

Then Lot looked round and cried out and ran back towards the city.

“What are you doing, accursed one?” the angels called after him.

“I am going to help the people of Sodom,” answered Lot, and he went into the city.

Thus it ends. What does one make of this? It feels radical for Čapek to make a story that is, ultimately, a defense of Sodom, from the perspective of one of its members. Who defends Sodom? Well, in fact, Abraham does: it is not so radical to suggest that there is something unjust in God’s plans.5

For me, the interesting thing about destroying Sodom (and Gomorrah, who basically has no independent story) is not so much the question of the sin or wickedness, but the more fundamental questions about justice that get raised both in the text (Abraham’s haggling) and in works like Čapek’s. When is it just to destroy an entire city, to be indiscriminate with wrath? Even the God of the Old Testament, who no one would ever accuse of being “soft,” appears to have worried about such things, and to be vulnerable to arguments about the moral hazards involved.

Before I talk more about my Germany trip, another thing that I did this week was talk about Truman and the bomb with Joseph Circincione, who was subbing in for the Bill Press Podcast:

I have only previously been to Germany once before, on a trip to Munich (to give a talk at the Deutsche Museum), some 15 years ago. Flying there from Paris is much easier (and cheaper) than from the US, so I had assumed I'd be back after we moved to France.

I studied German for several years as an undergraduate and then a graduate student, and during the pandemic I spent a year or so refreshing my German with Duolingo. My brain is currently very “tuned” to French, though, so while I can remember some basic German vocabulary and grammar, everything that comes out is a little peppered with French, which everyone finds incomprehensible, understandably. But I was able to get by in the very limited circumstances where the Germans did not speak English (none of my cab drivers spoke English, but we still had friendly little conversations).

The conference was in Potsdam. Having just written a book that had quite a lot to say about the Potsdam Conference, I thought it would be neat to see the castle that hosted the it, but it was not to be. It has apparently been closed for renovations since 2020, and will remain closed untol 2029. A German that I mentioned this exceptionally long renovation time to seemed to think it was par for the course here.

While I in flight to Berlin on Wednesday night I had the unfortunate realization that my hotel reservation in Potsdam did not begin until Thursday. How hard could it be to find a hotel (or even hostel) room in Berlin or Potsdam at 9pm on a Wednesday? Answer: impossible. Apparently everything was truly booked up, unless I wanted to spend €1000 or more. Which I did not.

I remembered that I did know a few people who lived in Berlin and fortunately (in between frantically Googling things like “can you sleep in the Berlin airport overnight?”) I ended up with two offers for help. I ended up in a very nice guest room in the Berlin apartment of an old friend from graduate school, which was much preferable to trying to rough it in the airport.

The next morning I took the train from Berlin to Potsdam, which was easy; it is about 30 minutes away. One does pass through Wannsee on the way there, which brought to mind yet another wartime conference.

The conference was held at a facility that was part of Albert Einstein Park, which houses a number of separate research institutes. As the photo above indicates, one has the feeling that the whole place is basically a forest, with little winding paths connecting various parts of it. A very odd (but pretty) place.

I'll talk about what my contribution to the conference was below. I was there for basically all of the sessions, which were on quite a lot of topics. Among the ones that captured my attention was one about how the CEOs of the various AI companies invoke the idea of apocalypses in justifying their work, and I am going to try and interview the authors of it for the blog at some point in the near future, because it provoked a lot of interestijg comparisons for me with the apocalyptic rhetoric common in nuclear history.

I didn't realize until I got there that the Science Park housed the Einstein Tower (above), which I was very aware of from my time as a TA for a class on the “Einsteinian Revolution” in graduate school. It was a little smaller than I imagined, but maybe it was just colder than usual (cue rimshot).

After the conference ended, I took the train back to Berlin, and had some time to just walk around and explore a bit. I saw a remnant of the Berlin Wall, the Reichstag, Check Point Charlie, Brandenberg Gate, and a few other “classic” sites because, well, one has to. The weather alternated between warm sunshine and pouring rain, which felt appropriate somehow.

I also then just walked around a few of the neighborhoods. I did not have enough time to really feel that I can generalize much about Berlin, which is a large city. I was impressed by how much of the city is covered in graffiti. It seem more prevalent there than even in New York (and much more than Paris, obviously).

