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.

I mentioned last time that I had some good news on various fronts that I could not yet announce, and I can still not quite announce it, but it should be announced in the next week or so. So that is good. I am looking forward to a very busy summer and a very busy next year, but it’s in principle going to be busy in interesting ways.

Along with other things, I have assembled a team of Stevens students to work on Oregon Road ‘83 this summer. We are making a big push towards the public beta… I think it is within reach! I have not been working on it much the last year, just because I’ve been swamped with other things. Moving to another country, at least under our circumstances, is not as hard as people sometimes think it is — it is doable, you have probably done harder things — but it does sap one’s time. But I’m very excited at being able to turn back to it for a few months.

The team I’ve assembled is a good one, I think, although smaller than in previous years. This isn’t because of any lack of interest (I had about 50 students who wanted to work on the project), but because the program that pays the students put limits in place (boo) on how many students any given mentor could have (only 10).

Did the fact that a few professors (me and at least one other) having huge teams of eager students working for them shape that result? Maybe, maybe. There may also have been other (e.g. financial) considerations. Anyway, it was a real bear trying to narrow it down, as I hate having to say no to eager (and generally very good!) students.

Back in January of this year, I filmed an interview about nuclear weapons “basics” for a media company that normally did Francophone content but has been branching out into English-language stuff. It released in March on YouTube with the title of “Why it’s so difficult to build a nuclear bomb.”

Last week, they had me come in to do another session (they are helpfully located in Paris), this time having me react to various depictions of nuclear weapons (and some just about radioactivity) in films and television shows. Which was a fun thing to do. I am not sure when they will finalize it, but I’ll post it here when they do.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote up the transcript of formerly Top Secret testimony to a Congressional committee from 1956 about the “psychological and political aspects of thermonuclear war,” in which an Army general describes how the US strategic nuclear war plan was expected to kill over 300 million people, including 2 million American allies:

I stumbled across this while looking for something else, which is how I find a lot of my research interests — serendipity matters! It’s a gobsmacking bit of testimony. What is also historically fascinating about it, I think, is that this classified presentation about how vast and horrible thermonuclear war would be is done in the service of requesting over 100,000 tactical nuclear weapons, so that some other kind of nuclear option is available as well.

Next week, I will probably do something about a movie… maybe something non-nuclear, just to have a bit of a shift… we’ll see…!

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Understanding the answer to this question, at different times in history, is often quite hard to do, because these kinds of war plans are, even decades later, often still highly classified. But it’s an important thing to study, because without some real, tangible data on it, it is hard to know exactly what could have happened if the Cold War had gone hot. And seeing what they did and did not plan for also gives important insights into how these organizations worked — or didn’t work.1

I recently stumbled across a fascinating discussion of the consequences of nuclear war in an Executive Session between the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) and representatives from the US Army from June 1956. The JCAE was the Congressional oversight committee for all matters relating to the US nuclear stockpile, and these Executive Sessions were highly-classified briefings that were never intended to see the light of day, but the transcripts of many of them have since been declassified, and are a historical treasure-trove.2

What makes the transcripts so valuable is that they are often far more blunt and direct than official reports and documents — one is seeing an actual conversation that took place, between people who thought that nobody outside of that room would ever get to hear the conversation. It doesn’t mean that people are necessarily more honest with one another, but it does mean that the show they are putting on is for a much more select audience.

In this particular hearing, the JCAE was only its Subcommittee on Military Applications, with only three members: Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), Senator John W. Bricker (R-OH), and Representative James E. Van Zandt (R-PA). The Army had sent some ten people to this hearing, but for the excerpts below the two who matter were Lt. General James M. Gavin, the chief of Research and Development and the ranking officer there, a Colonel Robert E. Coffin, and a Colonel George M. McHaney. I don’t know much about McHaney or Coffin — but what a name — but the point of the hearings, ostensibly, was to talk about the Army’s projected needs for nuclear weapons. And those needs were quite large, to hear them tell it: the Army alone was projecting a need for 151,000 tactical nuclear warheads, with yields ranging from “a tenth of a kiloton” up to a megaton, with the possibility of using over 420 per day of “intense combat.”

But it’s their presentation of a 1955 study of the consequences of a thermonuclear war in the bomber age that really grabbed me. What follows are selected excerpts from a much longer hearing.

GENERAL GAVIN. I would like to consider first the psychological and political aspects of thermonuclear war and in doing so I would like to present a chart that outlines the probable results from the use of a specific number of thermonuclear weapons against targets on the Eurasian land mass. This presentation has been made to the Chiefs of all services and the yardsticks used in developing the fall-out pattern are those accepted by all services.

This outline of fall-out shows the casualties that would occur if wind conditions were on this chart you are looking at now generally from to west to east and it is based upon the use of eight [11 characters redacted]3 weapons — surface bursts against airfields. This happens to be an arbitrary number and an arbitrary system of targets. It is not a precise plan. However, it is related to planning considerations.

SENATOR JACKSON, The primary first mission of our SAC [Strategic Air Command] would be to destroy their ability to hit us —

GENERAL GAVIN. That is right, sir.

SENATOR JACKSON. So that would be directed at their airfields.

GENERAL GAVIN. That is correct.

SENATOR JACKSON. This isn’t an inordinate number from that standpoint.

What is being described here is a “counterforce” attack on a massive scale, not unlike the one depicted in the contemporaneous USAF film, The Power of Decision. That it is largely “surface bursts” — weapons set to detonate on contact or very close to the Earth’s surface, in order to heavy damage to the airfields in question — is significant, because this means they would be heavily fallout generating. (Airbursts, of the sort used to destroy cities, produce considerably less “local fallout,” the intensely radioactive plumes that most people associate with nuclear fallout. Surface bursts produce lots.)

This is a massive attack — all the more so considering that the Soviet ability to attack the United States from those airfields was at that time still fairly limited.

When Senator Jackson notes, “This isn’t an inordinate number [of casualties] from that standpoint,” what I think he means is, “the casualties you are imagining inflicting upon the Soviets is not so high given that the goal is to keep them from being able to inflict huge casualties against us.“

Gavin continued to flesh out the numbers, helpfully painting the picture of the unseen map in our minds:

GENERAL GAVIN. Although numbers vary a great deal — this figure was projected into the future when this study was made a year ago — it is to be noted the casualties in the satellite countries were 324 million. The USSR — 142 million and allied 2 million.

Now I would like to show you the pattern of fall-out based upon a shift of winds that would put the winds generally east to west in mid-Europe with a little fishtailing into Japan and the Asiatic area, It is interesting that the gross casualties remain about the same — approach on the order of a half a billion, except if the wind blows one way someone else gets [more?] than if it blows the other way.

In this case it is to be noted that the casualties go up half way through the United Kingdom; the 80 percent line through the Scandinavian Peninsula; half of Spain, down into the Balkans, into Greece, into Turkey and of course a great deal of the fall-out pattern goes over Japan.

The capriciousness of the wind, and its ability to change which millions die, is a stunning concept. So is the planning of an attack that they believe would kill two million citizens of nations that are allied with them.

Another part of the discussion clarified that the “80 percent line” referenced was a line on the map depicting “80% civilian casualties.” They also clarified that they are talking about casualties — fatalities plus injuries — not just fatalities. Still, it is a massive number.

324 million casualties is still an incredible number. To put that into context, consider that the total number of deaths during World War II was on the order of 70-80 million people.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. These casualties are based on fall-out alone?

GENERAL GAVIN. Yes sir, fall-out alone.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. What about shock wave and so forth?

GENERAL GAVIN. No, I am incorrect, sir. These are total casualties. The heaviest losses would be from fall-out. Of course there would be complete destruction of people —

SENATOR JACKSON. And pre-supposes a lack of cover, of course.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. Those are all surface bursts?

GENERAL GAVIN. These are surface bursts, yes sir.

SENATOR JACKSON. Which they, of necessity, would be if they were directed at destroying their airfields.

The problem posed by fallout is, of course, immense here. And this study seems to presume that only counterforce (airfields) are being targeted, which it is clear was not the sum total of the US military’s nuclear war plans at the time. That is, they likely also were going to target cities directly, but that seems to be taking a back seat to the fallout problem in general.

All of the casualties discussed thus far are non-American casualties. Gavin did turn to the question of what might happen if the Soviets attacked in kind:

GENERAL GAVIN. There are various estimates of what casualties might occur under an attack on the United States. One figure that is pretty generally accepted is that, for example, a 60 megaton weapon over population centers of the United Stares would destroy about 50 percent of our population. One can take any number of weapons and come up with figures something of the order of these. I am not intending to be precise, but I would like to point out the problems one must face in making a decision to launch an attack like this. This is the psychological and political aspect of it.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. What is the world population — about 2 billion?

COLONEL COFFIN. Two billion.

SENATOR JACKSON. Two and one half. We have 7 percent of whatever it is.

The numbers here are a little imprecise. The current UN global population estimate for 1956 is that the world had 2.7 billion people at the time. The US Census estimate for the 1956 population was around 167 million. So the United States was more like 6% of the global population at the time.

The idea that the Soviets would use 60 megaton weapons on all US population centers not very realistic. Soviets never fielded weapons that large in reality. The US Strategic Air Command, was, however, quite interested in developing and fielding 60 Mt bombs. They had requested them in 1954, and twice again in 1956. SAC had first said that they wanted them to attack “hardened” targets, but they later suggested they would be more economical for destroying “target complexes” that were large-enough to require several smaller weapons, like greater Moscow. Ultimately Eisenhower vetoed the idea, after several years of pining.

There is a longer story to be told about this, at some later time, but I just want to emphasize this is an interesting example of “mirroring”: SAC wanted 60 megaton bombs in 1956, so they are imagining that the Soviets would be using that weapon against the US, even though the Soviets did not possess 60 megaton bombs at the time.

But just back to those numbers. If the US attack would create 342 million casualties, and the world population was 2.7 billion people, that means that the US attack alone would make military casualties out of about 12% of the entire global population. But if you go with the numbers the Congressmen were using, it’s more like 25% of the entire global population. World War II, by comparison, had a global casualty rate of around 3%, and was, well, rather remarkable for it.

The fallout discussion continued, with some discussion about “global fallout” — the general raising of background radioactivity that comes from the detonation of nuclear weapons, as opposed to the more direct “local fallout” previously discussed:

SENATOR BRICKER. Would the atmosphere in an atomic attack such as this pictured here become generally contaminated around the world?

GENERAL GAVIN. The strontium 90 content would go up significantly.

SENATOR BRICKER. How high do you figure?

GENERAL GAVIN: I am not sure I could any what the damage would be world-wide to people; that is through the United States, Canada and so on. I don’t know.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT: Isn’t it true, General, that those who study fall-out now tell us that when you use high yield weapons, that is a megaton, you throw it up into the troposphere and about two pounds [of fallout] for every 20,000 [tons of yield] and it spends anywhere from five to ten years up there?

GENERAL GAVIN. I don’t know, sir. That is very interesting.

Van Zandt’s numbers (he later clarifies that he means two pounds of fallout for every 20 kilotons) likely derive from someone explaining to him that fallout is mostly made up of fission products, and the rule of thumb is that 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs) of material fissioning completely corresponds to around 18 kilotons of yield. So his numbers were a little off, but close-enough. It doesn’t really tell you that much, though, since the impact of one kilogram of fission products dispersed in the air (much less in the upper atmosphere) does not correspond in some obvious way to a given situation on the ground. Hence the difficulty of fallout modeling.

After some more discussion on fallout (and the desire, by the Congressmen, for developing “clean” nuclear bombs), and some questions about prevailing wind directions in Europe, the discussion of casualties continued:

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. Do you suppose these nations concerned — these neutrals now are familiar with the results of fall-out in the event of an atomic war?

GENERAL GAVIN. I think a lot of them know more about it, sir, than we give them credit for knowing. This worries people very, very much in Europe in my opinion. Very much.

SENATOR BRICKER. What percentage of the 80 percent of civilian casualties there would come from fall-out?

COLONEL MCHANEY. I would say, well over 90 percent of them, sir.

GENERAL GAVIN. Again sir, the purpose of this chart was to make a point. This question was raised last year and in response I pointed out the psychological and political aspects would make the decision a very difficult one indeed.

SENATOR BRICKER. I have just one more question. That wouldn’t mean they would all be killed. It means incapacitated for warfare.

COLONEL, MCHANEY. That is right, sir.

SENATOR BRICKER. Some might survive.

COLONEL MCHANEY. Yes sir.

“Some might survive” is a grim way to put it. Later discussions appear to indicate that they are talking about around 250 rem and up, so “death and sickness” were combined into one blunt category.

Jackson asked about shelter assumptions, suggesting that if people took cover, those numbers would go down:

SENATOR JACKSON. You would reduce fall-out casualties very substantially if you could assume that the people in the fall-out area could obtain cover. This pre-supposes, I take it, a complete surprise.

COLONEL MCHANEY. No sir, if I might correct that impression. Those charts were drawn up under the assumption every man, woman and child in this area was taking advantage of any available cover. This was actually [based on] surveys made of normal building, housing structure in some of those regions. Most of the houses are stone. And in those regions the shielding effect of their homes was given appropriate credit. In other regions they are just frame houses and the shielding would be less.

SENATOR JACKSON. In other words you predicate [sic?] upon the home environment and made your decisions according to what the known environment is in each country.

COLONEL MCHANEY. That is correct, sir, so we have taken account of any natural shielding they could take today.

So that seems to indicate that these are the most “optimistic” numbers. If people didn’t take shelter, the numbers would presumably much higher.

At one point they go off the record when talking about American troops who would be exposed to fallout, but when they come back, they had this interesting exchange:

GENERAL GAVIN. I might say this is the first time we have ever brought these charts to any Congressional Committee. We have worked hard on them.

SENATOR JACKSON. We had one a couple years ago, as I recall, when General Ridgeway was up.

GENERAL GAVIN. It was a different one. It had a lot of bananas on it. I remember that one too.

Bananas, you say? I do seriously wonder if they are talking about the same map, and are making the same semi-serious association with those “Bravo” clouds and “bananas” that I did. The timing is not impossible!

There was one last discussion about global radiation increase from this much fallout, with Colonel Coffin (again, what a name):

COLONEL COFFIN. The exact effects of the massive fall-out on a world-wide basis are not known. We can arrive at such conclusions as 25,000 megatons will double the gamma radiation background in the world. The next question is what is the effect of that. Nobody knows.

SENATOR BRICKER. Genetically and otherwise. […]

COLONEL COFFIN. The effect on genetics is a tremendous increase in stillbirths. Nobody can give an exact figure, but a very definite increase. […]

SENATOR BRICKER. It isn’t a happy picture, is it?

COLONEL COFFIN. It is a very dismal picture at present.

