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…

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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.

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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…

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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!

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Dick, or PKD as he is known to his fans, was a prolific author of strange science fiction. Many of his novels and stories were made into major Hollywood properties — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) became Blade Runner (1982), “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” became Total Recall (1990), and Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), and The Man in the High Castle (2015) are all based on Dick’s writings. All of these adaptations involved some fairly significant deviations from the source material, because the source material was never all that Hollywood-ready: narrative flow and accessibility were clearly not Dick’s priorities. Dick’s real strengths were creative concepts and, above all, strange vibes — dark, unsettling, paranoid themes, perhaps a reflection of Dick’s own well-documented struggles with mental illness and drug use (particularly amphetamines and, later, LSD).

Whatever the cause, Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney is a strange, fascinating take on nuclear apocalypse, unlike any others that I have ever read. He wrote the book quickly, along with four other books, in an amphetamine haze in 1963. The working titles were Earth's Diurnal Course and A Terran Odyssey — neither particularly good or descriptive — but his editor suggested they change it to the title it ultimately had in a bid to capitalize on the interest in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

The story is centered in the San Francisco Bay Area (where Dick grew up and lived), in two different time periods, which the narrative sometimes jumps between. The first is 1972, before the apocalypse; the second is in 1988, after it.

The 1981 of the book (which was, again, written in 1963) is one in which scientific progress has continued at a decent pace, but has come with consequences. The main one of which occurred a several years before (in 1972), and involved a nuclear test explosion that went wrong. The details are kept somewhat hazy, but the gist of it is made clear: after the test of “high-altitude bombs,” the “enormous masses of radioactive clouds had not drifted off but had been attracted by the Earth's gravitational field, and had returned to the atmosphere,” causing “terrible fallout.” The consequences of this are never quite explained but it is invoked as something that caused enough suffering that several characters refer to themselves as all having been part of “the Spirit of ‘72.”

The book contains several characters, many of which are quite interestingly developed, but there are two in particular that stand out as exceptional. These are Hoppy Harrington, and Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld.

Hoppy is a phocomelus; the context is (again) not explained in detail, but it is strongly implied that he was a thalidomide baby. He appears to be a teenager, with a prominent head and torso but “flipper-like” hands and feet. He has a rather sophisticated wheelchair that allows him to both move around and manipulate objects rather deftly, and in the beginning of the book we are shown that he is capable of being an excellent television and radio repairman despite his handicap.

Hoppy is also psychic, capable of telekinesis, clairvoyance, and other apparent powers. He attempts to keep these largely hidden in the pre-apocalyptic period, as he fears how he will be treated, but upon drinking alcohol he enters into a clairvoyant stupor. He and those who listen to him apparently understand the bleak world that Hoppy describes in this stupor as the afterlife, but he is really describing the post-apocalypse. Hoppy’s powers, which manifest even more prominently in the post-apocalypse, are a major part of the evolving story.

Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld (the titular “Dr. Bloodmoney”) is a nuclear physicist from Budapest who is employed by the University of California and the weapons laboratory at Livermore. He is almost universally loathed, and held responsible for the nuclear accident of 1972. Early in the narrative (pre-apocalypse), he goes to see Dr. Stockstill, a psychiatrist, under the pseudonym of “Jack Tree.” Their initial interaction is fascinating and worth reading in its entirety:

To his new patient, Doctor Stockstill said, “Cup of coffee? Or tea or Coke?” He read the little card which Miss Purcell had placed on his desk. “Mr. Tree,” he said aloud. “Any relation to the famous English literary family? Iris Tree, Max Beerbohm...”

In a heavily-accented voice Mr. Tree said, “That is not actually my name, you know.” He sounded irritable and impatient. “It occurred to me as I talked to your girl.”

Doctor Stockstill glanced questioningly at his patient.

“I am world-famous,” Mr. Tree said. “I’m surprised you don’t recognize me; you must be a recluse or worse.” He ran a hand shakily through his long black hair. “There are thousands, even millions of people in the world, who hate me and would like to destroy me. So naturally I have to take steps; I have to give you a made-up name.” He cleared his throat and smoked rapidly at his cigarette; he held the cigarette European style, the burning end within, almost touching his palm.

Oh my god, Doctor Stockstill thought. This man, I do recognize him. This is Bruno Bluthgeld, the physicist. And he is right; a lot of people both here and in the East would like to get their hands on him because of his miscalculation back in 1972. Because of the terrible fall-out from the high-altitude blast which wasn’t supposed to hurt anyone; Bluthgeld’s figures proved it in advance.

“Do you want me to know who you are?” Doctor Stockstill asked. “Or shall we accept you simply as ‘Mr. Tree’? It’s up to you; either way is satisfactory to me.”

“Let’s simply get on,” Mr. Tree grated.

“All right.” Doctor Stockstill made himself comfortable, scratched with his pen against the paper on his clipboard. “Go ahead.”

“Does an inability to board an ordinary bus — you know, with perhaps a dozen persons unfamiliar to you — signify anything?” Mr. Tree watched him intently.

“It might,” Stockstill said.

“I feel they’re staring at me.”

“For any particular reason?”

“Because,” Mr. Tree said, “of the disfiguration of my face.”

Without an overt motion, Doctor Stockstill managed to glance up and scrutinize his patient. He saw this middle-aged man, heavy-set, with black hair, the stubble of a beard dark against his unusually white skin. He saw circles of fatigue and tension beneath the man’s eyes, and the expression in the eyes, the despair. The physicist had bad skin and he needed a haircut, and his entire face was marred by the worry within him... but there was no “disfiguration.” Except for the strain visible there, it was an ordinary face; it would not have attracted notice in a group.

“Do you see the blotches?” Mr. Tree said hoarsely. He pointed at his cheeks, his jaw. “The ugly marks that set me apart from everybody?”

“No,” Stockstill said, taking a chance and speaking directly.

“There’re there,” Mr. Tree said. “They’re on the inside of the skin, of course. But people notice them anyhow and stare. I can’t ride on a bus or go into a restaurant or a theater; I can’t go to the San Francisco opera or the ballet or the symphony orchestra or even a nightclub to watch one of those folk singers; if I do succeed in getting inside I have to leave almost at once because of the staring. And the remarks.”