The “vibe” of Berlin seems much more intentionally gritty than Paris (acknowledging that there are grittier parts of Paris and less gritty parts of Berlin) and one get the feeling that the scars of division and reunification, while perhaps healed, are scars nonetheless. And perhaps not all that faded.

It is an interesting place, though. I can see why it has a strong appeal for many — it has a particular urban funkiness to it, what Brooklyn today wishes it could be, I think. But I am neither an expert on Brooklyn nor Berlin, so these are just superficial impressions…

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote about a document that I have known about for a long time: an economist's analysis of the economic effects of a large nuclear detonation over the city of Houston from 1965.

I find it a very strange and fascinating read, some parts horrifying (in more ways than one) and other parts almost humorous. There are some nuggets of insight, though, and I find aspects of the analysis (like making the demographic effects of nuclear war more tangible) to be surprisingly consonant with some of my own interests. I would love for NUKEMAP to be able to give insights into the detailed demographics of the dead and the survivors of a nuclear detonation… who knows?

Read more

These imagined scenarios, particularly when they get very granular in their attacking the problem of nuclear war survival, often feel surreal. Pretty much anything mundane looks absurd and inconsequential when put up against the specter of full-scale nuclear apocalypse. Still, I think there is some value, even to those of us who are not committed one way or the other to do the survivability of some Civil Defense planning, into “grounding” an understanding of what “nuclear apocalypse” means.

In 1963, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a prominent DC-area think tank, was contracted by the US Office of Civil Defense, Department of the Army, to conduct a detailed study of what would happen to a American single city in the event of a nuclear war. Several reports came out of this work over the course of 1965.

The city chosen was Houston, Texas, and the studies looked at the effects of a singular detonation, centered on the most populous area of the city. A variety of possible explosive yields, ranging from 100 kilotons up to 100 megatons, were looked at for comparative value, and the consequences for a number of sheltering scenarios were compared (e.g., no shelters, versus people having the time to move to dedicated shelters, versus people only being able to shelter nearby). The focus on a “local area approach,” the study authors explained, was “fruitful” in that it allowed for “insights into the effectiveness of shelter programs that would have been lost in the aggregations necessary for any evaluation at the national level.”1

One of the specific studies done as part of this work was on the economic impacts of a nuclear weapon detonating over Houston. The report on this was written up by William C. Truppner, an economist and career bureaucrat with decades of experience in different US government agencies, with an inauspicious title: “Nuclear Blast Effects on a Metropolitan Economy.”2 It specifically was meant to assess “weapon effects on economic resources and considers the post-attack relationships between surviving population and resources.”

How does one study such a thing rigorously? Truppner’s study focused in on three aspects of what is an insuperably large problem: “economic output, property values, and population characteristics including the experienced labor force.”

“Property values” seems like a pretty odd thing to worry about, post-apocalypse. This is the part that seems absurd on the face of it. And perhaps it is a bit absurd. But Truppner is clear that this is an artifact of available data: property values are the kind of mass statistical data that are relatively easy to obtain, and can be thus used as a rough proxy for calculating economic impact. The problems with the data are pretty clear: are assessed values and real values the same (no), what does one do about the fact that certain types of property are exempted from taxation and thus are not in the same datasets (extrapolate between them), and, more fundamentally, the fact that the idea of a “pre-war” property value having any meaningful correlation to a “post-war” property value, as if the “pre-war” and “post-war” market forces would be roughly equivalent. Still, Truppner seems to be arguing, you have to start somewhere.

In looking at property values, what the IDA researchers did was essentially superimpose a series of blast rings over the city of Houston and assume that within certain distances of ground zero, for the variation detonations explored, a certain percentage of property was destroyed. Understandably, the larger the bomb, the higher the percentage, although the relationship between destructive potential and weapons yield for nuclear weapons is not linear. At the lowest end (100 kilotons), some 90% of the property in Houston survives; at the highest end (100 megatons), less than 20% does.

Some interesting results come out of this. One is that the total population also declines proportionally with property value in an unsheltered scenario — because people are in those properties that are getting destroyed, obviously. For a 10 megaton scenario, only 10% of the population of Houston would survive such an attack. But if one assumes that people are able to take shelter, this changes: in the 10 megaton case, now 30% of the population would survive.

That is still already somewhat sobering: even in a likely idealistic sheltering situation, you are still going to lose 70% of your city’s population. Is the difference between 70% dead and 90% dead “worth it”? The Civil Defense planner will generally say yes, because from a numerical perspective, at least, there is a significant difference between the total survivors in that situation, and that puts one on a very different “post-war” footing.