To put this discussion of 25,000 megatons into context, in 1956 the United States nuclear arsenal was just shy of 9,200 megatons, and growing rapidly. By 1957, it had over 17,500 megatons. At its peak, in 1960, it was over 20,000 megatons. So 25,000 megatons is not an insane number to use for projecting what might be “expended” in a full-scale thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union (who would presumably add some of its own megatons to that total) in the near future, particularly given that the context of the entire discussion was about the ever-larger stockpile requirements requested by the US military.

After this discussion of worldwide fallout, Gavin tried to clarify why they were giving them this briefing on nuclear in the first place:

GENERAL GAVIN. Again, sir, the purpose of this chart was to respond to an inquiry of last year as to what is meant by psychological and political difficulties in making a decision to launch a strategic offensive. This is only mentioned in relationship to the overall purpose of this presentation to comment on the Army’s tactical atomic requirements.

SENATOR BRICKER. You have definitely arrived at this conclusion that if a strike is made, it will be an all-out strike?

GENERAL GAVIN. Yes sir. The great significance of this to the Army is that the Soviets are aware of this. We are aware of it. As they arrive at the point of being able to deliver a blow like this against us, then they will be in a position if they have other forces able to wage war on a lesser scale to be aggressive around the periphery while all the time blackmailing us and never giving us a black and white decision. It will always be grey. They will always be doing something less than this. This is the problem that worries us most. We are arriving at that point we feel now.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. In other words, a continuation of the cold war?

GENERAL GAVIN. Yes sir, in the atomic era.

And so the full logic of this grim presentation, by the same Army requesting over a hundred thousand nuclear warheads, is reached. The presentation is meant to be horrifying. It is meant to feel overwhelming and terrible. It is an Army presentation of an attack plan that was largely developed by the Air Force, one that would result in an unimaginable scale of death and destruction. And, as Gavin emphasized, the plan was all-or-nothing: there was no option for anyone to “limit” the destruction of the US nuclear war plan at this point.

And given all of that, Gavin says, what are the odds that the Soviets would set such a thing off? What are the odds that the US would ever initiate it? And couldn’t, then, the Soviets then wage a much lower-scale conflict, something that would not warrant this level of attack, and thus make such a massive threat seem impossible and impotent?

Hence the need for the Army to have tactical nuclear weapons — smaller-scale weapons that could lower the threshold for nuclear use in a credible way, and avoid nuclear war being rendered entirely all-or-nothing, genocide-or-capitulation.

At this point, there is one more amusing question from Representative Van Zandt:

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. May I put one question at this point? I am thinking of the Russian propaganda machine putting something like this in print and distributing it to that part of the world affected and charging us with having capabilities of doing that job. From a propaganda standpoint, we would be behind the eight ball.

GENERAL GAVIN. If you handle it like that, we would.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. Yes sir. I imagine the Russians are thinking about the same as we are.

GENERAL GAVIN. I think they are too. They know about it.

Wouldn’t it be awful if the Soviets just told our allies that our plans would kill so many of them, and told the world that our war plans were so genocidal in nature? Wouldn’t that make us look like the baddies? It’s a good question — but nobody in this hearing really seems to think that the problem is that they are acting like the bad guys, here.

Which to me is an interestingly unspoken concern at this moment. Do the “good guys” actively spend their time planning for operations that would kill millions upon millions of non-combatants, including your own allies? If you assume they’ll never be carried out, that the act of planning for such mega-slaughter is enough to discourage it from ever occurring, one can certainly preserve some kind of moral position, although it’s still a pretty grim one.

But if you think that there’s a chance that position might slip, that deterrence might fail, and that you might actually then carry through a plan that would possibly kill or injure around 25% of the world’s population — as these people clearly thought was the case… that feels like a much worse moral position, to put it bluntly. And I think the fact that they were worried that the Soviets could use the reality of the American’s own nuclear war plans as moral propaganda against them shows, at some level, that these people understood that, in some way.

One of the things he brought up in the conversation was that he was entirely rethinking his “theory of change.” This is a term that I am most familiar with from grant proposals, but can be applied more broadly. What, exactly, is the underlying model one is imagining if one is going to make an argument that one’s life or work can have an impact on the world? That is what a “theory of change” essentially is — if it’s for a specific project, the “theory of change” is your argument about how this project will “matter.”

My colleague’s concern was that as someone who had been working at a policy school for years and years, he had an underlying, assumed theory of change that basically was that if he produced some kind of very smart and useful policy proposal, one could imagine, if it was written up and discussed in the right circles, that it would eventually land itself on someone’s desk in a position of power, and they might actually implement it. One could also imagine, in such places, that one’s students might be trained on a methodology, way of thinking, theory, policy ideas, etc., and that if those students ended up in positions of influence one day, they would be able to implement your ideas, if they were good ones.

This is all very bread and butter for the policy world and the international relations community, I think. But what do you do when nobody rational is running the ship? When the government explicitly eschews expertise, in particular academic expertise? When they are basically “anti-policy,” in the sense that all “policy” is based on whatever online ramblings and whims of an idiot were posted the night before, and everyone just bends over backwards to reaffirm that said idiot is not only always right, but has been more right than anyone who has ever lived?

This is especially the case for arms control, which has just been shredded under the Trump administration. Just absolutely shredded. Decades and decades of work and negotiation, hard work on treaties and agreements that were ultimately always primarily about serving US interests, thrown into the trash by someone who does not understand them in the slightest.

There seem to be two options, here. One is to imagine that, well, this will pass at some point. You continue the work, despite the fact that the day to day won’t be anything more than a hope for the future. Someday, this line of thought says, some reasonably sane people will once against inhabit the halls of power, and then you can go about the old approach again. Of course, you don’t know when that will be, and what the situation will be at that point, and what the priorities will be at that point. If one believes this will happen in, say, two years, that is not so awful. If one does not think that American politics will return to a position of stability for, say, ten years, then that is much less heartening, particularly if you are thinking in terms of one’s own career.

The other option is to pivot to some other “theory of change,” some other approach to one’s work. What does that even look like? Who is the audience, what is the method, what is the goal? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

I’ve thought a lot about the “theory of change” embodied in my own work, although other than grant applications where it is a requirement, historians are I think less inherently “obligated” to imagine themselves as enacting some kind of tangible change in the world, at least compared to people in the world of policy. Personally, I don’t have ambitions for direct change, in the sense that I am trying to push for some specific policy outcome via a specific mechanism. But I do like to believe that there are many possibilities for indirect influence and change — that is, to contribute to a broader context of ideas and facts, which might help steer the direction of how people think or talk about things, and could, you never know, play some unexpected role in making things better.

Well, one can hope. I’m not trying to be overly modest, here — I can see the impact of some of my contributions to the discussion of nuclear weapons in the world, sometimes in minor-yet-amusing ways. As a really silly example, I cannot confirm that the nuclear-effect visuals seen on the monitors of A House of Dynamite are based on the Outrider Nuclear Bomb Blast site that I helped work on (and is a “skin” of NUKEMAP), but I think it’s pretty likely that they are. There are many other things of this nature where I see something that is based on something I made, or hear some idea that is basically my own, and think, ah, that’s nice. A small contribution to the discourse.

I have a rather more developed “theory of change” that I use for guiding my public-facing work, that perhaps I will write up on here at some later time, which is based in both my experiences of making things “for the world” as well as my reading of the role of “culture” as a historian. It’s still relatively modest, in the sense that it is hard, I think, to successfully and deliberately make an “impact” on how people think about things, much less how politicians do things. For everything one can point to where “an impact was made,” there are undoubtedly even more things that had no impact, or had very indirect or delayed impacts.

Relatedly, in case you missed it, this week on Doomsday Machines I ended up writing about a film that I stumbled across while looking for something else: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), which was explicitly part of the inspiration for the 1954 Japanese film Gojira/Godzilla (with the other part being the Castle Bravo accident and memories of the atomic and fire bombings from World War II).

It is not a great film, by any measure. But I didn’t hate watching it, even though I thought the pacing was quite bad. What it really did for me, ultimately, is serve as an interesting foil for a rewatch of Godzilla. So while this is a post about The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, it is ultimately a post about what makes Godzilla interesting, which is fully on display when comparing it to this far inferior source material. The one place that I thought The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms did well was in the monster’s special effects, which generally (but not always) look better than the monster in Godzilla, who looks far too much like a man in a rubber suit for me to ever suspend disbelief. It is interesting to wonder what Godzilla would have looked like in 1954 if they had gone with stop motion instead… maybe better? Maybe worse?

The people who created The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms did not really, I suspect, intend to have any big impact on how people thought about nuclear weapons at all. They are really quite ancillary to the plot, ultimately. But they were just enough that they nudged the people who ultimately made Godzilla to think along those lines, and to bring the Japanese nuclear experience to bear on the giant-monster question. And that perhaps did have a cultural impact that resonated, to some degree.

I have a couple things on the possible docket for next week, including another entry in my file of “insane nuclear war plans from the 1950s,” but we will see what grips me…

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The film was famously inspired by the Castle Bravo accident in March 1954, in which the first test of a deliverable hydrogen bomb at the Bikini atoll by the United States resulted in a radiological catastrophe, with a massive and intense fallout plume that required the evacuation of native Marshallese islands and American observers. A Japanese fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (“Fifth Lucky Dragon”), was also accidentally exposed to its fallout, and after returning to port in Tokyo, its crew began to suffer from the characteristic symptoms of radiation poisoning. One of the crew eventually perished. Prior to this, the tuna catch was released to the Japanese fish markets, leading to a public panic as authorities sought to identify the radioactive tuna. The consequence was a temporary boycott on the eating of tuna, a staple of Japanese food, across the country.

The Bravo accident was an important moment for the Japanese public, who were only two years independent of the American Occupation of Japan, under which discussions about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were seriously curtailed, out of fear that they would lead to anti-American or pro-Communist sentiments. Bravo re-opened the issue, centered around (rightly or wrongly) the notion of the Japanese status as atomic victims, a status now doubly implicated. And so Bravo is seen in retrospect as a turning point for the emerging Japanese political movement against nuclear weapons.1

This was, according to those who worked on it, part of the context of deciding to make Gojira, and to make the film and creature a complicated metaphor for nuclear weapons, Japan’s status as a nuclear victim, and even a reminder of Japanese civilian suffering during World War II. I had heard (and taught) this story many times, because it is always interesting in retrospect to see that something that is often dismissed as a rather trivial pop culture phenomena (giant radioactive monsters) be rooted in a much broader political and social movement that can be traced back to a specific event (an American hydrogen bomb test).

But I was recently digging around a bit more in the history of Gojira/Godzilla, and was surprised to discover that Bravo was only half of the equation. The other half was something quite different: another radioactive monster film. What became Gojira was conceived of by its producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, as a merging of the post-Bravo mindset with a now-forgotten American film that had come out the year before, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which has its own radioactive monster going on a rampage. I was also surprised to learn that the working title for Gojira was even The Giant Monster from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was directed by the Russian–French filmmaker Eugène Lourié, produced independently, and distributed by Warner Brothers. A decent quality scan is available to download or stream for free on Archive.org. Its title comes from a short story of the same name by none other than Ray Bradbury which ran in The Saturday Evening Post in 1951.

Bradbury’s story, later anthologized as “The Fog Horn,” has almost nothing to do with the film as made. It was apparently quite popular, and so the filmmakers decided to buy the rights to it for their already-in-production monster movie, but other than a vague similarities and a single scene (involving a light house), the influence of the story feels rather absent. I had gotten my hopes up that one could trace Godzilla back to Ray Bradbury, but it’s a stretch.

The plot of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is as follows (feel free to skip to “THE END” — you’ll see it — if you don’t care about the recap, and just want the analysis). It starts in the arctic (it is later implied to be somewhere near Greenland), where the military and the US Atomic Energy Commission are conducting a nuclear test detonation with the deeply uninspired codename of Operation Experiment. The details of the experiment are unclear, but we see some good stock mushroom cloud footage from the 1940s (one part of the sequence is even cribbed from the Trinity test).2

Afterwards, two AEC scientists go outside to take measurements. One of them sees a gigantic lizard creature, and is so shocked that he falls off of a ledge. The ledge only looks like it is 15 feet tall, and he falls onto snow, so it is perhaps a little silly that this results in an apparently fatal condition. While searching for him, his companion, a German-American physicist named Thomas Nesbitt, also catches sight of the creature, before he is himself injured in an avalanche. Nesbitt is found by others and brought back to the base in poor condition, and quickly relocated back to the United States for treatment.

Nesbitt heals physically over time from his traumatic event, but psychologically everyone thinks that he has perhaps lost his mind. Quite a lot of the film is Nesbitt attempting to convince others that he saw a gigantic lizard monster in the arctic, and them more or less politely suggesting that he must be delusional.

But, of course, we, the audience, know that Nesbitt is not delusional, because we are watching a monster movie. The creature, brought to life by the famed stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen, makes his way south through the water, causing havoc as he goes. He destroys a few boats, and later attacks a lighthouse — the latter being the only real connection to the Ray Bradbury story, which is about a lighthouse that gets attacked by a giant monster. Nesbitt hears of these attacks and connects them with his own story.

Nesbitt contacts Dr. Thurgood Elson, a world-esteemed paleontologist, to ask about whether the creature could have been some kind of dinosaur that had become frozen in the ice, in a state of suspended animation for millions of years, and was awoken by the nuclear testing. Elson points out the many, obvious flaws in this idea. Elson’s assistant, the comely Lee Hunter, however, is intrigued by Nesbitt. She later meets up with him to show him drawings of different dinosaurs, on the off-chance that he can identify his monster. He concludes it was a Rhedosaurus, a (fictional) dinosaur that looks to me like a wingless dragon.

In order to prove that he didn’t imagine the whole thing, Nesbitt and Hunter work to find survivors of the other attacks. Nesbitt eventually connects with one of the sailors, and convinces them to return with him to New York, where, in the presence of Dr. Elson, he looks over the same dinosaur drawings that Nesbitt had and picks out the Rhedosaurus. Elson is convinced and lobbies the military to take Nesbitt’s claims seriously. While briefing the military, Elson notes that plotting the Rhedosaurus attacks on a map shows a definite southern movement, perhaps towards a deep sea canyon where many Rhedosaurus fossils had been found — perhaps an old breeding grounds.

Elson convinces the military to allow him to descend in a diving bell to scout for the Rhedosaurus. After a pointless but extended sequence of a shark fighting an octopus that looks half-real and half-puppet (one wonders if this is recycled footage made for some other film), he finds the lost dinosaur, and is delighted. Of course, it eats him. This is about the 3/4ths of the way through the film — it has taken this long for Nesbitt to be conclusively validated.