Bluthgeld eventually leaves in a huff, while Stockstill is convinced that the man is paranoid and probably schizophrenic. The nuclear war breaks out that same day, and Bluthgeld barely notices it, so lost he is within his own delusions and confusions. Bluthgeld is, to a degree, aware that he is ill, but his knowledge of this does not make it any easier for him to distinguish fantasy from reality.

Stockstill serves as our vehicle into the popular understanding of Bluthgeld:

It would be so easy, Stockstill realized, to find pathology here. So easy — and so tempting. A man this hated... I share their opinion, he said to himself, the they that Bluthgeld — or rather Tree — talks about. After all, I’m part of society, too, part of the civilization menaced by the grandiose, extravagant miscalculations of this man. It could have been — could someday be — my children blighted because this man had the arrogance to assume that he could not err.

But there was more to it than that. At the time, Stockstill had felt a twisted quality about the man; he had watched him being interviewed on TV, listened to him speak, read his fantastic anti-communist speeches — and come to the tentative conclusion that Bluthgeld had a profound hatred for people, deep and pervasive enough to make him want, on some unconscious level, to err, to make him want to jeopardize the lives of millions.

Bluthgeld continues in hiding after the apocalypse, but he is discovered. Post-apocalypse, he believes he has the ability to cause nuclear apocalypses with just his mind — which may in fact be true.

In 1979, Dick wrote an introduction to Dr. Bloodmoney, which did not appear in print until 1985. In it, he discussed many of the characters as he re-examined the book years later. On Bluthgeld, he said simply:

So I do have to confess to an overly simple view of Dr. Bluthgeld: I hate him and I hate everything he stands for. He is the alien and the enemy. I cannot fathom his mind; I cannot understand his hates. It is not the Russians I fear; it is the Dr. Bluthgeld's, the Dr. Bloodmoney's in our own society that terrify me. I am sure that to the extent that they know me, or would know me, they hate me back and would do exactly to me what I would do to them.

It is an interesting and strong reaction. Bluthgeld is, I think quite overtly, a riff of Edward Teller, the virulently anti-Communist, Hungarian nuclear physicist who worked at Berkeley and Livermore, who was famously the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and who was a reviled (and famous) character in American political culture at the time Dick wrote his book. While one could identify other potential influences in the character, the references to Teller seem quite direct.

The title of the book as it was published of course invites comparisons to Dr. Strangelove. The stories could not be more different. Dr. Strangelove is a parody; Dr. Bloodmoney is definitely not. Dr. Strangelove is about how nuclear war starts; Dr. Bloodmoney does not concern itself with that at all. Dr. Strangelove is primarily about generals and presidents and other “high-level” politics; Dr. Bloodmoney is mostly about, well, not exactly “regular” people, but something more of that level. Dr. Strangelove is, for all of its parody, played “straight” in terms of its plausibility; Dr. Bloodmoney relies on psychic powers for its story.

The character of Dr. Strangelove, played by Peter Sellers, may be meant “insane” in a sense, but it is a “rational insanity”: Dr. Strangelove’s madness is the madness of following certain types of reasoning to irrational ends. He is not “mentally ill” in a clinical, pathological sense. (The one character from Dr. Strangelove, the film, who was arguably mentally ill in that sense was General Jack Ripper, who believed that the Communists were attempting to infiltrate his “precious bodily fluids.”)

Dr. Bluthgeld isn’t “crazy,” he’s mentally ill. He suffers from clinical delusions both grand and small. (That he happens to be correct that in Dick’s universe, he may have psychic capabilities to manifest his delusions, is immaterial to our comparative point, here.) Ultimately, Dick’s identification of Bluthgeld’s mindset with a profound misanthropy means that his character is doing something very different than Kubrick was doing with Dr. Strangelove, and it makes Dick’s argument quite a different one than Kubrick’s.

Dr. Strangelove ends with the nukes going off, and the elites rambling about fanciful post-apocalyptic fantasies. The nukes going off happens almost immediately in Dr. Bloodmoney, which is why it is the truly post-apocalyptic of the two. Dick addressed the “survival” aspect of the book in his later introduction:

In my opinion, this is an extremely hopeful novel. It does not posit the end of human civilization as a result of the next war. People are still around and they are still coping. Those who survive, anyhow, are fairly lucky in their new lives. What is interesting is the subtle change in the relative power status of the survivors. Take Hoppy Harrington, who has no arms or legs. Before the bomb hits, Hoppy is marginal in terms of power. He is fortunate if he can get any kind of job at all. But in the postwar world this is not the case. Hoppy is elevated by stealthy increments until, at last, he is a menace to a man not even on the planet’s surface [an astronaut circling the Earth]; Hoppy has become a demigod, and a complex one at that. He is not really evil but that his power is evil.

Which is what makes it all the more unfortunately that the title means that this book will forever have to be compared in some way to Dr. Strangelove, because it is really quite a different kind of story.

I have tried to call to mind what other books or stories it reminded me of. The closest I could come is Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), which is similarly post-apocalyptic, and deals with dark forces and supernatural powers. The Stand is quite different in many respects, to be sure, but in using the post-apocalypse not only as a vehicle for making commentary on the nature of contemporary society (which all post-apocalyptic stories do), but as a way to imbue what starts as a fairly “grounded” novel about a pandemic with supernatural themes, it has more in common with Dr. Bloodmoney than the latter does with, say, Fail-Safe or Red Alert or even The Day After.

Dr. Bloodmoney is not one of Dick’s best-known novels, and it is not a classic of either the post-apocalyptic genre or the nuclear war genres, by any means. But what is interesting to me about Dr. Bloodmoney is that even though it makes no real pretensions about modeling the world as it really is or could be — what with a psychic phocomelus, a psychic conjoined twin (I’m not going to get into that), and other fantastical elements — and is not narrowly focused on any particular “issue,” it still manages to be a commentary on the nuclear age. Not on its specifics, but a comment on what Dick seems to have felt was its darker id, a deep paranoia and misanthropy that lurked beneath its rational surface.

So what that means, practically, are several things. For one thing, it means I have an actual salary for the next couple of years, which is a positive development to say the least. That, plus the fact that my wife also found gainful employment this year, means the whole “France experiment” is going as positively as one could possibly hope for, so far.