But a somewhat surprising results comes out of this. For one, the amount of property destroyed does not change with sheltering plans, only the population. So that means that if the “value” of the city is considered as its property (and not its people!), then the total value per person after nuclear war goes down when more people survive:

These data suggest that if the entire population is given any kind of shelters, even fallout shelters, and the attack is upon the at-home population for upon the shelter posture was designed, they will emerge “poorer” on the average. If the population were at work and therefore unable to reach the shelters allocated for the resident population, there are postures which would have the effect of maintaining or increasing post-attack per capita wealth. But the stronger the shelters available, the poorer the survivors will be.

I hesitate only a little to point to this as evidence that economists are very strange, and perceive the world very strangely. The logic certainly makes sense. But it seems like entirely the wrong way to think about survival: we’d all be richer if fewer of us survive. The fallacy of this is somewhat evident: a lone survivor is hardly “wealthy” in a meaningful sense, even if he may make claim to all the world’s resources, because actual value comes out of societies, systems, pooled resources, etc., to say nothing of the fact that there are many ways to value things other than economically.

This effect of “richer” and “poorer” survivors is also, understandably, correlated with the amount of damage that is done:

Post-attack physical property values, subjected to the sixteen hypothetical attacks (eight weapons, two targets each), varied from 94 percent of the pre-attack value for a 0.1-Mt weapon to 10 percent for a 100-Mt weapon. The same attacks on the unsheltered population of Houston result in 86 percent and 2 percent rate of survival, respectively. The survivors of larger attacks, in a limited sense, become richer. The higher the yield of a weapon, the greater the per capita “wealth” of the survivors....

I hesitate to call this perverse, both because that is not a very “historical” judgment, nor do I think the logic is wrong. But one does wonder how Truppner felt, writing that last sentence down.

Obviously Truppner was not calling for less people surviving, or for the economic benefits of being attacked by multi-megaton weapons. To the contrary, he sees in this data a new mandate: Civil Defense must do a better job to protect property:

It seems, then, that unsheltered people are more destructible than unsheltered property, but sheltered people are less destructible than unsheltered property. If one purpose of a shelter program is to maintain per capita property values within bounds, protection must be given to property as well as to people…

I need to start creating a list of deeply strange Cold War sentences, because that first one is really one for the hall-of-fame.

Truppner’s report goes deeper than this high-level generalization, looking at the specific industries affected within Houston, both in terms of infrastructure (e.g., what kinds of buildings and factories are destroyed) and workers (focusing on particular professions). For both of these, he that because industries and their workers are not uniformly distributed inside of Houston, there were places where surprisingly disproportionate results occurred, with some industries (and professions) having roughly the same proportion of survivors in “post-war” Houston as “pre-war” Houston, but others being either over- or under-represented. He describes this as a “distortion” of the economic situation, and underlined the consequence of it to highlight them:

Assuming that such a situation would be characteristic of every target city in a nuclear attack, it would appear that important tears in the national industrial fabric are obscured by analyses relying on nationwide aggregation. This finding has obvious implication for judgments based on estimates of post-attack economic output developed from statistics reflecting national totals.

When applied to the workforce, Truppner found that there were serious “distortions” in professions between the “pre-war” and “post-war” in unsheltered scenarios, and that they disappeared if you assumed sheltering was taking place. This part of the study gets into more of that impressive minutiae which also gives it that air of absurdity. Pre-war Houston had 1,603 barbers, which made up 3.57% of the labor force. Post-war (10 megaton detonation) Houston without shelters would only have 105 barbers, now only 3.04% of the labor force — a distortion of 0.53%! But with shelters, you’d have 398 barbers, and they would retain their share of 3.51% of the labor force. Phew.

It’s not just barbers — it’s taxi cab drivers, midwives, weavers, welders, asbestos and insulation workers, plumbers, opticians, electricians, stone masons, carpenters, glaziers, real estate brokers, underwriters, stenographers, cashiers, conductors, lawyers, judges, teachers, nurses, physicians, psychologists… you name it, they tried to catalog how many of them were in Houston before the war, and how many would be expected to survive with and without shelters.

I think this is actually quite wonderful. Would it not be amazing if NUKEMAP could do something like this? Does it not render the cost of nuclear war so much more tangible?