The Rhedosaurus soon after surfaces in southern Manhattan and begins wrecking havoc. A police officer shoots it with a pistol and is eaten for his troubles. The Rhedosaurus destroys some cars and crashes through some buildings. Air-raid sirens scream. Crowds flee in a great panic. Somehow the police and military lose sight of the monster. We transition to a newscaster who tells of the lockdown in the city — visualized with news footage of a 1951 Civil Defense exercise in NYC, I would add — and are told that it is “what is already the worst disaster in New York’s history,” with 180 known dead, 1,500 injured, and, god forbid, $300 million dollars in property damage.

The Army mobilizes. When the creature is next spotted, they attack it with heavy weaponry, including a bazooka that actually injures it. It flees, again, and the soldiers pursue. But the creature’s blood makes them mysteriously sick, and it is theorized that it has some kind of prehistoric disease that has also hitched a ride in hibernation across the millions of years. The fear grows that if they kill the creature in some spectacular way, it will spread its plague along with it. Nesbitt proposes that they use a “radioactive isotope” to destroy the monster and “all that diseased tissue” it carries.

The creature next attacks Coney Island. Nesbitt and the army, including a sharpshooter, pursue. (Hunter, Dr. Elson’s attractive assistant, goes along with Nesbitt on most of this, but doesn’t do much other than serve as a growing love interest. He seems only moderately interested.) While the creature is inside a large wooden rollercoaster, Nesbitt (with the isotope) and the sharpshooter done radioactive protection gear and ascend in one of the coaster’s cars. Nesbitt loads the isotope weapon and the sharpshooter fires it into the wound on the creature. While this happens, the rollercoaster car they used to ascend gets out of their control and, somehow, starts a massive fire. Nesbitt and the sharpshooter precariously descend the burning rollercoaster structure.

The creature, although wounded by the isotope, escapes the fire and staggers around. Nesbitt gets a hug and a chaste kiss on the cheek from Hunter. The Rhedosaurus emits a Godzilla-like scream, and then dies. The words “THE END” appear over its corpse. That’s all, folks.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is not that great of a film. The stop-motion animation of the creature is really the only thing it has going for it, and it looks pretty good in the slightly-jerky, slightly-uncanny-valley way that all stop-motion creatures from this era looked.3 Almost all of the creature work is in the last 1/4th of the film, however, and the lead-up to that is rather tedious since we, the audience, know that Nesbitt is not insane and that the creature is real, and we are just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to him.

It is, however, interesting to compare the film with Gojira (meaning specifically the Japanese version from 1954, not the Americanized version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters, from 1956). The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms exists in a very different thematic space as Gojira, and a very different relationship to nuclear technology.

Both Gojira and Rhedosaurus are awoken by nuclear testing. But other than one line spoken by Nesbitt right after the test — “What the cumulative effects of all these atomic explosions and tests will be, only time will tell” — there is no real depiction of nuclear weapons as “a problem” in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and Nesbitt is an active and willing contributor in the test experiment that wakes it up. The US has made its own monster, but nobody ever explicitly frames it that way.

By comparison, in Gojira, the nuclear testing is an external force that the Japanese are being subjected to, and nuclear weapons are explicitly invoked as a harmful, threatening aspect of the modern world. I re-watched Gojira after watching The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and it was very clear how overt Gojira is about this. There is a conversation on a Tokyo train later in the film (but before the attack on Tokyo) between several people that goes along these lines:

— “It’s terrible, huh? Atomic sea life, radioactive fallout, and now this Godzilla to top it all off!” […]

— “I guess I’ll have to find a shelter soon.”

—“ Find one for me, too!”

— “The shelters again? That stinks…”

Gojira ties the monster, the atomic testing, nuclear fallout, and the need for shelters together, and “the shelters again?” strikes me as a reference to the sheltering that was done during the firebombing campaign in World War II, less than a decade before. Similarly, later in Gojira someone asks: “Isn’t Godzilla a product of the atomic bomb that still haunts many of us Japanese?”

Gojira also has more subtle allusions. The earliest scenes are of a ship undergoing an unexpected (and at the moment, unexplained) catastrophe — something much closer to the Bravo accident than The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. The attack on the village on Odo Island has scenes from the inside of houses that are collapsing that are strongly evocative of victims’ descriptions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the monster attacks Tokyo, the capital city is set aflame, which to the Japanese at that time must have felt compelled to append the word “again.” Its imagery seems deliberately evocative of these past horrors, in other words, something entirely absent from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Nesbitt, the scientist in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, never renounces his life’s work in any way. He believes that nuclear technology is the future (there is much ado about paleontology being about the past, and nuclear work as being about the future, and this is even turned into flirtatious banter between him and Hunter), and he saves the day thanks to his “isotope.” Yes, the atomic test woke up the Rhedosaurus, but atomic science is also what put it in the ground.

The only “themes” I really detected in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms were about scientists themselves. In particular, Dr. Elson’s death is the result of his own naivety and scientific fascination, his unwillingness to take seriously the threat that he is trying to study. He encourages the military not to try and kill the beast, because of its value to science, and he believes he understands it, because he is studying it. After it eats him, Hunter tells Nesbitt that he really shouldn’t let it bother him too much: “Nobody is to blame. And everybody is to blame. We all did what we thought was right.” I don’t actually think this was meant to be an indictment of a particular mindset, but it feels like it ought to be considered one — the road to hell, and all that.

The death of Gojira is a very different kind of affair. Without getting into all of the details, a different scientist, working in secret, develops a new scientific weapon known as “the Oxygen Destroyer.” But he doesn’t want to use it, because he believes it will lead to a new arms race, to new destruction, and would be “a new super-weapon to throw upon us all!” He finally agrees to use it, but insists on using it himself, and ends up destroying Gojira, himself, and the secret to his new weapon, all in one go. Which is a very different attitude than Nesbitt exhibits towards his “isotope” (“WHICH ISOTOPE?” I mentally screamed every time someone invoked about “the isotope”) or the killing of the Rhedosaurus.

Gojira is also just a better film overall. The story’s pacing is better and clearly better thought-out. In Gojira, the identity and nature of the creature is not at all clear in the beginning of the film, making the investigations into it a collective understanding for both the characters and the audience. Whereas in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the audience pretty much knows what the creature is from the beginning, but there is a long, protracted sequence in which Nesbitt tries to convince others of this fact.

Nesbitt is also just not a very relatable character, and his “role” in Gojira is split into several different characters (including the always wonderful Takashi Shimura, recognizable even to Americans from his appearances in the films of Akira Kurosawa, including his role as the primary samurai in Seven Samurai, which came out the same year as Gojira) who are given far more emotional depth and thematic complexity than Nesbitt. (And nothing is ever done with the fact that Nesbitt is German, for example. Whose side were you on during zie war, Herr Doktor Nesbitt?)

The one place where The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms outshines Gojira, in my opinion, is the creature special effects. Gojira, the monster, does look like a guy in a rubber suit. It detracts from the seriousness of its endeavor. Rhedosaurus, for all of its clumsiness, looks and acts more like a wild animal. But I noticed that there seemed to be many more action shots of Gojira than there were of Rhedosaurus, and I suspect that’s the advantage of a guy in a rubber suit: it’s probably cheaper, and quicker, than having Ray Harryhausen do your special effects for you, and so you can have more of them.

Putting them side by side, it is clear where Gojira took inspiration from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. But it is also just as clear what the creators of Gojira did to turn their film into something much better, by infusing it with the complex cultural associations that the Japanese public had with nuclear weapons, turning a fairly schlocky idea (a monster is awoken by atomic bomb testing and goes on a rampage until put down by scientists) into something that also carries considerable thematic heft.

The week before last, at the International Journalism Festival, I talked briefly with a journalist who left a major network/publication to become an independent journalist with an apparently huge Substack and YouTube channel. I asked them how that worked out the way it did? They gave a few answers (of varying levels of persuasion, for me — “luck” was not among them), that mostly came down to “hard work” (i.e., they do updates of everything all the time, daily, etc.). It sounded fairly hellish, I will admit; it is hard-enough for me to get done the things I want to get done and have a weekly blog entry, I cannot imagine trying to do it on a daily basis.

One of their other things they said was that they ran all of their writing through ChatGPT or some other LLM/AI service to make it punchier, identify typos, and otherwise improve the chances it would do something in the world. I am pretty opposed to using LLMs for written work for a lot of reasons, pride in the craft being one of them, but I admit the thought stuck in my craw. Because I do hate the typos that pop up in my writing online, a function of a fast schedule (weekly content that is mixed into a lot of other work) and the individual nature of it (there’s no staff over here!). And I do love when I can write for a venue that has a good copyeditor, because they always have a better sense than I do of how to cut and condense this stuff (I just find it all too interesting).

What if, I wondered, I experimentally uploaded my blog post for this week to ChatGPT and asked it to work its wonders? Would it be impressive? Would it make something that would give me that feeling of a good editor? Would it at least find my typos? Am I being too much of a curmudgeon about this stuff?

So I took this week’s blog post (linked below), put it into a MS Word file, and uploaded it to free version of ChatGPT. I told it to tighten up the writing and identify typos, but to not change its tone of voice to the insipid one that ChatGPT usually uses. “OK!” it said, insipidly, and then after a second of thinking gave me a new MS Word file with its edits.

I told MS Word to create a composite version of my original file and the new file with the changes highlighted, so I could see its magic. It asked me who the author the changes should be listed as, and I suggested “Clanker.” It did identify a couple clear typos (I somehow misspelled “annihilation” once and ignored the red underline, I once I mis-typed Ellsberg’s name), but it also let a few through that I noticed on a re-read (e.g. “would bu” was left in, where it should have been “would be”).

But otherwise it almost changed nothing. A few words snipped here and there, but no actual editing of importance was done. Except for one, persistent change, that is so strange that I feel the need to provide a screenshot of it, because it seems so absurd:

That’s right, it changed the word “discovery” to “disco” multiple times in the document. “The disco of nuclear reactions.” “The disco of induced radioactivity.” “The disco of nuclear fission.”

I admit that I did laugh at loud, and then laughed at myself for ever thinking this was a good idea. Now, I am sure that it doesn’t always give results like this. And perhaps if I were paying for the more expensive version of ChatGPT it would do better. Or another service. But the whole thing reminded me why I am so loathe to rely on this kind of thing in the first place. Aside from the absurdity of wasting gobs of energy to query a statistical database full of copyright-infringed texts (including, I am positive, my own!) in a business model that seems guaranteed to destroy the economy no matter whether the predictions of its advocates come true or not, for an industry run by anti-human tech-bros who would set all of human culture on fire for a dollar and their science-fiction dreams… aside from all that, it also is just so often not that good.

Imagine giving a human being the task of editing this and aside from the lightness of it, they changed all instances of “discovery” to “disco.” You’d wonder if it was a joke. You certainly wouldn’t be encouraged to pay them anything. Or have them teach your children. Anyway, I am not going to be using LLMs in this capacity anytime soon, I don’t think — so I just hope that you will see my typos for what they are, a consequence of an all too human workflow!

Well, I am an AI grump, I know this. And of course I am participating in a selection bias, here. I have found a few uses of LLMs in my own life that, all of the ethical stuff aside, I find good-enough. They all involve uses that are very easy for me to check the veracity of the output of, like translating a statistical function to Javascript for me, which I can then look over the logic of, and test that it gives the correct outputs — even this often requires some back-and-forth as the LLMs make assumptions about what I want and diverge from instructions. Or translating English into French for the purposes of a formal e-mail (even then, I look it over closely).

None of these uses involve anything I enjoy doing, like writing or researching or even the more enjoyable parts of programming. And I would be happy to give them up in a heartbeat, really. But I simply do not understand why people would want to use them for things like that, but I suppose people come in all sorts of different packages…

The post for Doomsday Machines that I subjected to that experiment is the one I posted on Friday, about the topic of “atmospheric ignition,” that is, setting the Earth’s atmosphere (or oceans, or crust) on fire through an endless, out-of-control nuclear reaction:

You might think, if you are of a certain frame of mind, that you have read everything there is to read about that topic — e.g., that during World War II, the Los Alamos scientists contemplated whether they could set the atmosphere on fire, and did the math and found out they could not.

This is only part of the story, however. The trope goes back to at least 1903, as far as I can tell, and the actual “math” behind the ignition problem is more interesting than I think has been appreciated anyway. More importantly, as Dan Ellsberg emphasized in his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine, there is at the core a question that doesn’t go away once you conclude that you can’t burn up the world that way: a question of how much risk is acceptable for scientists to take.

I am not sure exactly what I will write about next week, but I stumbled across a very revealing document from the mid-1950s that shows how the generals thought about nuclear war at that time, so I may write something that centers around it… we shall see…!

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“Only a nightmare dream”

The earliest case I am aware of this idea being put into circulation dates to 1903, where the atomic pioneer Ernest Rutherford was reported by a colleague to have suggested that “it was just conceivable that a wave of atomic disintegration might be started through matter, which would indeed make this old world vanish in smoke.” This supposedly referred to a “joke” of Rutherford’s that “some fool in a laboratory might blow up the universe unawares.” It was, the colleague reported, merely a “nightmare dream.”1

Rutherford’s collaborator, the chemist Frederick Soddy, also invoked the "nightmare” of death-by-transmutation in his public lectures. In a 1903 lecture on “Some Recent Advances in Radioactivity,” Soddy considered that:2

The knowledge [of radioactivity must] make us regard the planet on which we live as a storehouse stuffed with explosives, inconceivably more powerful than any we know of, and possibly only awaiting a suitable detonator to cause the earth to revert to chaos.

The next year, Soddy gave on radium the next year at the Corps of Royal Engineers, in which he suggested that:3

It is probable that all heavy matter possesses—latent and bound up with the structure of the atom—a similar quantity of energy to that possessed by radium. If it could be tapped and controlled what an agent it would be in shaping the world’s destiny! The man who put his hand on the lever by which a parsimonious nature regulates so jealously the output of this store of energy would possess a weapon by which he could destroy the earth if he chose. […] The fact that we exist is a proof that [massive energetic release] did not occur; that it has not occurred is the best possible assurance that it never will. We may trust Nature to guard her secret.

Soddy did not mention the possibility of either a weapon or global destruction in his 1909 book, The Interpretation of Radium, which is an interesting omission. The idea was resurrected and further popularized some years later, in May 1922, by the British chemist Francis William Aston, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry that year for his work on isotopes. Aston gave a lecture at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute in which he warned that:

Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dreams of scientific fiction; but the remote possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighbouring substances. In this event the whole of the hydrogen on the earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.

And Aston repeated this paragraph in his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture later that year. Aston’s lectures led to a spate of newspaper articles, not unlike an anonymous “Oxford scientist” of the same year who warned both of atomic bombs and possible global annihilation: “it is conceivable, too, that such terrific force might eventually be liberated as to blow up the world.”