The other is that it gives my activities over the next few years a lot more form and structure, since the position comes with many obligations (that I myself largely came up with). This means writing quite a few articles/columns for the Bulletin (which will be cross-posted on Doomsday Machines) on both historical and contemporary issues, getting the video essay series I’ve been working on for awhile off the ground, developing a number of interactive web tools/datasets/etc. for the Bulletin, and working with a podcast company to develop a limited podcast series about the history (and future?) of the Doomsday Clock.

So that’s a lot! Ridiculously ambitious, even! But it’s also all stuff that sounds quite fun to me, and includes some things (like the video essays) that I’ve been really wanting/needing to get done anyway, and who knows what it will all lead to in the long run.

In other news, it has been a heat wave for the last two weeks in Europe. I’m pretty good with dry heat, being a native Californian, but boy, I had not realized how much my being “pretty good” with it depended on having air conditioning as a respite from it. Temperatures were generally above 90ºF/32ºC, even at night, and while I don’t mind being in that heat generally, being steeped in it, day after day, with no relief, got pretty tiresome by the end of it.

The French believe that air conditioning is not just an environmental drag (debatable) but that it is actually bad for your health to be at what we consider to be a comfortable temperature (e.g. 60-70ºF/16-21ºC), and so even businesses that do have air conditioning keep themselves pretty warm. Pretty much no homes have them (including ours). We have a few fans (two of these if you are curious), which helped (especially at night), but it still felt hot.

The lycée where my wife teaches went remote on Friday because it was just too hot in the classrooms (which also do not have air conditioning), and I’m not really sure how that helped anything because if it’s too hot to learn in a classroom, it’s also too hot to learn over Zoom, and it wasn’t like it was much cooler in anyone’s homes.

Well, the heat wave ended yesterday, finally, and today it is much more comfortable — all the more so by comparison to the past week. We are enjoying that the sun is not even starting to set until 9:45pm these days — it makes the days feel gloriously long.

For Doomsday Machines this week I posted about a fascinating document from February 1957 about the “arithmetic” used by Strategic Air Command in the 1950s:

As with so many other things, I had (several) copies of this on my computer, and stumbled across them again while looking for something else, and got absorbed in it. I find “insider” accounts of nuclear targeting methodology and philosophy both fascinating and chilling, and the fact that the author of this one (a Navy advisor to the Atomic Energy Commission who had previously been head of SACEUR’s nuclear targeting and would play a role in shifting Eisenhower-era nuclear policy) both knew what he was talking about and was quite critical was quite unusual.

I got absorbed in it, as I often do, thought, “well, I should just write this up, since I find it so interesting.” I am sure that “read a document with me” is probably not everyone’s favorite cup of tea, but a) I do think giving documents careful attention is a core historical competency, and so maybe that is interesting-enough to see done, b) I try only to pick extremely interesting documents that are also not very well-known, and c) they’re easier to write than many of the other kinds of posts, so it is helpful to do them for weeks where I am feeling crunched for time (which I was this week, owing to a deadline I had on Friday).

As always I have several posts on “the back burner”… we’ll see what ends up moving me for next week… there are a few of my planned posts that I am probably going to convert to articles for the Bulletin, because they align well (and are worth the extra time I would put into them for that), but I am thinking of writing something on one of the stranger and more obscure post-nuclear war fiction books I’ve read… but it might also be zombies, who knows?

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SAC had first established the “military requirement” for the weapon in December 1954, and then reasserted that “requirement” twice over the course of 1956. AEC commissioner Thomas Murray wrote a letter to President Eisenhower in July 1956 inquiring whether “the stockpiling of a weapon of this size is in the national interest,” questioning whether it was “necessary or useful for military purposes” and whether its use would “be consistent with the dictates of the moral law with regard to the moderate and discriminating use of force in warfare.”1 Eisenhower bumped the question to the National Security Council, who did not complete their study until August 1957.

In January 1957, Murray gave further testimony to the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy which criticized the plans for the stockpile, and the 60 megaton bomb proposal. Subsequently, in February 1957, the Deputy Chiefs of Staff met to discuss the 60 megaton bomb question — the Army opposed it, the Air Force and Navy supported it, but again, there is more to this story that I am glossing over. Morse wrote his own analysis of Murray’s position in a letter to Strauss a few days later.

Morse’s own position on the 60 megaton bomb question appears to have been complicated. He did not believe that Murray, “nor any other civilian,” was in a position to “properly or successfully challenge the mathematics or the military factors” which were necessary for making sense of whether a “military requirement” was valid or not.

But he did believe that he had the qualifications necessary to discuss such matters, as he had served for three and a half years as the head of Atomic Planning within General Lauris Norstad’s Air Operations Directorate in European Command. And so Morse’s memo was primarily about why he believes that the methods for the military requirements of nuclear weapons was “still in the ‘stone age’ of development,” and that he felt the AEC commissioners should be aware of this fact.2 His critique starts as an organizational one:

Two major handicaps restrict military atomic planning. First and most important is the inferiority complex still common to most senior officers. They tend to consider atomic weapons to beyond their understanding without extensive study for which they have neither interest nor time.

Atomic planning is therefore delegated to junior officers who have completed various “effects” courses. They frequently lack the maturity and judgment normally provided by guidance from their seniors. When these junior planners confront their seniors with effects terminology and apparent complex calculations, the senior officers are unable to exert normal guidance. Instead, they are prone to endorse the computations without close questioning and without understanding procedures or implications, and often in spite of personal misgivings. I have seen this reaction time and again in the European Theater.

So what we have here, in Morse’s description, is nuclear planning being done by fairly inexperienced officers who are then deferred to by senior officers because of a lack of confidence on the latter’s part in contesting technical analysis.

The second issue is one of national policy in general:

Another major handicap lies in our National Policy which establishes no specific war objectives from which the military can deduce any limitation on the destruction to be inflicted on the enemy. Consequently, no limitations are planned.

This is quite damning and a fascinating observation: if the war objectives do not provide any requirements for limitation of damage, then the planning will not contemplate such limitations.