That is not how Tuppner sees it, of course. He instead frets that some industries would be over- and under-represented, and how this has “stark implications for the post-attack world,” notably that, for example, the surviving employees in the “food and kindred products, wholesale trade, and retail trade” sectors would outstrip those sectors’ capabilities post-war, and those workers would not have transferable skills. This is where the economist’s world view seems to go off the rails: that people who worked in “retail trade” might need to learn a new profession after a nuclear war is, well, probably not what most people would count as a pressing problem.

Truppner’s study is fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. There’s definitely value in this kind of “local area” approach to nuclear war: it makes the unimaginable seem tangible, graspable, and individual. Who can resist looking for one’s own profession on such lists? (Pre-war Houston would have had 154 Professors of Social Studies. After a 10 megaton blast, without sheltering only 10 would remain. With sheltering, 33.)

But at the same time, the framing of nuclear war in purely economic terms, and the perhaps perverse conclusions that arise from that, feels like it undercuts the ultimate message about survivability. Contemplating the number of surviving barbers in Houston under different nuclear war scenarios feels so disproportionately strange that it mocks the entire enterprise in a way that no parody possibly could.

This upcoming week I will be making a trip to Potsdam, Germany, for the Science and Democracy Network annual meeting. I have only been to Germany once, years ago, and only to Munich (which was lovely, but I gather from Germans that saying “I have been to Germany but only Munich” is a bit like saying “I have been to the United States but only Columbus, Ohio” — they consider it to be a very strange choice as the only place one has been in their country, despite it being a rather significant city historically). So that should be interesting.

I have also finalized my plans to go to Edinburgh in July for the 2026 annual meeting of the History of Science Society, where I will be presenting a paper (on the “architecture of secrecy”) and participating in a round-table (on global nuclear history). I have never been to Scotland, so I am also looking forward to that.

I’ve been working on a few articles for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, one of which will involve dipping my toe very delicately into the discussion about “AI” (specifically LLMs) and nuclear security. It is a big topic, and one that many very capable and able people have thought about a lot, and not one that I have particularly strong feelings about at the moment (in the sense that I do not really feel confident about predicting the future).

My article will focus on an aspect of the nuclear side of things that I know particularly well, a place where I feel I might be able to offer some non-obvious (and hopefully somewhat well-grounded) observations. Well, we’ll see…

One of the things I’ve been working on for the last few weeks have been improvements to MISSILEMAP, which has needed some updates for awhile now. The major push for making the changes is that MISSILEMAP is still running on Mapbox, which means that if traffic spikes (as it occasionally does) I get hit with a bill from them, and I am rather resentful of paying them for that. So I’ve been converting it over to the Protomaps setup that I developed for NUKEMAP a few years ago, which is much cheaper.

The problem is that the setup I developed is (like every piece of code I go back to) squirrelly and spaghettified and certainly does not explain itself. Additionally, the framework I developed for NUKEMAP, while pretty flexible, doesn’t have built-in capability for some of the things MISSILEMAP needs, like geodesic paths. So I’ve been adapting the code over (and remembering how it works, because of course it is not documented), and I’ve also made the obviously-wrong choice of re-coding the map framework along more sensible lines. It is coming along.

While I was in the MISSILEMAP code anyway, I re-did a few of the functions that I was somewhat unhappy with. One of them is the way it calculated accuracy (circular error probable), particularly when it “simulated” launches. The original function mathematically satisfied the definition of it, but was clearly not very “natural” in that the distribution did not look very Gaussian (smooth).

The new function is based on a better statistical function, and will even (in the future) allow one to tweak the parameters a bit. Above is a quick screenshot showing the new function (left) and the only function (right) — you can see how much more “realistic” the one on the left looks. You can also see that there are occasionally “hits” that go outside of the CEPX3 range (the largest of the light blue circles), which is possible in a better function.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote about one of the stranger post-apocalypse novels I have ever read: Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965).

I don’t remember when I first read Dr. Bloodmoney, but it was a few years back. I re-read most of it prior to writing the blog post, as a refresher, and it was interesting to come back to it. I had remembered the psychic phocomelus and the titular Dr. Bluthgeld, but I had forgotten exactly how Dick characterized Bluthgeld in particular, and the dark paranoia that suffused the work. I had not, prior to writing the post, thought about the contrasts between it and Dr. Strangelove, whose title the editor blatantly emulated, and I thought that was a productive way to engage with it as a cultural artifact, as it shed light on both of the works.

Read more