Newspaper headlines globally ran headlines about these warnings: “Tinkering With Angry Atoms May Blow Up the Earth,” “Earth as a Bomb,” “Will the Atom Blow Up the World?” But dismissing this idea, in the 1900s-1920s, was, as Soddy illustrated, simple enough: if it was that easy to turn the world into a run-away nuclear reaction, then surely it would have happened at some point over the course of the Earth’s long history. What are the odds that humanity, that johnny-come-lately species, is going to be the one who set it all aflame?

And it was all still quite hypothetical, as humanity had no sign of this level of control over transmutation, no “detonator.”

“Atmospheric ignition”

This would change in the 1930s. The discovery of induced radioactivity in 1934 meant that the possibility of chain reactions was possible: that one nuclear reaction could lead to many more nuclear reactions. The discovery of nuclear fission in uranium in late 1938, and the fact that neutron-induced fission reactions produced additional neutrons, gave a practical way to accomplish nuclear transmutation at a whim. That the world had not already in the long past exploded from nuclear fission reactions suggests these reactions are not easy to start or propagate. And, indeed, the issue was quickly discovered: only some isotopes of uranium are easily fissioned, and most are not, and so it requires quite a lot of artifice to create the conditions for such chain reactions to occur.4

But the possibility of explosive nuclear reactions was, eventually, pursued for military purposes. And so we jump ahead to the famous meeting at the University of California, Berkeley, in July 1942, where J. Robert Oppenheimer assembled a coterie of nuclear physicists to discuss the theoretical basis for designing an atomic bomb, prior to the formation of the Los Alamos laboratory. And into this mix, the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller suggested a new nightmare: “atmospheric ignition.”

Accounts of the discussion vary. Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine (2017) contains an excellent summary of many of them.5 The gist is that Teller laid out the possibility that in the event that they created and detonated a bomb powered by an explosive uranium-235 fission chain reaction, it would produce, among other things, an intense and concentrated source of heat. This heat would be enough, he argued, to cause fusion reactions in light elements, like hydrogen. Teller’s primary interest, here, was the idea of the Super, or hydrogen bomb.

But this was linked with another idea, that these fusion reactions would also take place in the Earth’s atmosphere, notably hydrogen (in its water content) and nitrogen (which makes up 78% of our air). If the atomic bomb started such a fusion reaction in the atmosphere, and the fusion reaction was hot enough to cause additional fusion reactions in that same atmosphere, then a runaway fusion reaction would, within seconds, traverse the globe, burning everything, and leaving dead rock in its wake.

This kind of problem, to a nuclear physicist, is equal parts interesting and distressing. The assembled group, which aside from Oppenheimer also included the meticulous German physicist Hans Bethe — who would later win the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in the 1930s in uncovering the fusion reactions that power stars — picked over Teller’s equations and reasoning. A fatal flaw was soon found: the heat of any fusion reactions created would dissipate quickly in the atmosphere. This would likely make such a run-away fusion reaction impossible, as the cooling would prevent it from spreading. Thus Bethe, nearly instinctively, judged the scheme as “impossible.”

“The ultimate catastrophe”

However, that this was considered far from proven. Oppenheimer himself subsequently traveled to Chicago talk with Arthur Compton, the Nobelist physicist running the Metallurgical Laboratory to create the world’s first nuclear reactors there, to share news of the possibility. Compton wrote of this some 14 years later in his memoir:6

I’ll never forget that morning. I drove Oppenheimer from the railroad station down to the beach looking out over the peaceful lake. There I listened to his story. What his team had found was the possibility of nuclear fusion—the principle of the hydrogen bomb. This held what was at the time a tremendous unknown danger. Hydrogen nuclei, protons, are unstable, for they could combine into helium nuclei with a very high temperature. But might not the enormously high temperature of an atomic bomb be just what was needed to explode hydrogen? And if hydrogen, what about the hydrogen of sea water? Might the explosion of an atomic bomb set off an explosion of the ocean itself?

Nor was this all. The nitrogen in the air is also unstable, though in less degree. Might it not be set off by an atomic explosion in the atmosphere?

These questions could not be passed over lightly. Was there really any chance that an atomic bomb would trigger the explosion of the nitrogen in the atmosphere or of the hydrogen in the ocean? This would be the ultimate catastrophe. Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!

This is, as Ellsberg later noted, quite a proposition: if the atomic bomb had any chance of killing the entire planet, then it was better to accept the possibility of a Nazi victory than total suicide. We will come back to this proposition, later.

In many later recollections, particularly in the 1970s when this issue became raised again, many Manhattan Project participants, like Bethe, outright dismissed the idea that they ever considered atmospheric ignition even a remote possibility. One finds this sentiment in many modern-day discussions of it. Ellsberg argued, and I think he is correct (for both his reasons, and others that I will come back to later), that this latter-day denial is bad history.

It is perhaps quite true that Bethe himself never took it seriously, for reasons that we’ll get to below. But it is also clear that there were some who did take it more seriously, and that even up to the moment of the Trinity test there were those who feared, in some small way, that the “ultimate catastrophe” might still be in the cards. And the insistence that this was not a legitimate concern was in part an effort to retrospectively paper over that any kind of uncertainty about a risk that might have been taken.

Because to acknowledge any sense of uncertainty on the issue is to suggest that these scientists were willing to take a secret gamble on humanity even more so than they did by merely ushering these weapons into the world. And to acknowledge that would be to undermine the story that the atomic scientists were telling after World War II that they were the responsible experts whose views should be taken seriously when shaping the future of the world.

In 1959, Compton told the writer Pearl S. Buck that:

scientists discussed the dangers of fusion but without agreement. Again Compton took the lead in the final decision. If, after calculation, he said, it were proved that the chances were more than approximately three in a million that the earth would be vaporized by the atomic explosion, he would not proceed with the project. Calculation proved the figures slightly less—and the project continued.

This suggests the issue was a more drawn-out discussion than the “never took it seriously” narrative would imply, and also the firm-but-arbitrary limit of three-in-a-million as the “acceptable odds” for this catastrophe. Those are indeed long odds, but not as long as winning lottery jackpots.

What was the source of these estimates? Teller did write up a paper in 1943 on the subject (cited in some literature as LA-001), but it has never been made available that I have seen. The internal, top secret Manhattan Project History, commissioned by General Groves, with its Los Alamos section written by the physicist David Hawkins and finished in 1947, describes the work thusly:

It should be mentioned at this point that in the early period of the project the most careful attention was given to the possibility that a thermonuclear reaction might be initiated in light elements of the Earth’s atmosphere or crust. The easiest to initiate, if any, was found to be the reaction between nitrogen nuclei in the atmosphere. It was assumed that only the most energetic of several possible reactions would occur, and that the reaction cross-sections [probabilities] were at the maximum values theoretically possible. Calculation led to the result that no matter how high the temperature, energy loss would exceed energy production by a reasonable factor. At the assumed temperature of three million electron volts the reaction failed to be self-propagating by a factor of sixty. This temperature exceeded the calculated initial temperature of the deuterium reaction by a factor of one hundred, and that of the fission bomb by a larger factor.

The impossibility of igniting the atmosphere was thus assured by science and common sense. The essential factors in these calculations, the Coulomb forces of the nucleus, are among the best understood phenomena of modern physics. The philosophic possibility of destroying the earth, associated with the theoretical convertibility of mass into energy, remains. The thermonuclear reaction, which is the only method now known by which such a catastrophe could occur, is evidently ruled out. The general stability of matter in the observable universe argues against it. Further knowledge of the nature of the great stellar explosions, novae and supernovae, will throw light on these questions. In the almost complete absence of real knowledge, it is generally believed that the tremendous energy of these explosions is of gravitational rather than nuclear origin.

It is not clear whether this perfectly reflects the reasoning of 1943-1945. Ellsberg interviewed Hawkins about the question in 1982, and says that Hawkins told him that he had “done more interviews with the participants on this particular subject, both before and after the Trinity test, than on any other subject,” and that the atmospheric ignition question was continually “rediscovered” by other, younger researchers, and had to be dismissed anew again and again. This suggests another origin of the early defensiveness about this topic — and part of the its seemingly conclusive inclusion in the Manhattan District History, which was explicitly meant to serve as a classified record of activities to be consulted in the event that there was a need for justifications of actions taken during the war. Hawkins would tell Ellsberg that by “impossibility,” he had really meant “for practical purposes,” as opposed to literal “impossibility.”

“A colossal catastrophe”

In March 1946, the question was raised from another source. In the months prior to Operation Crossroads, there was considerable public controversy regarding the safety of two underwater tests that were planned. One was a shallow underwater test (Baker), and the other was a deep underwater test (Charlie, which was ultimately cancelled for other reasons). These underwater shots appear to have generated similar fears about fusion ignition, this time of the oceans.

The Harvard physicist Percy Bridgman, whose high-pressure lab had generated data on plutonium’s equation of state during in the Manhattan Project, and who had received the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1946, was so alarmed by the idea that he wrote to Bethe on the subject, and his fears were forward to General Leslie Groves:

What is worrying to me is the possibility that if the bomb is exploded in the ocean the hydrogen may be converted to helium with an astronomical release of energy. […] If the history of physics teaches any one thing, it is that long-range extrapolations are hazardous. Even the best human intellect has not imagination enough to envisage what might happen when we push far into new territory. […] To an outsider the tactics of the argument which would justify running even the slightest risk of such a colossal catastrophe appears exceedingly weak. […]

If I am right in thinking that the tactics of the argument are weak, then it would be wrong to drop the bomb whether or not the ocean explodes. Suppose the bomb is dropped as [is] at present planned, the ocean does not explode, and later it should become known to the general public that the argument had been weak and that the scientists had permitted the taking of a stupendous chance without doing everything in their power to safeguard all possibilities. There might be a reaction against science in general which would result in suppression of all scientific freedom and the destruction of science itself.

This appears to me as cause for greater concern than the blowing up of the ocean, which after all would not very much affect a world of dead men.

That it was forwarded to Groves points to some concern about it. It is possible that someone like Groves might have been worried less about the reality of Bridgman’s fears, but about the way that having such a thing in writing could, inadvertently, bring Bridgman’s fears about later accountability into reality. How “weak” was the argument, and how would they be later judged if someone — including Bridgman himself — made this point publicly?

The immediate outcome from Bridgman’s letter appears to have been a “debunking” article by Hans Bethe, which appeared in the March 15, 1946 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. By this point, Bethe notes, there had been “much public discussion” about the possibility of atmospheric or oceanic ignition. Bethe says that the concern is “very well taken,” but is thoroughly discouraging of the idea. His basic argument is that because an atomic bomb contains a lot of non-reacting material — everything beyond the part that is fissioning — that will necessarily lower the temperatures that are transmitted to the atmosphere, and that the temperatures needed for fusion are very high indeed. He concludes that while there were unknowns, safety seems guaranteed by wide margins.7

It is an interesting and different argument than any of the other ones given here. He also, per his expertise, discourses at length on the conditions inside of stars, and how different they are from those on Earth, even those places that are near exploding atomic bombs. It is perhaps the best evidence we have for how Bethe himself would have thought about it, which is interesting because it is not how, say, Teller seems to have considered the question. Bethe’s answer from 1946 is far more categorical than any of the other ones offered up so far.

“The dangerous temperature”

The concerns about Crossroads might provide some context for the formal writing up of a paper tackling the atmospheric ignition problem by Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Cloyd Marvin, Jr., titled “Ignition of the Atmosphere with Nuclear Bombs” (LA-602), dated to August 1946.8 It might be, for example, the “due diligence” desired to show that the “argument” about ignition was, in fact, not weak. But it only concerns itself with atmospheric ignition (not oceanic ignition), so perhaps not. But it is otherwise not entirely clear why this was written up nearly a year after the Trinity test, particularly if there is an earlier paper from 1943 on the same subject.

The Konopinski–Marvin–Teller paper is extremely technical but not too difficult to follow if one is familiar with the basic terms. The question they try to tackle is, what would the easiest possible atmospheric ignition reaction be, and are there conditions under which it could ever occur, based on what was known at the time?

They assume that a nitrogen–nitrogen fusion reaction would be “easiest” fusion reaction to induce in the Earth’s atmosphere. They did not know how easy it would be to induce, because they did not know the probability of that fusion reaction under different conditions of temperature or pressure (they did not know its cross-section, in technical terms). Given these uncertainties, they advocated a risk-adverse philosophy: “because of the uncertainties in the knowledge of these processes, the policy should be adopted of exaggerating the dangers at any point which appears at all questionable.”

So they made some conservative guesses as to what seemed reasonable based on what they did know, and then then reasoned about how this reaction might propagate in the atmosphere if it started, balancing the processes that would produce heat, and those that would dissipate it.9

All of their results were that no reaction would propagate. A major question of interest for the paper, though, was how confident they were in that answer. This came in the form of a “safety factor,” the ratio of energy losses to gains. If that ratio of losses to gains is >1, then the reaction is a net loss — no propagation, no global thermonuclear apocalypse. If it ever gets close to 1, however, that is a problem. They performed their equations with different assumptions about how much energy was being generated by the bomb, and found that for all reasonable numbers, the “safety factor” was very safe indeed.

But they found that if the initial energy was high-enough, it would get to a “safety factor” that was only around 1.6. That was still “safe,” but was close-enough to 1 to indicate that any major errors in their understanding could be quite dangerous indeed. This corresponded to an initial temperature of 10 MeV, which was very hot indeed. They explained that this would be the total energy of a weapon on the order of 27,000 megatons was entirely pumped into the air as heat. In reality, they explained, most of that energy would not be converted into heat, so even this was unrealistic situation — a weapon over a million times more powerful than the weapons of World War II — was not very plausible.10

They continued, though, and suggested that if somehow the energy of 3 tons of fissioning material was dumped into a very small volume of air — a sphere with a 7 meter radius — that might get closer to the “dangerous” temperature of 10 MeV. This is still not that plausible: the weapons of World War II each fissioned only about 1 kilogram of material, so we are still talking about something thousand times more explosive, on the other of 50 megatons.11

But this much lower number, they noted, does start to get one into the mindset of Teller’s contemplate Super bomb, which was assumed to be possible of being thousands of times more powerful than the weapons used against Japan, and would also release more of its energy in a “useful” form for heating the air than the fission bombs. Thus a fusion reaction in “a sphere of liquid deuterium only 1 to 1.5 meter in radius may suffice,” which in the range of the future multi-megaton Super bombs being contemplated during the war were imagined to be.12

Still, even in this situation, the authors have faith that the cooling effects would win out. The abstract of the paper is categorical: “The energy losses to radiation always overcompensate the gains due to the reactions.” But the actual conclusion of the paper couches its work in more uncertainty than this:

There remains the distant possibility that some other less simple mode of burning may maintain itself in the atmosphere.

Even if the reaction is stopped within a sphere of a few hundred meters radius, the resultant earth-shock and the radioactive contamination of the atmosphere might become catastrophic on a world-wide scale.