Morse then continued, analyzing the difference between how the Army and the Air Force saw these issues. The Army, he argued, were focused on how to defeat “men” — tactical issues in battle. As men are “mobile and unpredictable,” they had a much harder time justifying any military requirements for the stockpile. (The Army might have opposed the 60 Mt bomb, but at that same time they were pushing for over 150,000 tactical nuclear weapons to be built for their own use.)

The Air planner, however, thought in terms of “facilities,” and had a very simple “arithmetic” for calculating their requirements, which Morse explained:

The “arithmetic” of the Air planner is important. He first studies each target in the dim light of four important guesses: his bombing error, his desired probability of success in achieving a selected degree of damage to selected elements of the target. (Single rather than multi-weapon attack on each target is the rule in order to conserve delivery forces.) As an example, the planner may estimate a 3000 foot CEP (explained below), and require a 50% probability of achieving 50% damage to concrete structures. After these selections of guesses the answer comes by “arithmetic”. The answer is highly sensitive to all initial selections.

All of the emphasis in the above is in the original, and meant to indicate what “variables” could be tweaked, with the exception of the last sentence, which is just emphasized.

Morse explains CEP (which in the original he first calls “DEP” in an apparent typo), a common measure of projectile or bombing accuracy:

CEP means “Circular Error Probable,” and is the radius of the circle within which 50% of the bombs dropped on a specific target may statistically be expected to fall. It is a measure of bombing accuracy and is established by average peacetime bombing performance. The degradation factors for war conditions are largely guesswork. SAC says 3000 feet in peace, 10,000 feet in war. 5 miles is the specified CEP for the ICBM. Arithmetic with this CEP and a 50% probability produces a requirement for 20 [megatons] to crater runways. Raising the probability to 90%, same CEP, calls for 110 MT. By such arithmetic the Air planner can establish “requirements” for 60 MT, 120 MT (as SAC now talks in briefings) or any other number without limit. For example, such arithmetic applied to the ICBM can justify 300 MT or higher. As one pushes probability toward certainty, required yield approaches infinity.

What a lovely explanation of the relationship between accuracy, certainty, and required yield. The last sentence is one for the ages regarding overkill: if certainty is required, then overkill is inevitable, if accuracy is fixed. This paragraph also hints at the idea that SAC did not even consider a 60 Mt bomb to be the end of its ambitions for that time.

Morse then notes that SAC’s goals of cratering runways meant that it was contemplating ground bursts. He noted (and underlined) that “fallout from such attacks has been largely ignored to date by all planners except SACEUR [Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who prohibits ground bursts.”

Morse further pointed out that at SAC’s planning process was focused on individual targets, not systems of targets. This also led to overkill:

The distinction between analysis by individual targets rather than by systems of targets is most important because by its very nature it insures no allowance for the cumulative effects of weapons upon targets or operations other than those which each individual weapon was intended to destroy. The destructive and disruptive nature of nuclear weapons, particular megaton weapons, is such that cumulative or ancilliary effects may often be as great or greater than primary damage. Yet in today’s nuclear weapon planning they are dismissed as “bonus” effects adding to the certainty of success. Radioactive fallout upon enemy and friend alike, as well as world-wide, are among those effects so lightly dismissed as “bonus”.

In other words, by focusing on individual targets, particularly hard ones, SAC was focusing on a tiny range of potential damage: the highest blast pressures obtainable, used for cratering airfields and the like. It thus ignored the fact that these multi-megaton weapons were also doing vast “lighter” damage to the same area, including to other targets in that “complex,” as well as creating fallout, fire, and other longer-range damages. The latter were all “bonus” compared to that desire for cratering the airfields. (And how many targets are we talking about? A list of potential targets used by the USAF for nuclear planning from 1956 was released a few years back, and included some 1,100 individual locations.)

Morse noted that this concludes here was not just his own view of things:

A current DOD [Department of Defense] study questioned this procedure, pointed out that “bonus” effects result in tremendous over-kill, and concluded that analysis by systems rather than by individual targets, using the same procedures and calculations, would show that kilotons rather than megatons are more than sufficient to achieve desired destruction. This study was rigorously suppressed and all copies destroyed. It lent support, however, to the growing doubt regarding the validity of current military requirements for nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

What suppressed study is he referring to? The late Bill Burr suggested it might have been a forerunner to Project Budapest, an Army-Navy study that critiqued Air Force nuclear planning that was completed in August 1957.

Morse continued by noting there were other areas of “guesswork” used to inflate requirements, like questions about how many bombers would actually reach their targets. The result of all of this, he concluded, was that:

…the planner for air attack with nuclear weapons can generate requirements for any number or yield of weapons which he desires. By his interpretation of intelligence he can select an almost infinite number of targets for destruction, and of characteristics justifying any yield he wishes. It is he who estimates losses and aborts before penetration of enemy defenses. He also estimates losses to the latter. And he makes allowances for destruction of his own weapons by initial enemy attacks. Weapon requirements are directly proportional to the choice of such factors, but the remaining factors of the problem can multiply requirements manyfold.

What limiting factors were there, ultimately, in such a situation? Only three, Morse argued: conscience, financial resources, or production capacity. Of these:

Since the first is flexible and the second has imposed no restraint as yet, only production capacity has so far limited weapon requirements. The close correlation between SAC requirements and AEC production capacity over a period of years is not coincidence.

Morse takes a slightly more positive view of the Army’s planning, noting that the Army’s perspective was much more respectful of the consequences of such weapons, given their proximity to their effects:

[The Army planner] is acutely aware of the damage that explosives can do, to him as well as to the enemy if he is not careful. He has often seen high explosive effects, although not nuclear, at first hand. The air planner has seldom seen the results of his own bombing. Consequently, the Army nuclear planner is subject to almost automatic restraints, which do not apply to the reasoning of the air planner. And the results are quite different.

As for the Navy (Morse’s own service), Morse acknowledged that he was largely going to skip them, as its approach “hovered between the two extremes” of Army and Air, but tended to side with Air just because their own nuclear planning at that time involved using similar platforms (planes launched from carriers).

Again, Morse concluded that while he felt Murray was probably right about the lack of a military need for very high yield weapons, he did not think that Murray’s “guesses” for military requirements were any less arbitrary than the military ones. The point of the memo was not to provide even his own “guesses,” but to create a context in which the AEC Commissioners could evaluate why the different branches had such different apparently “requirements,” and why the Air requirements should be viewed with a grain of salt. If these military methods were “not tempered by good judgment and restraint,” then they would result in “questionable estimates,” to put it lightly.