One may conclude that the arguments of this paper make it unreasonable to expect that the N+N reaction could propagate. An unlimited propagation is even less likely. However, the complexity of the argument and the absence of satisfactory experimental foundations makes further work on the subject highly desirable.

Now, again, this particular paper was finished after the Trinity test, so its conclusion that the atmosphere would not be set aflame by Trinity was presumably considered pretty valid. In his memoirs, Teller says that he, Konopinski, and Marvin, “demonstrated” with their equations that “such a cataclysm could not occur,” but that the famed physicist Enrico Fermi was not satisfied:13

But when we had completed our proof, Fermi insisted that we go one step further. All we had proved, he pointed out, was that such an explosion could not occur according to known laws of physics. But what presently undiscovered phenomena might exist that, under the novel conditions of extreme heat, might magnify the consequences and lead to an explosion? Considering that question occupied my time immediately before the test. I explained the possibilities I had considered and asked for suggestions from everyone who would listen to me.

Fermi’s question is a bold one, and perhaps is the reason for the expressions of doubt, and desire for future research, at the end of the 1946 paper. After all, if all of this is new physics, what is to say that they’ve actually got it all figured out? They knew they didn’t even know the exact cross-section of the reaction they are talking about — what about the things they didn’t know they didn’t know?

In October 1945, Teller wrote up a short paper for Fermi about the possibility of the Super, as part of the postwar planning purposes. In it, he mentioned atmospheric ignition in the context of an even bigger weapon:14

Careful considerations and calculations have shown that there is not the remotest possibility of such an event [ignition of the atmosphere]. The concentration of energy encountered in the super bomb is not greater than that of the atomic bomb. In my opinion the risks were greater when the first atomic bomb was tested, because our conclusions were based at that time on longer extrapolations from known facts. The danger of the super bomb does not lie in physical nature but in human behavior.

Which is an interesting data point in Teller’s own thinking on the matter, and the question of the unknown unknowns.

“Disastrous consequences”

The matter was not, for Teller, apparently resolved completely. In 1951, as work on the hydrogen bomb was moving forward to the point of a planned test in late 1952, he asked the physicist Gregory Breit, then at the Yale University, to independently re-consider all of the calculations with fresh eyes. Teller apparently told Breit that “the considerations of the wartime period might have been too hurried,” and that the plans to test a Super “have increased the importance of the question.”15

By this point, much more was known about fusion reactions, and the fact that they were in fact much harder to start and propagate than Teller had imagined in the 1940s. Breit and his “group” of postdocs and graduate students tackled the problem and had answers by the fall of 1952, prior to the first megaton-range thermonuclear test, Ivy Mike.

The Breit group’s recalculation was able to substitute much more definite data than had been available in 1943-1946. They concluded that, as before, there was a “dangerous temperature” in which the possibility of energy gains might overcome energy losses, and even revised it downward from the original — they agreed with 10 MeV as a dangerous temperature, but thought it could possibly go as low as 5 MeV. But they noted that the energy of the bomb being contemplated (on the order of 10 megatons) were 500 to 1,000 times too low (only 10-15 keV). “In the fall tests,” they concluded, “there is no danger that one can see.” They considered as well that “although one does not know all the factors with certainty it is quite unreasonable to expect them to be off to a degree which would matter.”

Even here, though, they felt the need to add a bit of critique. The original paper, and perhaps their own, suffered from the possibility of unknown unknowns:

The theory of nuclear forces is still in a rudimentary stage and while it is generally agreed that very large effects of this kind are improbable it would be unfortunate if one were mistaken and if one were the cause of disastrous consequences through overconfidence in present day nuclear theory. Much of the latter [the report] is based on incomplete evidence. The attitude regarding what constitutes certainty in question under discussion Is necessarily different from that taken in deciding what constitutes a good Ph.D. dissertation problem or even what constitutes a suitable subject for inclusion in an ordinary bomb test.

We are back, again, at Ellsberg’s question: how much risk is allowable if you are talking about the possibility of global annihilation? Should “normal” scientific attitudes towards risk and uncertainty prevail, or are they inadequate when the risk of being wrong is so large? Can one know, in advance, how wrong the unknown unknowns could be? It is interesting to consider that in only a few years, the second American thermonuclear test, Castle Bravo, would become a major radiological accident in part because of the inability of scientists to predict the physics involved in the test. Even the Trinity test itself was several times more explosive than had been anticipated ahead of time.

“The necessary conditions”

In the 1979, two Livermore scientists, Thomas A. Weaver and Lowell Wood, published a paper that re-studied the atmospheric and oceanic ignition problems with the benefit of many decades’ of data and advanced computing capabilities. Instead of asking whether kiloton- or megaton-range nuclear detonations could set the atmosphere of Earth on fire — they already knew it could not, plainly — they instead asked what the “necessary conditions” would be if you were to set off a runaway nuclear chain reaction in an atmosphere.16

They concluded, as I have written about in the past, that the “easiest” way for such a thing to happen would involve increasing the deuterium content of the ocean by twenty times, at which point it could be ignited by a 200 teraton (20 million megaton) explosion. Which is a very precise way to say “impossible.”

By this point, in 1979, I think it is fair to say that no scientists took seriously the possibility of atmospheric ignition. If anything, they were perhaps all too quick to dismiss it even retrospectively. By the 1970s, the idea of the paternal scientific expert giving wise counsel was coming under widespread attack as a result of the deep linkages that had formed between the scientific community, the weapons industry, and the perceived role that they played in enabling and perpetuating the Vietnam War.17

But it is worth returning to Ellsberg’s question, which, as we have seen, is echoed in many of the earlier discussions by the historical actors themselves: What level of risk is tolerable in this situation, particularly when these risks are being taken by agents who are not being subject to even the oversight of scientific peer review, much less democratic oversight?

Let’s say that we decide that Compton’s criteria of anything less than a 3 in a million chance is too much, when we are talking about killing everyone on Earth. One might still find that to be a dangerously risky proposition given the unknowns and the potential consequences — again, one-in-a-million odds events do occur, sometimes.

But let us imagine that we are at least somewhat comfortable to imagine that, under the circumstances of World War II or the early Cold War — where these bombs are hardly being developed and tested for mere interest but as part of a major global confrontation — that we might imagine that we could agree that these are somewhere on the order of magnitude of odds we might accept. One in a million. If the odds of atmospheric ignition were imagined by experts to be, say, one in a hundred, would the Trinity test have been vastly irresponsible? I think undoubtedly.

But here’s where someone like Ellsberg wants us to flip things around. It’s not just about atmospheric ignition. Ask yourself: what do you think the odds are for a nuclear war occurring in the next century? My sense is that most people who study this question seriously would consider them to be much more likely than one-in-a-million, and that the historical data we have — with a few very “close calls” within the first eight decades of the nuclear age — suggest that it might be very high indeed.

The fears of atmospheric ignition, in retrospect, seem perhaps quaint, and attackable by both mathematics and experience. But the underlying problem, the underlying question of how much risk is acceptable, seems to be as potent as ever.

His talk was on a very important question, one made all the more important by the rhetoric of two weeks ago: how do we evaluate various kinds of “nuclear threats” that are made or alleged to have been made? Perkovich prefers to call these kinds of things “nuclear manipulations,” because not all of them are genuine threats (e.g., if one is just “reminding” the world that you have nuclear weapons, that is different from, say, drawing a red line and saying, “if this event does or doesn’t happen, I will use nuclear weapons,” even if the former still can be rather “threatening” if made during a crisis). Perkovich’s paper on this, which you can read online here, is a careful attempt to think about the various factors that would go into evaluating such “manipulations” in real-time, with a very nice “decision tree” for weighing the relative urgency and seriousness of a given “threat.”

I find this kind of thing quite interesting and stimulating. I have an unabashed passion for taxonomic approaches to the world (make it orderly!) and of course my “historical brain” loves to think about examples from the past that could be fodder for complicating such a system. (And I recognize that complicating the system is often deliberately not the intent, nor necessarily helpful, but still, it is my impulse.) So, for example, where most of Perkovich’s criteria are simple yes–no binaries, I am always tempted to create little spectrums and then think about how they would be weighed. For example, “Did top leader make or affirm the statement?” for me instantly splits into a little hierarchy of possible “voices” for a threat, e.g., the “top leader,” a top military leader, someone in the cabinet, someone who is assumed to be a mouthpiece for the leadership even if they aren’t technically in it, and so on down the line. And instead of yes–no–unknown for “did it involve nuclear warheads?,” I want to add something like, “it was kept deliberately ambiguous,” and think about how I would want to chart that between “yes” and “no.”

All of this is a heuristic, of course, a way to practically and roughly think about how to distinguish between different kinds of situations and scenarios. It’s a little model, one aimed at utility rather than representation of the world as it is. I love little models, particularly because I am not that invested in whether they represent “reality” in a deep sense (plenty of models don’t, but are still useful).

Perkovich also mentioned that he has a book coming out from Adelphi Books later this year on Nuclear Threats in the Ukraine War, which I am very keen to see. There are bits and pieces of that story that have been reported on (some of which is in the paper linked above), but there’s quite a bit that is not generally known that I think is rather important to get out there, so I am hoping it will lead to a broader discussion of this issue.

After teaching on Wednesday I got onto a plane and flew to Rome, Italy, and from there took a shuttle bus to Perugia, for the International Journalism Festival. I had been asked to be on a panel about the nuclear imagination (and its limits) with Beatrice Fihn (formerly of ICAN), who I have enjoyed meeting and talking to over the years, and moderated/hosted by Rob Elder (of Outrider), who I have worked with many times (I am on Outrider’s Advisory Board). I find speaking for “only” 15 minutes almost intolerable (even when I lecture for hours I feel like I barely scratch the surface of these things), but I gave a little talk about the creation and limits of various kinds of “nuclear imagination.”

The main thing I wanted to try and get across is the ways in which “imaginations” about nuclear weapons have been created (a sort of complicated and dynamic interaction between the audiences — public and official — and the various “voices,” including experts, journalists, and “cultural” creators like artists and writers and directors), and talk a bit about the dangers of limited imaginations and ones that are based in essentially incorrect ideas. For the (mostly) journalists in the audience, my point was really to get them to see that they have a rather important role in this kind of thing (even if they are not the only “player” in it), and that a lot of things in the “nuclear world” that are taken for granted are in fact quite constructed and debatable.

You can watch the whole panel here if you are interested, but it not required! I felt like it went OK for a short talk, but it’s hard for me to know whether that is true or not, given that I am not really a member of the target audience (journalists) and I’m also not really sure what the “impact” goal of such a talk even is. But I usually wonder the same thing about talks at more academic conferences as well, and suspect most of why these things exist is as a form of networking (“here I am, this is what I’m working on, get in touch if you’re interested” could be the “ultimate” goal of pretty much all academic talks).

Perugia was interesting. I had never been to Italy before, and I am aware that it is much more than this one city, and that even Perugia must be more than the small piece of it that was hosting the conference. The conference was mostly in various venues (hotels, theaters, etc.) in the “old” part of the city, which was on a craggy hill and seems to have architecture dating from the 14th-17th centuries or so. If you like very old-seeming, somewhat decaying, very atmospheric kinds of spaces, well, they’ve got those by the spadeful. I hope you like getting lost and walking up steep hills, though, because the place is a complete maze and as mentioned built on a fairly impressive hill.

I will admit that Perugia’s charms wore out on me fairly quickly. The first few picturesque streets and cobblestone corridors were quite charming. But then they all started to blend together, and my frustration with the fact that I kept getting lost (Google Maps is just not built for this kind of environment, and it shows) made me long for the Paris’ 19th- and early 20th-century “baroque modernity.” Which was a preference/distinction I didn’t quite know I had, until I was walking around something that felt much more medieval and early modern.

There is also a way in which Perugia felt embalmed, probably because the only local economy near the “old town” was tourism, and the streets I walked in even outside of it were essentially devoid of pedestrians and the kind of pedestrian-dependent or pedestrian-catering spaces that I have started to take for granted. The whole place felt very anti-pedestrian in general, with far too many tiny Italian cars driving disturbingly fast around blind corners.

So while I found Perugia interesting to visit, and I enjoyed meeting some of the people at the conference (and I attended a few other panels, about nuclear weapons and AI weapons), but I was pretty ready to go home by the end of it. At some time in the future I will do a more “traditional” trip to Italy — Rome, Venice, etc. — because I know that I really only got a taste of it here.

While at the conference, I did manage to get a blog post out the door for Doomsday Machines, on the trope of “atomic bombs” prior to the discovery of nuclear fission:

I’ve wanted to write something up on this for awhile, because it’s a favorite of mine to lecture on, and it often surprises people. It is also the answer to a common question that I get, which is about how people conceptualized the meaning of “atomic bomb” in 1945. The answer is that they already had a conceptual framework for it, because the idea predated the actual realization of the weapon by several decades, and it is also one of the clearest cases we have where you can show that cultural products (like the novels of H.G. Wells) had an impact on the later attitudes of both scientists (Leo Szilard) and policymakers (Winston Churchill) when they grappled with an “emerging technology.”

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“Ready!” said the steersman.

The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied it against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter. Between its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he bent his head until his lips touched it. Then he had to bite in order to let the air in upon the inducive. Sure of its accessibility, he craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane and judged his pace and distance. Then very quickly he bent forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over the side.

“Round,” he whispered inaudibly.

The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a descending column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a whirlwind. Both the aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks, hurled high and sideways and the steersman, with gleaming eyes and set teeth, fought in great banking curves for a balance. The gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; his nostrils dilated, his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly strapped. . . .

When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the crater of a small volcano. In the open garden before the Imperial castle a shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation. They were too high to distinguish people clearly, or mark the bomb’s effect upon the building until suddenly the façade tottered and crumbled before the flare as sugar dissolves in water. The man stared for a moment, showed all his long teeth, and then staggered into the cramped standing position his straps permitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it down after its fellow.

Wells’ “atomic bombs” were not like the fission or fusion explosives that would come in the future. It is somewhat difficult to imagine exactly what he had in mind, as the text is not always entirely clear on it.

The section quoted above mentions an explosion with the appearance of “the crater of a small volcano.” He describes the mechanism in a bit more detail shortly thereafter:

Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them. Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by which the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb was a blazing continual explosion. […]

[…]once [Carolinum’s] degenerative process had been induced, continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing could arrest it. Of all Hyslop’s artificial elements, Carolinum was the most heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to make and handle. To this day it remains the most potent degenerator known. What the earlier twentieth-century chemists called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it poured out half of the huge store of energy in its great molecules in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen days’ emission was a half of that first period’s outpouring, and so on. As with all radio-active substances this Carolinum, though every seventeen days its power is halved, though constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays. . . . […]

Once launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and blistering energy, were flung high and far.