The estimating of military requirements for atomic weapons is still in the “stone age” of development. Certainly you among the Commissioners should be fully aware of this fact in weighing Commission response to requirements expressed by the military.

Morse’s memo is vivid, clear, and sharp in its critique. It contains many of the same critiques that later analysis, such as Daniel Ellsberg and Lynn Eden, have since levied at nuclear war planning in the Cold War: arbitrary systems, swathed by secrecy and apparent technical precision, with little room for consideration of larger effects, conscience, or the big picture.

But Morse was no dove by any definition— and neither was Murray, nor Strauss, nor Eisenhower, nor anyone under discussion here. Morse would become a major force pushing for increased use of tactical nuclear weapons, limited nuclear war, and the “neutron bomb.” All of these were hawkish in their own way, but still recoiled from the horrors of the “infinite” targets and “infinity” yields that he saw as indicative of the “stone age” approach to planning by the Air Force.

I am quite honored and more than a little surprised. One never knows with a book, and I have no experience with awards of this sort, and while I am happy to stand by my book, whether other Truman scholars would find it in the least compelling remained somewhat unclear to me. So this feels very vindicating.

I had some family visiting in town for the last two days, and we took a trip to the Paris Catacombs. I had been to them a decade or so ago while visiting the city, and when we had moved here at the end of 2025 they were closed for major renovations, and only re-opened a few weeks ago. So I was interested to see what, if anything, had changed in the subterranean land of the dead.

The renovations are impressive. The original Catacombs, as I remember them, had very little signage. You took an elevator down, followed a long pathway, and then eventually ended up among stacked sculls and femurs and so on. You walked and walked and eventually ended up at a tight, claustrophobic stairway that dumped you unceremoniously back out on the street. I thought this was all pretty enjoyable at the time, because the distinctly un-polished approach had its own charm.

They’ve polished the experience up quite a bit. The skulls are basically the same, obviously. But now there is an audio tour that is proximity triggered, so you wear headphones as you walk through, and as you approach certain areas the audio track changes. The audio is mostly fine — a little cheesy (most of it is the voice of the fellow who was tasked with designing the Catacombs after the Parisian cemeteries started overflowing, and the actor hams it up a bit), and perhaps a little too much ambient music for my taste (I think the goal is to keep people from talking too much), but some of the things it pointed out were indeed interesting.

There is also just a lot more signage, including projected videos showing how the limestone had been dug out from under the city, and how the bodies were removed from the cemeteries. There are also some interesting exhibit changes in the name of accessibility, like the above tactile depiction for the blind. There is just quite a lot more to read while down there (in both English and French) in order to understand the broader context of the Catacombs.

Interestingly, there were no elevators at all, this time. I suspect they have them hidden away somewhere, but they expect the average visitor to use the stairs going both up and down. The stairwells have been completely renovated and, while still spiral stairs, are much larger than they used to be. The stairway down (but not up) also has landings every couple of stories, which breaks up the sense of claustrophobia. It’s about 110 stairs up and down by my count.

The Catacombs themselves were well-ventilated — an important thing for the last couple of days, as we’ve been in a heat wave here. My sense is that they upgraded the lighting as well; it is deliberately atmospheric, and made to look like candle and torchlight.

There will at some point be a Catacombs gift shop at the end, but that wasn’t open yet.

While walking Lyndon last Thursday, we happened to be going by Montparnasse Tower while someone was (illegally) free-soloing it. The photo above was taken from basically right underneath it, when the climber was maybe 1/4th of the way up. The police showed up right after I took the photo, and they made people clear the area. Then they just watched up, because it isn’t like they could do all that much, either. I watched until he was about 1/3rd of the way up and then went about my business. It was a hot day to do it! He made it look pretty easy though.

I’ve found very little online about the incident, other than a report that said that he did make it to the top, where he was (predictably) arrested. The tower is currently undergoing a major renovation, so I guess if there is ever a time to do such a thing, now is the time.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote about a famous episode of The Twilight Zone from 1961: “The Shelter.” I have watched a number of Twilight Zone episodes that feature nuclear war, and most of them just treat “nuclear war” the same way you might treat any other generic “end of the world.” This one, however, really tried to grapple with some of the underlying issues from a human perspective, and, as I discovered while looking for more information about the writing of it, came out of personal anxieties that Rod Serling himself had about the ethics of fallout shelters.

It’s a pretty good episode. Many of the Twilight Zone “twists” are predictable at this point, just because there’s only so many times you can do the “they’re actually on/not on Earth“ thing before it becomes obvious to expect it. “The Shelter” really doesn’t do anything bizarre — bomb shelters and false alarms were and are real things — and instead is just a little “play” meant to illustrate some deeper questions.

I suspect that for next week I will have something about nuclear war planning, either American or Soviet; I’ve been digging deep into some documents about those things, and keep finding things where I think, “oh, that would be interesting to share with people.” But we shall see…!

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“The Shelter” opens with a birthday celebration of a physician, Dr. William Stockton, thrown by his family and neighborhood friends. Along with singing the praises of the good doctor’s generosity, the celebrants also give him some gentle ribbing about how much time and effort he has put into building a bomb shelter:

Well, I'm afraid we'll have to forgive him for all that despite the fact that what the doctor thinks of as farsightedness on his part has been a real pain in the neck to the rest of us, what with all the concrete trucks and the nocturnal hammering and all the rest of it.

But the party quickly turns sour when Dr. Stockton’s son, Paulie, runs him to tell him that the radio program he had been listening to had abruptly shut off after announcing that people should turn to the CONELRAD station. Today this would require a bit more explanation, but in 1961 I suspect the audience could be expected to know that the CONELRAD station, which was even marked on many American radios from the time with a triangle, was for emergency information, particularly related to Civil Defense and nuclear war.

Dr. Stockton takes this seriously, as befits a man with a bomb shelter. The station announces that “unidentified flying objects” had been detected by America’s ballistic missile warning systems, and that people were advised to go into their shelters if they have them. If they did not have them, they were advised to move supplies of food, water, and medicine to a “central place.” The guests hastily run home.