And so on, with his faux-technical terms, describing something that is both radioactive and a “continuing explosive.” To me it invokes a mash-up between a radiological weapon (contaminating with radioactivity), an open and erupting volcano, inextinguishable incendiary warfare, and the Sun.

Wells’ ideas about the atomic bomb and atomic energy are traceable to the writings of Frederick Soddy (1877-1956), the easily-overlooked British chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921 for his work on nuclear transmutation with the (much more famous) physicist Ernest Rutherford. Soddy was the first major English-language popularizer of the idea of “atomic energy,” the notion that the newly-discovered phenomena of radioactivity implied that all matter contained huge amounts of latent energy locked into its structure. Whereas radioactive elements tend to leak away their energy steadily, and uncontrollably, Soddy, in popular lectures published as The Interpretation of Radium (1909), imagined a future in which that energy could be released on demand:

This bottle contains about one pound of uranium oxide, and therefore about fourteen ounces of uranium. Its value is about £1. Is it not wonderful to reflect that in this little bottle there lies asleep and waiting to be evolved the energy of about nine hundred tons of coal? The energy in a ton of uranium would be sufficient to light London for a year. The store of energy in uranium would be worth a thousand times as much as the uranium itself, if only it were under our control and could be harnessed to do the world’s work in the same way as the stored energy in coal has been harnessed and controlled. […]

As we have seen, we cannot yet artificially accelerate or influence the rate of disintegration of an element, and therefore the energy in uranium, which requires a thousand million years to be evolved, is practically valueless. On the other hand, to increase the natural rate, and to break down uranium or any other element artificially, is simply transmutation. If we could accomplish the one so we could the other. These two great problems, at once the oldest and the newest in science, are one. Transmutation of the elements carries with it the power to unlock the internal energy of matter, and the unlocking of the internal stores of energy in matter would, strangely enough, be infinitely the most important and valuable consequence of transmutation.

Soddy’s book did not speak of bombs, but its allusions to immense the power contained in the nuclei of atoms were frequent, and many of his examples of such, like the one above regarding the lighting of London, would quickly become standard clichés.1

He describes individual radioactive decay reactions as “explosive” in character, and does at one point make an unusual analogy about how much is unknown about the atomic realm at that point, comparing it to an architect being suddenly told that his everyday bricks could “could with effect be employed as an explosive incomparably more powerful in its activities than dynamite,” but he never warns of radioactivity or atomic energy as a fodder for weaponry. The jump from a new, inexhaustible source of energy to a dread weapon seems to have been Wells’ own.2

In the summer of 1922, various news syndication agencies ran a story that consisted of essentially one long quote from “one of the eminent English scientists” warning of similarly dire possibilities:

We are on the eve of scientific discoveries of so sensational and so far-reaching a character as to render Einstein’s theory, by comparison, child’s play. I predict that within the next five, ten, or at the outside twenty years, men will be able to say, “I have harnessed the atom.” […] The energy stored in such elements as thorium and uranium is stupendous. […] It only needs the knowledge of how to ignite it — how to cause the atoms to break up when we desire — to make this power immediately available. […]

It is conceivable, too, that such terrific force might eventually be liberated as to blow up the world.

Then consider the possibilities of war. The first nation to discover the secret will be in a position to wipe out all the other nations, literally, in a quarter of an hour. It could send over an aeroplane with a 2,000-pound bomb which would have as devastating an effect as that of a million aeroplanes carrying the 2,000-pound bombs in use today. […]

The question is: Which will that nation be?

This article circulated globally, at times accompanied by dramatic headlines, like “EARTH AS A BOMB.”3 Some of the accounts say it was an “eminent Oxford scientist” who provided the story. But who was the “eminent” scientist? It is quite unclear. That the article ran anonymously suggests that whomever the source was, they didn’t want their name publicly attached to the idea. To my knowledge, no one ever came forward later to claim their prescience as the source after the fact.4

In interwar September 1924, Winston Churchill tried his hand at writing about new technological futures in an article with the odd title, “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” Influenced by both H.G. Wells — Churchill claimed to have read all of Wells’ books since The Time Machine immediately as they came out, and multiple times — and his close scientific friend and advisor Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell, Oxford professor), Churchill laid out a his grim sense of coming conflict and the role that science and technology might play in it:

The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending. But up to the present time the means of destruction at the disposal of man have not kept pace with his ferocity. Reciprocal extermination was impossible in the Stone Age. One cannot do much with a clumsy club. […] It was not until the dawn of the twentieth century of the Christian era that War really began to enter into its kingdom as the potential destroyer of the human race. The organization of mankind into great States and Empires and the rise of nations to full collective consciousness enabled enterprises of slaughter to be planned and executed upon a scale and with a perseverance never before imagined.

Churchill warned that the peace of the Great War was likely a temporary one, as “two mighty branches of the European family will never rest content with their existing situation” — Russia and Germany. And just as surely as war will return, Churchill wrote, the technology of mass destruction will continue to evolve:

“Wars,” said a distinguished American to me some years ago, “are fought with Steel: weapons may change, but Steel remains the core of all modern warfare. France has got the Steel of Europe, and Germany has lost it. Here, at any rate, is an element of permanency.” “Are you sure,” I asked, “that the wars of the future will be fought with Steel?” A few weeks later I talked with a German. “What about Aluminium?” he replied. “Some think,” he said, “that the next war will be fought with Electricity.” And on this a vista opens out of electrical rays which could paralyse the engines of a motor-car, could claw down aeroplanes from the sky, and conceivably be made destructive of human life or human vision. Then there are Explosives. Have we reached the end? Has Science turned its last page on them? May there not be methods of using explosive energy incomparably more intense than anything heretofore discovered? Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings — nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp, or dockyard?

Churchill further worried that such weapons could allow “a base, degenerate, immoral race” of people to “make an enemy far above them in quality” their slaves on the basis of their possessing and being willing to use novel technological weapons.5

I don’t believe that Churchill’s article had a major public impact on the thinking about “atomic bombs,” but it doesn’t really need to have: it reflects that this discourse about science fiction weaponry had made it to what would very soon be the highest echelons of public policy in at least the United Kingdom (Churchill was on the political “outs” in 1924, but would soon come back), and joined into security debates. Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Adolf Hitler in particular shared a common belief in the value of “wonder weapons” produced by scientific research, a shared “lesson” of the Great War for all of them. It is part of the context of why each of these nations were willing, to differing degrees, entertain the possibilities of fantastical wartime research, including atomic research.

There were other minor references to “atomic bombs” across the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the discovery of nuclear fission. The most important and perhaps famous inspiration was that of the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who famously credited H.G. Wells for his development of the concept of the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, over five years before the discovery of nuclear fission. He later described it this way:6

In 1932, while I was still in Berlin, I read a book by H. G. Wells. It was called The World Set Free. This book was written in 1913, one year before the World War, and in it H.G. Wells describes the discovery of artificial radioactivity and puts it in the year of 1933, the year in which it actually occurred. He then proceeds to describe the liberation of atomic energy on a large scale for industrial purposes, the development of atomic bombs, and a world war which was apparently fought by an alliance of England, France, and perhaps including America, against Germany and Austria, the powers located in the central part of Europe. […] The book made a very great impression on me, but I didn’t regard it as anything but fiction.

I was no longer thinking about [H. G. Well’s book] until I found myself in London about the time of the British Association [meeting] in September 1933. I read in the newspapers a speech by Lord [Ernest] Rutherford. He was quoted as saying that he who talks about the liberation of atomic energy on an industrial scale is talking moonshine. This sort of set me pondering as I was walking the streets of London, and I remember that I stopped for a red light at the intersection of Southampton Row. As I was waiting for the light to change and as the light changed to green and I crossed the street, it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large a mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction. I didn’t see at the moment just how one would go about finding such an element, or what experiments would be needed, but the idea never left me. In certain circumstances it might become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs. The thought that this might in fact be possible became sort of an obsession with me. […]

In the spring of 1934 I had applied for a patent which described the laws governing such a chain reaction. This was the first time, I think, that the concept of critical mass was developed and that a chain reaction was seriously discussed. Knowing what this would mean—and I knew it because I had read H. G. Wells—I did not want this patent to become public.

It isn’t that Wells’ book gave Szilard any strong technical inspiration — Carolinum, it isn’t. Szilard’s neutron-based chain reaction is his own. But Wells did clearly provoke Szilard’s imagination about atomic bombs, and helped frame how he thought they might matter if they were possible. And thus Szilard’s first impulse was towards secrecy, towards believing that such a chain reaction would be vastly important development for humankind. And that impulse set off its own historical chain reaction, leading to Hiroshima, the H-bomb, and beyond.7

Szilard didn’t have a candidate reaction for his concept of the chain reaction, and while he did some research to search for one, he ended up essentially shelving the question for several years. Nuclear fission was discovered by Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Fritz Strassman, and Otto Frisch in late 1938, and became global news in early 1939. The moment that Szilard heard about the discovery, he was ready to understand what it might mean:8

[The physicist Eugene] Wigner told me of Hahn’s discovery. Hahn found that uranium breaks into two parts when it absorbs a neutron; this it the process which we call fission. When I heard this I saw immediately that these fragments, being heavier than corresponds to their charge, must emit neutrons, and if enough neutrons are emitted in this fission process, then it should be, of course, possible to sustain a chain reaction. All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.

This is also one of the clearest examples we have of the complicated relationship between scientific research (radioactivity, transmutation), scientific popularization (Soddy), science fiction (Wells), a feedback loop back into scientific inspiration (Szilard), and broader policy decisions (Churchill).

The pre-fission history of atomic bombs is important, not just for Szilard, but for a vast number of other people, including scientists, statesmen, and the everyday public. It created a context for understanding what “atomic bomb” even meant prior to their invention, and towards thinking about the idea of a vastly powerful science-borne weapon as a possible concrete reality. It is why, in 1945, when the United States announced that it had invented an “atomic bomb,” people understood immediately that this meant a vastly powerful, possibly game-changing weapon, and not, say, a very tiny explosive.

The atomic bomb in Wells’ book may have been “strange even to the men who used them,” but Wells’ book made the concept considerably less strange than it might have otherwise been.

This wasn’t quite Russia–Ukraine 2022 levels of usage, thank goodness, but it’s still a pretty significant spike. It is also interesting to me how quickly it went down to baseline afterwards — a graphical rendition, perhaps, of how people react to nuclear crises in general, where there is a sudden burst of attention and then a return to not worrying much about it at all.

NUKEMAP did pretty well in that period, although there was some performance degradation for the parts of it that require Amazon EC2 and RDS instances to function (casualty calculation and loading some dynamically-modified configuration data). It has given me some ideas as changed to make so that NUKEMAP can still load its basic functionality even if the Amazon assets are knocked out by too much traffic, which I’ll implement when I get the chance.

And how did you do? I found the whole thing very alarming. Not so much because I thought the US was about to use nuclear weapons — although the inability to rule that kind of thing out was troubling — but because I did think that there was a real danger that the US was about to commit a very terrible massacre of civilians. Trump’s language about killing “a whole civilization,” described as “grave” in some headlines where the word “genocidal” should have been used, is unprecedented for a sitting president. It is reprehensible, a war crime, and an impeachable offense by itself: whatever his intent, the language was meant to invoke a genocidal threat.

I was asked about this by a New York Times reporter, and had some rather strong things to say about it. They only quoted one of my least strong statements, which perhaps is for the best:

Alex Wellerstein, a historian who studies nuclear conflicts, said that even if Mr. Trump does not carry out the extent of his threat, the president’s violent rhetoric damages his credibility as a negotiator and his country’s standing in the world.

“You’re talking about a world that largely increasingly sees the United States as unhinged and dangerous, and not a reliable partner,” he said, “where all of the countries that typically align with democracy and freedom are on the other side of the United States.”

The more substantive thing that I said to them was that while one can point to instances of sitting presidents making nuclear threats, the truly (and intentionally) aggressive ones have been done in private, not in the public sphere. And the reason for this is that such threats a) terrify one’s own populace, b) terrify one’s allies, and c) there is a good chance your enemy will call your bluff. All of which were on display in this case.

Was Trump’s rhetoric meant as a nuclear threat? I don’t know. I did also tell the Times reporter that a) if the words had any intentionality behind them at all, they were meant to invoke specter, and b) it didn’t really matter what the intentionality was since any reasonable audience would (and did) consider that to be a plausible interpretation of them.

Intentionality does matter a bit, particularly when we are talking about words perhaps taken out of context, or goaded out of someone. When Truman made comments about the atomic bomb being under “active consideration” at a news conference during the Korean War, that was a case of a news story being manufactured out of nothing. That news story did succeed in terrifying both the US population and its allies (the UK immediately requested an audience with Truman), but it also led to an immediate clarification and rebuttal by the White House. (If you are curious about this incident, I discuss it at some length in The Most Awful Responsibility. Even at the time it was clear that this was a “slow news day” problem.)

In the case of Trump, there is no such excuse. That does not mean that I credit his intentionality all that highly, because I think his grasp on language is pretty poor, but it is hard to imagine a world in which he (or his allies) would interpret such language differently if it was coming from the Iranians.

Well, now that can has been kicked down the road some more. Coincidentally, my post on Doomsday Machines this week was about looking at what US nuclear war plans were in the late 1950s, through the lens of The Power of Decision, an in-house production for the USAF about how its bomber forces would coordinate to destroy Communism from 1958:

I’ve been looking at The Power of Decision for a long time, particularly at “the Big Board” and all that it implies. The restored version by Peter Kuran made finalizing my thoughts on it much easier, as there were a number of very basic things (like “what does the legend on the board say?”) that were unanswerable without better resolution than was previously available to me.

This upcoming week I will be out of town for part of the week, so I’m not sure what I’ll get posted for Doomsday Machines, but I have a few things in a “partially finished” state that I’ll try to turn around before I head on the road. Here’s hoping for that, among other miracles!

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Just this week, the filmmaker/special effects artist Peter Kuran, of Trinity and Beyond fame, released a restored version of the film that is such an improvement over the muddy, pixellated version that had been made available to the NSA. You can view it in its entirety on his YouTube channel:

There is so much one can say about it, but for the moment I want to focus on one aspect of it that I have been obsessed with for some time: its war plan. There are three war plans discussed in The Power of Decision: WAR DANCE, which is a described as “a typical war plan for our heavy units”; QUICK STRIKE, which is the dramatized war plan shown in the bulk of the film, and the one shown in the most close-up detail; and FOLLOW THRU, which is an operation that was meant to be running directly after QUICK STRIKE. Because it is the most detailed and most carefully discussed, I am going to focus entirely on QUICK STRIKE.1

I have been pouring over the details of QUICK STRIKE for some years now. I put off writing this post until after Kuran’s restored version was posted (I had gotten wind of it a bit earlier) because I thought it would help me resolve a lot of unanswered questions to be able to see the “Big Board” — yes, that is what it is called — more clearly. Kuran quite generously also allowed met to access a version without a watermark for this post.