At this point, Serling’s introductory monologue cuts in:

What you’re about to watch is a nightmare. It is not meant to be prophetic, it need not happen. It’s the fervent and urgent prayer of all men of goodwill that it never shall happen. But in this place, in this moment, it does happen. This is the twilight zone.

The partygoers have left. Stockton and his wife, Grace, are preparing their supplies. Grace is filling up jars full of water at the sink, although the water pressure is waning and finally ends. Grace and Bill move their supplies to the basement and send Paulie out to grab some more.

While he is gone, Grace kneels in desperation or prayer. Bill tries to comfort her:

– Grace. Now, if it is a bomb, there's no assurance it'll land near us, and if it doesn't...

– But if it does, Bill, New York is only 40 miles away. And New York’s gonna get it, we know that. So we'll get it, too, all of it. The poison, the radiation, the whole mess. We'll get it.

– We'll be in a shelter, Grace, and with any luck at all, we'll survive. We've got food and water enough to last us for two weeks. Maybe even longer if we use it wisely.

– Then what, Bill? Then what? We crawl out of here like gophers to tiptoe through all that rubble up above? The rubble and the ruin and the bodies of our friends? Oh, Bill, why is it so necessary to survive? What's the good of it? Wouldn’t it just be better and easier, just quicker if we just...

Before she can finish the sentence, Paulie is heard up the stairs. Bill gestures upwards:

Grace, that’s why we have to survive. That’s the reason. He may only inherit rubble now, but he’s 12 years old. He’s only 12 years old, Grace.

Grace seems somewhat reassured, and collects herself.

We cut to Bill upstairs, in the kitchen, grabbing some final jugs of water. A knock comes at his window — it is one of his neighbors, asking that Bill might allow him and his family share the Stocktons’ shelter. Bill tells him there is no room and tells him that he should instead go into his own basement. But his friend notes that his own house doesn’t have a basement; it is modern construction, with all the electric conveniences of the time, but no basement, no protection. Bill gives him a lecture:

I kept telling you, Jerry... all of you... Get ready, build a shelter. Forget the card parties and the barbecues for maybe a few hours a week, forget them, and make the admission to yourself that the worst was possible. But you didn’t want to listen. None of you wanted to listen.

To build a shelter was to admit to the kind of age we lived in, and none of you had the guts to face that. So now you've got to face something far worse! So, God, please, God protect you. It’s out of my hands. It’s simply out of my hands.

And so emerges the central tension of the episode. One by one, the neighbors who had been at Dr. Stockton’s birthday party show up at the house, begging for shelter. Bill, by now barricaded inside his bomb shelter, is adamant that this is impossible: they do not have enough space, supplies, or even air to spare. Bill has been the one who prepared, and the others mocked it, and now they were on their own.

The friends become increasingly agitated. They turn on one another. They argue about which of them is more deserving to live; one of them declares that another is a “foreigner,” a “pushy, grabby, semi-American” who does not deserve anything.

At the shelter door, they plead for the lives of their children. They threaten. Bill tells them that they are wasting their time, that he will not let them in, that they should be seeking shelter or preparations elsewhere.

Finally, the neighbors move to acquire the tools necessary to break down the door to the Stocktons’ shelter, to claim it for themselves. Hearing all of this, inside the shelter, the Stockton family process it:

– Bill… Who are those people?

– Those people... those people are our neighbors, our friends, the people we've lived with and alongside for 20 years.

The neighbors return with a battering ram. They force the door down, but the Stocktons have piled up furniture to slow them down.

Just as they make it through the door, the CONELRAD station pipes up:

This is CONELRAD. Remain tuned for an important message. The President of the United States has just announced that the previously unidentified objects have now been definitely ascertained as being satellites. Repeat. There are no enemy missiles approaching. Repeat: There are no enemy missiles approaching. The objects have been identified as satellites. They are harmless and we are in no danger. The state of emergency has officially been called off. We are in no danger.

The neighbors embrace their loved ones, crying with relief. The most aggressive neighbor attempts to apologize to his immigrant friend — “I went off my rocker… well, you can understand that, can’t you?” — who is clearly not reassured. They apologize to Dr. Stockton and offer to pay for the damage they have caused to his home.

Dr. Stockton emerges from the shelter, looking spent and haggard. One of the other neighbors suggests they have a big block party to celebrate their survival. While another nervous neighbor embraces the idea: “anything to get back to normal, huh?”

The doctor walks through them, shell-shocked. He turns, looking at them like they are madmen:

– Normal? I don’t know. I don’t know what normal is. I thought I did once. I don’t anymore.

– I told you we'd pay for the damages, Bill.

– Damages? I wonder. I wonder if any one of us has any idea what those damages really are. Maybe one of them is finding out what we're really like when we're normal... The kind of people we are just underneath the skin. I mean all of us. A lot of naked, wild animals who put such a price on staying alive that they'll claw their neighbors to death just for the privilege. We were spared a bomb tonight, but I wonder. I wonder if we weren’t destroyed even without it.

And so the episode ends. Serling gives his outro monologue:

No moral, no message, no prophetic tract. Just a simple statement of fact: For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized. Tonight’s very small exercise in logic from the twilight zone.

Like many episodes of The Twilight Zone, the themes are not subtle, nor obscure. The question of “fallout shelter morality” was a commonly-discussed one at the time. If you prepare for nuclear war, and your neighbor does not, are you obligated to help them, even if it comes at the expense of yourself or your own family? Conversely, is the neighbor under the obligation to simply suffer under those circumstances, or are they justified in trying to protect themselves and their loved ones?

And the idea that friends could become instant enemies when the world was at the door, and that civilization and civility are only thin veneers that wash away at the first sign of threat, is a common threat in literature, sociological musings, and post-apocalyptic fiction. (And many other episodes of The Twilight Zone.)

But “The Shelter” does a very good job of putting these things together in a way that befits the context of a call for national shelter building. Unlike some of Serling’s other episodes that invoke nuclear disaster, nuclear war isn’t just a metaphor here, it is part of a very real concern at the moment, referring to very real questions at the time. There is no indication that this episode is taking place on an Earth-like planet (like some other episodes), or any place other than the here and now. It’s not even fanciful: there had already been several major “false alarms” of nuclear warning systems that reached the public, and many other secret alarms that had not resulted in any public warning. The episode aired only a month after the Berlin Wall had been erected, and about a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis — pretty much the most dangerous period of the Cold War.