What has made QUICK STRIKE a fascination of mine for so long is that it is devilishly hard to get information on “real” war plans for any period, much less this bomber-centric one, in a period in which the US had vast forces to deploy. We have had previous releases that gave a sense of targets, and we know where many of the weapons were located, and we know what some of the planned “movements” were, and we know what the general philosophy of these planes were… but it’s another thing to see something that is meant to be a “realistic” nuclear war plan, made for internal, classified consumption. It is, we should note on the onset, not an actual nuclear war plan — as I will discuss, many of the details are clearly fuzzed/fabricated — and it is, even within its own context, meant to be a future war plan, but I believe it does reflect much of what we know war planning in this period looked like, and vividly so.

I’ve created a mosaic out of all of the screenshots of the Big Board showing QUICK STRIKE in the film. This was done with over a dozen carefully selected images of the restored film and trial-and-error with Photoshop’s Photomerge feature, careful hand-masking of layers to get the highest resolution possible, and then an overall straightening of the piece. Here it is in its “raw” form:

This map does not read itself. There’s a lot going on in it. The black spots are not redaction marks — they are just areas that do not appear in any particular frame, or if they do appear, it is at such a distance (and they have so little information in them) that it just distracts from the overall image (e.g., that small area in the Pacific, which you can see in the first film screenshot above — fitting in that extreme angle into this was not within Photomerge’s capabilities, and it did not seem worth it). I have not “filled in” any missing areas for the sake of aesthetics.

I have also made an annotated version of the above mosaic, which I will use to help “decode” and analyze the plan below. I will explain the various annotations in turn.

First, our orientation: this is a polar projection, centered on the North Pole, looking “down” at the planet. This is common for Cold War “face off” visualizations for reasons that are somewhat geo-strategically obvious: a “side-on” project (e.g. Mercator) projection obscures the distances quite a bit when talking about travel over or near the poles (especially Mercator, which dramatically distorts near the poles). So to get your bearing, take note of the North Pole (where the thick vertical black line and a thin horizontal meridian meet), and look at North America in the lower right, and Eurasia in the upper left.

There a few different pieces of information shown on this map. First is, of course, the map itself, with its representation of geographic locations. Note that the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and the Warsaw Pact states (Eastern Europe) are essentially undifferentiated and treated as one large, pink-tinged entity. We know that the war plans of this period did not allow for “de-selecting” China or other countries — it was assumed that all of Communism was the target, and the SAC planners actually resented and feared the idea that a civilian authority (like the president) would ever want to have a more “limited” plan, as Daniel Ellsberg writes disturbingly about in The Doomsday Machine.2

There are two additional sets of borders added to the “base” map: early warning radar lines (or “nets” as they say in the film). The black line with red and white borders around Eurasia is the Soviet warning network, and the yellow-on-red line around North America is its American equivalent (i.e., the Distant Early Warning Line and other radar stations).

Let’s zoom in on a screenshot of the United States:

Dotting the Allied countries are red and black dots. The black dots are “launch bases”: bases that American attacks would emanate from. The red dots are “recovery bases”: friendly airfields that any plane that has survived its attacking run, or any damaged plane, could land at after their attack, potentially refueling and then participating in a future attack wave (e.g. FOLLOW THRU). In the above, you can see that all of the bases in the continental United States are “launch bases,” and that the only “recovery” bases visible are in Alaska and Canada. In the larger mosaic, you can see lots of “recovery” bases abroad (more on bases abroad in a moment).

The lines that emanate from the black dots and make their way to the Soviet Union are the attack themselves. They come in six colors: black, blue, red, green, orange, and yellow. Some of the lines converge at large colored circles with shapes on them; these are aerial refueling points, and each of them have their own code names: SUN SPOT, ROBIN HOOD, RAIN DROP (shown over northern Canada above), HOT ROD, HEN PECKED, and LIL’ LADY. Each of the different “plans” has different code names for its refueling points. These are where outgoing long-range bombers would rendezvous with aerial refueling planes, like the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker, and take on more fuel before making their bombing run.

One important thing: the bases marked in the United States are mostly nonsense. The location of SAC bases in the USA is not (and was never) secret, and we also know (from declassified reports) where SAC stored nuclear weapons in 1958. A few of those “launch bases” are correct-enough — e.g., Amarillo AFB, March AFB, and Biggs AFB are in cities marked as bases — but a lot of actual bases are missing, and a lot of the labeled bases are just totally wrong/nonexistent. The base locations in The Power of Decision are bogus. This is something I can say with much more authority now that we have the restored version of the film, as it was harder before to see really where everything was located. Again, this is meant to be evocative of an actual war plan, and I think it is that, but it should not be mistaken for an actual war plan.

What do the colors of the lines mean? To the left of the big board, behind our narrator, is a table of lines of the same colors showing their flight times to targets. It’s not easy to see the whole thing in detail, but you can see some of it in the above screenshot. Each line in the table is labeled with one of three acronyms: BW, GMS, and SRW, each of which also has either a number (e.g. 203 SRW) or letter (e.g. “E” GMS) in front of it. So the group of lines at his elbow, above, are 491 BW (blue), 581 SRW (black, very long), “E” GMS (short yellow), and 10 BW (blue).

In Air Force lingo, a BW is a Bomb Wing, a SRW is a Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, and a GMS is a Guided Missile Squadron. The coloring of the BW and SRW lines appears to be inconsistent and without any obvious rhyme or reason; I am not sure how you would correlate the table on the left with the map on the right at all. The GMS lines are always yellow, and the short timing on the table is pretty consistent with them being surface-to-surface missiles of the sort that were just going online in the late 1950s, like the AGM-28 Hound Dog. The yellow lines are also the only ones that never branch.3

The thicknesses of the lines also seem rather arbitrary. Sometimes a thick line branches into many smaller lines, implying the thickness correlates with the number of planes, but a lot of the times thin lines also branch to similarly thin lines, and some thick lines do not branch at all. Two massive red lines that emerge from the eastern USA intersect at refueling point HEN PECKED, combine, and then just as abruptly end at the Soviet early warning line. Only red, orange, and green lines are ever thick — blue lines never are. Some of the red, orange, blue, and black lines are spindly thin. What does it mean? Perhaps nothing, in this case, but it would make sense if these lines did have meaning in an “actual” war plan, and not this “evocative” version of one.

Above is a detailed screenshot of Western Europe, which I have flipped on the vertical axis so it is oriented with north being up. I want to use it to talk about both the foreign bases, and the targets.

First, on foreign bases: as you can see, there are launch bases and attack lines emanating out of bases outside of the United States. In Europe, these are set in the United Kingdom, Spain, Morocco, and Libya. As with the US detail, there are some things about this that are correct, some things that appear to be erroneous. The UK sites do not align with actual SAC bases at the time very well. The Spanish lines appear to emanate from Torrejón, but are missing the SAC bases at Morón and Zargoza. The Morrocan lines appear to emanate from a place far to the east of the actual bases (Sidi Slimane, Ben Guerir, and Nouasseur); the left-most red dot (a return base) could be Ben Guerir, but the black dots look like nonsense. Wheelus air Base, in Libya was an important coordinating base for SAC, but did not host nuclear weapons per its own internal (now declassified) lists.

One could try to make excuses for this: the verbal description of the plan in the film says that aircraft have already been deployed to forward bases, and that can mean that weapons have been moved around prior to attack. But I think it is far simpler and more likely to just assume that the map locations were intentionally obfuscated by people who wanted the attack to resemble an actual strike (with plausible countries and locations) but were not going to give actual detailed target or base information to the film crew if they didn’t need to.

Similarly, the orange lines coming out of the Azores (another detail that had confounded me until the restored film was available) are in a similar category as Wheelus: as far as I know, the Azores did not store nuclear weapons, but do have important US air bases in them.

The launch bases in Okinawa, Guam, and Greenland (Thule) do seem accurate. It is less clear with (mainland) Japan what is going on — are the bombers rendezvousing there and then continuing on, or are they meant to be actually based in Japan? Are they Strategic Reconnaissance or bombers? Japan did not (willingly) host nuclear weapons during the Cold War, although it is clear that the US did host them at Okinawa and some other US bases at times. But definitely not, say, in Tokyo, as indicated on the map.

For the sake of comparison, I’ve created a quick little map, below, that approximates the same map projection as the screenshot of the United States above, with actual SAC bases, including nuclear-armed ones, shown as dots, for around the period of the film’s creation and its near-term projected future. This is not a complete map of SAC deployments at the time: the projection necessarily leaves out many, such as the weapons deployed in French Morocco (Ben Guerir, Nouasseur, and Sidi Slimane), Greenland (at Thule), Guam, Okinawa, Spain (Morón, Torrejón, and Zaragoza), and the United Kingdom (at Brize Norton, Fairford, Greenham Common, Lakenheath, and Mildenhall).4 The point here is that one can readily see that these maps do not have much in common — the data does not line up, except in a few places that might just be random.

The targets of the attack similarly look somewhat vaguely accurate, but also somewhat bogus. Yes, Moscow was heavily targeted — no secret there! As are a few other major areas, like Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Tomsk, and what looks like areas in East Germany, Poland, and Soviet Ukraine. But there are a lot of more specific targets that are conspicuously missing. The scale and scope of US targets against the Soviet Union in the late 1950s is known to have been vast.

It is also difficult, I would note, to judge exactly what is targeted. The lines of the planes sometimes end in “target icons,” but more often than not they just end in some part of the map without anything indicated. The rhetorical stance of The Power of Decision is that most of the targets are defensive or counterforce, with not much discussion of the targeting of cities or even industry. Magnitogorsk, a major site of Soviet industry, is not indicated with any target labels (you can see its label on the map), but there are some bombing routes that terminate near it. I do not suggest, again, that these bombing routes or labels are accurate, but just suggest that the plan as displayed seems to be far more extensive than the target labels would let on, presuming those planes aren’t just going to those unlabeled spots on the map and simply turning around to go home again.

The labels for the target types are mostly pretty straightforward — and primarily counterforce. “SAM” (large black circles) are surface-to-air missiles. “F & T Control” (yellow circles) are sites that coordinate fighters and tactical responses, and possibly early warning radars stations. “Control” (maroon squares) appears to be “government control” (see below) which suggests command and control sites. “A & TN weapons sites” (black squares) are nuclear weapons storage sites. “LRAA HQ” (purple triangles) are Long Range Air Army headquarters, where LRAA is essentially the Soviet equivalent of SAC (at least in SAC documents from the time). “Liquid fuel” (large gray circles) storage sites and “transportation centers” (large red cirlces) speak for themselves. The only strange one, not explained at any point in the film, is “M Center” (green circles). I had wondered if it was “military centers” but based on their placement — along the Soviet/Chinese borders, except to the south — my guess is that the M standards for “missile.”

Later in the film, they do a “preliminary strike report” (above) with categories that mostly overlap with the map categories. You can see that a single category, “Missile Sites,” has perhaps absorbed both “SAM” and “M Center.” We also have a clarification that “Control” is probably “Government Control.” We also have two categories not indicated explicitly on the map: “air supp[ort] industries” and “war sust[aining] industries.” Again, all of the rhetoric of these targets is about counterforce targeting.

Lastly, let’s talk about the timing of this attack. The film explains that QUICK STRIKE is meant to elapse over 20 hours or so — QUICK by the standards of world war, to be sure, but slow by the standards of the missile age. Those concentric black lines going into the interior of the USSR, with H+0, H+1, etc. indicated on my annotated version, are estimates of a bomber’s flight time once it has hit the Soviet early warning net. So in principle a bomber could make it all the way to the heart of the USSR in 4 hours. In practice, many of them would not be trying to do that, and many would probably be shot down by enemy defenses. But, of course, they’ve planned for that. As our narrator explains:

Remember, this is a “bomb as you go” concept. Targets are bombed progressively, shallow targets first, with the strike continuing to deeper targets. This enhances the penetration capability of succeeding waves. This pattern is essential because we are playing the Soviet’s game. He picked the time of day, he knows we’re coming, we must use every trick to overwhelm him.

So if you bomb one target and then get shot down, that’s one less target for the bomber behind you to worry about.

There is no mention in the film of targeting Soviet cities, and no attempt made to estimate enemy casualties. The only casualty estimates are American ones: 60 million “personnel casualties,” 20 million wounded and 40 million dead. The 1958 US population was around 175 million, so that is a third of the country rendered dead or injured.

As a point of comparison, in the introduction to The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg described an official report he received in 1961 that he received which suggested that the deaths in the Soviet Union and China from an all-out thermonuclear attack by the United States would start at around 275 million at the moment of war, and rise to 325 million over the next six months. Including deaths in Eastern Europe, as well as collateral deaths from fallout from just American attacks in other nations, would raise the total deaths to around 600 million, “a hundred Holocausts,” as Ellsberg puts it.5

So what is the take away of all of this? The specifics of the QUICK STRIKE war plan shown in The Power of Decision are certainly made up for the purposes of the film. But the general feel of the war plan is probably correct: in the late 1950s, the United States could, within a few short hours, mobilize a bomber force so vast, and with so much firepower, that it could exterminate the populations of multiple nations. And, in fact, this system was so rigidly constructed that they really did not have any options to limit that destruction, even if someone (say, the President) had wanted to.

The rhetorical stance of the film is meant to one of responsibility and constraint: in the film, the Soviets have started World War III, but the United States is going to end it. The actors — and again, they are all actors — do not appear to ever relish their role in the war, but they also appear satisfied to grimly carry it out. There is no hand-wringing. There is no, “my god, what have we done?” moments, as they contemplate a slaughter that would out-do the Holocaust by an order of magnitude. “Sir, we have failed in our primary mission: deterrence,” a colonel briefing on the outcome of QUICK STRIKE begins, with a dark tone to his voice. “However,” he continues, brightening, “our second mission, of destroying the enemy, is apparently fulfilled.” It’s more than a little chilling.

I’ve been teaching with the diagrams of QUICK STRIKE for over a decade now. I think there’s real value in showing how the abstractions of deterrence theory were rendered into a horrific, tangible, effective killing machine at the height of the Cold War. I sometimes have students who (adorably, naively) ask: “but would they actually have used the bomb in this way?” And being able to point to this proud, in-house, top-secret, self-congratulatory film is one easy way to answer that question. It sure looks like they would have.

There is something, too, I think, in the fact that these 1950s plans were all bomber-based: that human beings, at every step of the way, would need to carry out this horror, this atrocity. It was not a “push button” affair; while the system’s wheels were well-oiled, as the film makes clear, it was hardly automatic. You can’t blame the logic of machines for this one.