Serling was interviewed on the radio about the episode on a radio station apparently about a month later, asked about the reaction to the episode. He told the interviewer, Bob Crane that:

We had about 13,000 letters and cards inside of two days. I think we hit some kind of nerve. […] I wrote it because I felt that it had great immediacy. We’d be talking at home, my wife and me, about the possibility of building a shelter, and we were struck with the moral and ethical problem of what would happen if there were an alert sounding, and we got into our shelter happily, because we’d built one, and neighbors with children came to the door and said, “please let us in.” Well, that was the problem. I can’t answer it. I don’t know what is the ethical rightness and justice of this. I haven’t figured it out yet.

The interviewer noted that he had heard several “knowledgable men” on a panel debating exactly these kinds of ethical questions, and asked Serling about the ending, and whether he wanted “to leave it a little bit stronger than that,” in terms of providing answers to the moral question posed. Serling was emphatic:

No, because I’m not one of those quote “knowledgable men,” Bob, I don’t know. I was up in the air about it, morally and ethically. I didn’t know how to end that thing. I didn’t know what position, philosophically, I could take.

The interviewer then asked Serling about his own shelter plans. Serling said they weren’t building one now, but for awhile “they had thought very seriously about it.” But they decided they weren’t going to build one. “Why?”

Well, for very realistic, you know, stringently realistic reasons. It’s my feeling now that if we survive, what’ll we survive for? What kind of world are we going to go into? You know, if it’s rubble and poisoned water, and inedible food, and my kids have to live like wild beasts, I’m not particularly sure I want to survive in that kind of world.

The only character who voices this specific point of view in “The Shelter” is that of Grace, Dr. Stockton’s wife. Both Dr. Stockton, and the neighbors, took the imperative for survival as a given. But Grace had to be convinced, and only supported the effort after her husband reminded her that it was really about the survival of their child.

Serling also invoked the lives of his children his children’s lives, but to support the opposite conclusion of Dr. Stockton, from the episode: that he could not bear to put them through such a “survival.”

Here is a photo from 9:30pm the other evening, when the sun was only starting to set and had hit that “Golden Hour”:

It was even lighter than it is there, because the camera on my phone (which is not good) is trying to balance out how bright the sun was against the building in front of me.

I can see, now, why the French famously end up eating and staying up so late. It doesn’t feel like nighttime until it is truly late, now, and getting dinner at 6pm feels like eating it at noon. I’m not complaining, though, except for the fact that it’s easy to get thrown off.

Last week I got all of my grades in and closed out my semester at Sciences Po. I always feel a bit liberated after doing that, and excited to start planning out the summer. Among the several things I will be doing this summer, I have once again got a group of students together to work on the Oregon Road ‘83 project, as I mentioned last time.

We had our first “pre-summer meeting” (we will start in earnest in a few weeks) last week, and I did some of the setup work that is necessary each year, like setting up a Discord server for the team, setting up a shared folder for the game, making sure everyone had been added to the private Github repo, and so on.

I also drew up my list of summer 2026 priorities for the game. The major one is to push it to public beta. That happens to have been the major priority for summer 2025 as well, but I think if we stay focused — and I am not in the middle of an international move again! — it should be possible to achieve, as we are quite a lot of the way there.

The “to do” list is more or less:

• Debugging and fixing a lot of things — as always!

• Fully fleshing out the city exploration system that lets the player move through cities — this is pretty well developed but is not quite “done” yet, either in terms of the programming, the integration into other systems, or in terms of final UI design.

• Finalizing the “introduction” sequence — this has been plotted out in some detail, with some art, but it just hasn’t been fully finalized/developed.

• Endings — two of the endings are well-described and partially coded, but they need to get fully fleshed out/finished. There are also two other endings I would like developed. Ultimately I am hoping the beta will have at least 3 possible endings (other than player death).

• Two of the recruitable NPCs are pretty fleshed out, one of the most important ones is almost totally programmed (he is being used as the “demo” for all NPCs, and is very complex). We have lots of potential other recruitable NPCs, and the goal is to narrow down to maybe eight or so for the public beta, and to get them fully integrated into the game. Some of the NPCs are necessary for some of the endings, as well.

• Finalizing aspects of the “nuclear war scenario,” including targets, weather/climate, and the final fallout parameters.

I will be posting more on these things over the summer on here. The main goal is to really avoid any further scope creep for the moment, and to just focus on finalizing and fleshing out the existing systems.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I had been working on an entirely different topic (which I might finish for next week; I just felt like it could use some more work), when I serendipitously stumbled across a PDF I had downloaded of issues of The Georgia Alert from the 1950s. As my post explains, I had initially downloaded this researching a different blog post, but this time my eye was drawn to their headlines about paper cups, for whatever reason. And then, as the post explains, I noticed something else, which took me in a very different direction:

I am quite curious about how segregation was handled in other aspects of Civil Defense in the American South in the 1950s and 1960s. It feels like a topic for a very deep historical study. Has anyone done such a study? I found the one article that I cited about it, but honestly it didn’t have all that much more information in it than I had been able to dig up from just looking at those PDFs of The Georgia Alert in the first place. There must be more to this story, particularly in the period in which Civil Defense in the USA shifted towards public fallout shelters. It is hard to see how segregation and Civil Defense could be truly compatible, and that has got to have had some interesting-if-terrible consequences to how the planning was done.

The post I was working on related to Soviet nuclear targeting priorities in the 1970s and 1980s, and what little we do and don’t know about them, and perhaps I will post that next week… we shall see! But I had intended to do something less heavy this week, like write about a zombie film or something like that, so perhaps that is still on the table…

Incidentally, while looking for something else (how often is that the case? always?) I stumbled across this rather amusing paragraph in a document from the early 1970s about revisions that were made to the American nuclear war plan, the SIOP (Single Integrated Operations Plan):

The acronyms require a little decoding: the JSTPS is an organization within the Joint Chiefs of Staff (top military brass) tasked with creating the SIOP (the war plan). The above is explaining that once the JCS approve the SIOP — which was a list of targets and forces allocated to them — it would then given to the commanders of the different military branches that would actually be tasked with making it happen in the event that the president ordered for it to be “executed” — nuclear war.

The last, highlighted line, is what amused me. If I am reading it right, it is saying that the group who designed the SIOP would update it every 6 months, but the group’s “functions would cease once the plan was ordered executed.” Which is to say, that they would not have to keep updating it once nuclear war began. Which seems fair, I guess? But what a funny thing to put into writing. I wonder how many other contracts or lists of obligations could have a similar clause in them: “all of the above is to continue until the point that nuclear war breaks out.”

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At first I was just amused by it, because it seemed to embody the paradox of American Civil Defense during the early Cold War: lots of rhetoric about how important it was that was absolutely detracted from by the relatively modest effort being made. The main headline from their first issue, in November 1951, is just… humorous: PAPER CUPS STOCKED FOR EMERGENCY USE.

Georgia has a stockpile of 1,000,000 paper cups and containers, which will insure an adequate supply of these important utensils for every town and city in the State, in the event of air attack or other disaster, it is revealed in an announcement by Ernest Vandiver, Georgia Director of Civil Defense.

The paper supplies are stockpiled in a warehouse in the Griffin area and plans have been perfected to transport a sufficient supply to any section of the State affected by atomic explosion or other disaster, the Director pointed out. The exact location of the stockpile will not be made public for security reasons.

The paper supplies become highly essential in emergency hospitals and feeding the homeless when water supplies are knocked out, making dishwashing impossible, Mr. Vandiver said.

That this is the lead story of their premiere issue — paper cups, wow! — is funny enough. Yes, paper cups do seem like they would be useful in an emergency. And taking mundane problems like “how do we distribute water to people in a way efficiently and in a way that won’t spread disease?” is exactly what all emergency preparation efforts have to consider if they are serious at all, because disaster relief is really nothing but a series of mundane challenges. And perhaps the temptation to steal or otherwise use 1,000,000 paper cups would be enough to warrant their being kept at a secret location.

But the idea that paper cups are going to be the key to surviving a nuclear war is, well, inherently amusing. Pretty much any single response to an atomic explosion is going to look amusingly inadequate by comparison. Much less focusing on paper cups, of all things.

And it wasn’t just that they used it for the feature story — they kept going on about the paper cups in the interior pages, with a photo of the State Director of Civil Defense posting in front of boxes of the paper cups, labeled FOR DISASTER USE ONLY, demonstrating a “portable hot and cold drink dispenser” with a secretary:

Again, I’m not saying these things are wrong… they just seem so woefully inadequate to the task at hand. And this is what they are choosing to publicize?

But it was really this photograph from the same issue, of the Civil Defense office’s staff, that suddenly put all of this in a different light for me:

Oh, right. Georgia. That Georgia. The American South. The Deep South. Georgia, where the Civil Defense headquarters are located on Confederate Avenue (which was renamed United Avenue in… 2019). Georgia, the state that in 1956 adopted the Confederate Battle Flag as part of its state flag as part of its self-proclaimed “massive resistance” to forced integration after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Which means that the woman posing with the Confederate battle flag in the above photograph from 1951 is not posing with the Georgia state flag — it’s “just” the Confederate flag, a symbol of “Southern heritage” — the war flag of a successionist government that fought the bloodiest war in American history in order to preserve the state’s “right” to enslave human beings. Ah. Yes.

I skimmed over the issues from 1951 through 1955, and found zero photographs of any African Americans, and exactly one reference to their existence at all: in a list highlighting “women’s activities in CD in Georgia,” from March 1953, one woman is listed as having been asked by the Superintendent of Schools for Richmond County “to assist in setting up a plan for the protection of children in the schools, white and colored.”

Looking at the newsletters from 1955-1958 turns up a story about Girl Scouts distributing a Civil Defense pamphlet in 1958 which also says that “a Colored Cub Scout Troop helped make deliveries to the Negro sections.” A news round-up story about a flood in Savannah in 1956 mentioned that 75 “negro children” were rescued. And a photo caption from July 1956 describes a mock “air raid alert” in Toccoa, Georgia, that was held in “both city schools,” and then mentions that one of them was “the white school” — suggesting, even only by omission, that the other school was for the non-white population, and that they too participated in the alert exercise.

That the 30% or so African-Americans in Georgia are basically invisible in their Civil Defense publications from this time is hardly surprising. But it does stand out. It raises the question of how segregation was handled in Civil Defense planning. If one took these newsletters at face value, one would not be remiss in thinking that Civil Defense in Georgia was about preserving the white population exclusively. It puts the portable drink dispenser in a different light: in a state with segregated drinking fountains, were such supplies going to be made available to the entire Georgia public?

In a 2011 journal article about Civil Defense planning in Savannah, Georgia, by Jonathan Leib and Thomas Chapman suggests that this omission was characteristic of planning at the time.1 Looking at the 1955 “Hydrogen Bomb Evacuation Plan” for Savannah, that while there was no explicit discussion of Jim Crow segregation, a close reading of the plan suggests that the assumption was to maintain segregation even while trying to evacuate areas before or after an atomic attack. They conclude:

Facing the total destruction of Savannah and the surrounding region, it is both absurd and unremarkable that evacuation planners would be concerned enough to create an evacuation plan that sought to preserve Jim Crow racial segregation. It is absurd because a hydrogen bomb dropped on the city would likely result in a massive number of deaths that would not discriminate based upon one’s race. However, the tenets of the plan are also unremarkable in that it did not appear to have escaped the long fingers of the Jim Crow system of institutional segregation.

It is indeed “unremarkable,” in the sense that it is exactly what we would expect. But both the authors and I are, of course, remarking upon it, because it is a useful reminder that even in the face of existential risk, societies carry their “baggage” forward with them. For me, it also raises a question that I think about a lot in the context of the video game I am working on: if you were rebuilding society after a nuclear war, would you want to rebuild it to be the same society it was before the nuclear war? Or would you desire something radically different?

One would hope that the prospects of thermonuclear destruction would be enough to at least temporarily put aside base prejudices in the name of group survival. Would the survivors of such an attack be more open-minded and understanding than the people who were planning for it? One would hope… despite all evidence to the contrary.