When I call this kind of thing an atrocity, I am not saying that the people who designed it, or served in it, were themselves evil. I understand full well the logic of deterrence: build the system, and perhaps it will never have to be used. But if you have, indeed, failed at your mission of deterrence — and the film is explicitly based on the premise that deterrence has failed — then what have you got? What moral shelter can one take, as one sets into motion the largest act of civilian slaughter in human history?

But I’m not complaining. I am glad I could make the trip. Joshua Tree was quite beautiful, and (believe it or not) I had never been there before. (I am from Central California, and while I have spent some time visiting Southern California over the years, there is much I haven’t seen there.) The vistas reminded me of photos of the Nevada Test Site — scrubby desert broken up by rocky mountains. Quite beautiful in its own, austere way.

I saw a coyote, and several chubby rodents (which may be White-tailed Antelope Squirrels), and many birds (but no roadrunners). And there were flowering cacti in abundance. I found myself wondering how this landscape would look to people crossing it in ye olden days — would it be as beautiful if one didn’t have easy roads in and out of it, or would it simply look intimidating?

The family event was lovely (I will not be going into detail on my blog, thank you very much!), and despite the wear-and-tear imposed by this kind of travel I am glad I could make it work out. I have not driven a car since coming to France, and I believe I more than made up for it on this trip, spending some 7 or 8 hours behind the wheel total on Los Angeles freeways.

I have to admit that I felt that the vision of Los Angeles I saw on this trip did not compare very favorably to Paris — roads, roads, and more roads, moderately (for LA) busy, with most people driving monstrously large vehicles, and an endless stream of garish LED billboards advertising primarily the services of accident lawyers and online gambling. These things do not exist in Paris (billboards, for example, seem to be very heavily regulated there, in both size and content). I found myself thinking about how a born-and-bred Parisian would think they’d landed in some kind of cyberpunk wasteland dystopia. But I am aware that Los Angeles is more than just this, and that staying in a motel near LAX for two nights did not really allow the city to put its best foot forward.

And while this was not a work trip, I did squeeze in one bit of “work” while I was out here — I gave a talk at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, where my longtime friend and fellow nuclear historian Edward Geist works. I had never been to visit RAND before, and so the experience alone was an valuable one just for the taste of it. I was highly amused, for example, to see that the city of Santa Monica had erected a statue of a mushroom cloud, made out of chains, across the street from RAND’s campus (above).

RAND was quite interesting. The people I met were about what I expected: earnest and smart, perhaps a slight overrepresentation of people on the spectrum, with good questions about the material. And they were also quite interested in talking about NUKEMAP, which is always fun for me, particularly because so much of the work I do on that is relatively “invisible” to the everyday user (“behind the scenes” stuff). I was also able to take a look at at their library, which included a lot of interesting early works by RAND luminaries.

The talk I gave on the Castle Bravo accident, essentially similar to the one that I mentioned some weeks ago. I’ve been writing it up as a formal academic paper, and have found some new documents that further my argument a bit more. The most amusing of which is that I believe I have traced the erroneous, pre-Bravo theory of “stratospheric trapping” — the idea that megaton-range detonations would not have any significant local fallout because their mushroom clouds would rise to such a high altitude, which was one of the two erroneous approaches to thinking about fallout that led to Bravo accident — to a possible initial author. And, dear reader, you will be as shcoked as I was to find it may have originated as early as 1950 from none other than your friend and mine, Edward Teller.

I was asked: how did I find such a thing? The answer is just that I have many, many, many reports and documents on my computer, and occasionally I do things like search all of them for the word “stratosphere” and go over the results (in this case, I have about 1,600 PDFs with that word in them, but by glancing at the file names I can rule out a lot of them). That might sound laborious but it’s a lot easier than wading through archival boxes, let me tell you. And I have enough success with this method that it feels a bit like a game, like I’m mining for treasure. And the worst-case scenario is that I find something unrelated-but-also-interesting!

I love the serendipity of this kind of research. Once one has found something to focus on, sure, it is good to dig into it, but wading through lots of different things can turn up so many unexpected results. Which is what happened with this week’s Doomsday Machines (posted on Saturday, because my jet-lagged brain just didn’t have the bandwidth on Friday to wrap it up), which is on the role of organized religion in US Civil Defense planning:

That this is coming out on Eastern weekend is, I assure you, a total coincidence (I am pretty unaware of religious holidays, and would not have even known it was Easter if someone hadn’t mentioned it). I stumbled across the two pamphlets discussed, “The Clergy in Civil Defense” and “The Church and Civil Defense,” while looking for information about something else (the “something else” will be a future post). Then I started digging into the personages involved, particularly this Fred W. Kern, and was quite delighted to find that he had made Civil Defense into a holy ideological struggle (what fun) and also that he was FCDA Administrator Val Peterson’s brother-in-law (which was not obvious). The latter I was tipped to by the fact that in Val Peterson’s post-gubernatorial papers, Kern’s correspondence (which I haven’t seen) is included in the “Peterson family” collection, and with some digging I was able to find that Kern had been married to his sister. Not a major research accomplishment, but satisfying nonetheless.

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The first, from October 1951, was titled “The Clergy in Civil Defense” (AG-25-1) and prepared under the supervision of a Religious Advisory Committee of the FCDA.1 Its use of the term “clergy” is, it clarifies, meant to be pan-religious — “the clergy of all faiths” — although the committee was composed of four Christians (of different sects) and one rabbi.

The role of the clergy (thus defined) is divided into two phases: “pre-attack” and “post-attack.” Pre-attack is perhaps the most interesting: they are charged with the task of reinforcing a particular ideological stance:

(a) Maintenance of firm resolution and composure of the people through preaching and worship.

(b) Through pastoral care of families and individuals, creation of a sense of responsibility and spiritual security among the people to meet the possible exigencies of attack on a scale never experienced before in the United States.

(c) Maintenance of courage and spiritual well-being of children through regular programs of religious education (especially in respect to parent groups and teachers).

(d) Encouragement of the enlistment of volunteers for the civil defense services.

(e) Acting as chaplains to the various civil defense services such as warden, rescue, and fire fighting, during training and in actual operation.

(f) Planning, organizing, and preparing services of the clergy and other religious activities in time of attack or other emergency.

(g) Planning and arranging the part of the clergy and members of religious organizations in mutual aid and mobile support programs.

(h) Planning for religious ministry in evacuation reception areas.

(i) Planning with chaplains of adjacent military installations for cooperation and mutual assistance in case of attack.

The first four in this list strike me as quite different from the rest. It is one thing to conclude that pre-attack (or pre-disaster) preparation means thinking about the organizational responses to the attack (or disaster). But the first three are about creating some kind of spiritual or psychological sentiment in their congregations, which seems to go well outside the normal role for the federal government to recommend. An encroachment of “turf,” one might say. And the fourth, actively encouraging participation in the Civil Defense program, assumes that said program is in fact in alignment with the beliefs of these different organizations — something, perhaps, that they could take for granted in 1951, but, as we will see, becomes a trickier assumption as the decade continued.

In the post-attack phase, the role of the clergy shifts to being of “great help in sustaining and restoring the morale of the community.” This is pretty much what you would expect: they are to administer religious rites for “for the seriously injured, dying, and dead,” to conduct burial services (“including possible mass burials”), comfort the survivors, lead ministry and worship “where appropriate,” attend to the religious needs of civil defense workers, and participate in “mutual aid” activities as is possible and appropriate. All of which strikes me as quite practical by comparison to the pre-attack directives.

In 1954, when “The Clergy in Civil Defense” was issued, Civil Defense programs were not yet especially controversial. There are a variety of reasons one could point to for this — the thermonuclear age had not yet arrived, the threat of atomic war against the continental United States still felt somewhat remote to most Americans, and Americans could by and large simply ignore Civil Defense if they thought it was not for them. The amount being expended on it was never large, and it largely did not intrude into American lives one way or the other with the exception of some mild indoctrination for children like “Duck and Cover” drills.

Starting in 1954, however, this situation changed significantly. The Castle Bravo nuclear test accident made it quite evident that the thermonuclear age was at hand and it meant that the destructive capacity for nuclear war had increased dramatically. Both the US and the Soviets began speaking publicly, in much more dramatic terms than before, about what nuclear war would mean. And the FCDA and local Civil Defense authorities began a series of national drills, known as “Operation Alert,” in which they mandated that everyday citizens participate in mock Civil Defense exercises.

The latter point is probably the most important, from the perspective of public opinion about Civil Defense. When your city shuts down for a few hours so that you can pretend you have been obliterated, it forces one to take stock of the situation. Political scientists would say that it increases the salience of the risk: it goes from something abstract to something tangible.

And while most people went along with the exercises, one finds the emergence of a small but significant group of people who began objecting to them on both practical and moral grounds. When the 1955 “Operation Alert” exercises came around, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers of America refused to participate, instead handing out pamphlets:

We will not obey this order to pretend, to evacuate, to hide. In view of the certain knowledge the administration of this country has that there is no defense in atomic warfare, we know this drill to be a military act in a cold war to instill fear, to prepare the collective mind for war. We refuse to cooperate.

Over two dozen people were arrested for their non-participation in the drill. While the anti-Civil Defense arguments would broaden over the years — by 1960, over a thousand people would be arrested in NYC for protesting the drill — the fact that this initial argument against Civil Defense was rooted in a religious pacifism, and a specifically Catholic organization, is what strikes me as being interesting in this context. The 1951 pamphlet and its authors assumed, perhaps correctly for its moment, that Civil Defense was religiously uncontroversial. Three years later, however, serious religious objections to Civil Defense had emerged, and consensus could not be taken for granted.

Which is interesting context to consider for the revised version of pamphlet AG-25-1 that was released in October 1956, now re-titled as “The Church and Civil Defense” (AG-25-1 Revised).2 Gone, apparently, is the council of religious advisors — in fact, no author is listed whatsoever. Instead, it appears that the FCDA Administrator since 1953, former Nebraska Governor Val Peterson, created a Religious Affairs Office which consolidated the functions of the previous council and made them a more integrated part of the FCDA. Heading this office, since 1954, was one Dr. Fred W. Kern, a Lutheran reverend — and Peterson’s brother-in-law — who ran the office for the next seven and a half years.3

What was Kern’s agenda? Kern gave a talk at a Civil Defense conference in 1956 describing in vivid his approach to the job, and the world:4

When I came with civil defense, no one knew exactly what I should do and I didn't either. I think there was in the minds of some people the idea that the church is such a big institution and has so many millions of people that somehow we ought to get them behind us — we ought to get the church to support civil defense . Now, how are we going to do that? We know very well that everyone in any public office knows that you are not going to go to the church and tell them the government wants them to do so and so, the government says that this is what you ought to do If you ever tried that approach, you know from very clear experience that the opposite may have happened, because the church in this country is free, and that is one of our cherished freedoms. We don't have the government interfere in any way with what we do in our religious life, so long as it isn't contrary to the interests of our government or our citizenship.

I had to do some studying on this business of civil defense because I knew very little about it. I started reading books on civil defense and on communism. Naturally when we think about the question, “Why do we have civil defense," we conclude, "Well, we have to protect ourselves, we have to be ready to live, to preserve our life, we have to be ready to do something for the preservation of our country, our properties. "And, of course, you have to ask yourself, Against whom? "Well,” you say, "only one source, and that is communism.

This is quite an interesting jump — that the role of the church in civil defense is rooted in a deep anti-Communist sentiment. This is clearly what animated Kern, beyond the more prosaic functions that religious organizations could serve after a major disaster. Kern’s talk frames the entire issue in theological–ideological terms:

It has been my contention that we have civil defense because of an ideological friction and conflict in the world. […] The cause of all the friction and conflict and the struggles between East and West and democracy and communism rest with the idea or the concept that we have concerning the true nature of a human being. What is man? It’s a moral issue, because it is a moral judgment applied to the nature of human life and human beings. And there’s only one institution in the whole world and certainly in our country that is dedicated to this problem of the moral judgment of life, to the nature of man, to his origin, the value of his life and his destiny. And that is the church. […]

In the Soviet Union there is no God. It is strange how philosophy can even presume to be logical and rational without the acknowledgment of a Creator. The Russians believe there is nothing spiritual in the world, there is no God, no spirit; there is nothing spiritual about a man — he is material.

And so on, and so on. “Civil defense,” he concluded, “should include spiritual civil defense.“ Because even after a nuclear war, Communism would still exist, even if “every living Communist” was killed. Because Communism was an idea, and as such, “you can’t kill it with a bullet. The only way to meet it is on its own grounds, and that is basically an ideological basis, ideological counteroffensive.”

It seems likely to me that Kern’s expansive mandate was a reaction to exactly the kind of skepticism of Civil Defense that had been developing in the intervening years. Whereas “The Clergy in Civil Defense” could take for granted that Civil Defense was essentially seen as a positive activity, Kern is trying to sell it as an essentially holy war.

The pamphlet, “The Church in Civil Defense,” is not nearly as fiery as Kern’s own speeches, but one sees his beliefs in it:

The very existence of Western civilization is endangered. Our present state of culture, developed over centuries, is threatened with extinction. Not only democratic government, the highest form of political order yet evolved, which offers the greatest degree of individual and group freedom while guarding the rights of all, but religion itself, is challenged by a godless, totalitarian tyranny. The church cannot do its work effectively in a state which stifles it If civilization is to continue to make progress and if democratic government is to exist, then the church must be free to continue its mission.

Communism is a substitute religion. At its deepest level the conflict between Soviet communism and the free world is a religious conflict. We are not dealing with an inconsequential perversion of philosophy and religion. Communism tries to interest mankind in religious terms in spite of its avowed godlessness. It has its substitute god and utilizes all the facets of religious motivation The Party tries to usurp the place of the church and to give the writings of Marx and Lenin the status of sacred scriptures. The kingdom of God is promised in the classless and stateless, that is, governmentless society . […] The old Marxian charge that religion is an opiate used to oppress people can be dispelled only by an alert and positive church, a church motivated by its tenets of love of God and love of man, and therefore, a church actively interested in any program of human welfare. Civil defense is a program of human welfare devoted to saving and sustaining human life.

Other than the introductory notes, the actual recommendations are not all that different from the 1951 pamphlet. The only notable difference that jumped out to me was that each clergyman involved with Civil Defense was entitled to a helmet and special armband that would so identify them in time of disaster:

There is also a fascinating organizational chart that divides the work into three functions: the spiritual, self-protection, and mutual aid. I have to admit that having “mass burial” and “panic prevention” being put next to one another raised an eyebrow.

There are a smattering of records of Kern’s work beyond this pamphlet. He was apparently still in the role when the FCDA was consolidated into the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization in 1958, and stayed in the role until the early 1960s. He gave talks to many religious groups and organizations, and was the one who led the opening “invocation” at official FCDA meetings. His office facilitated the donation of thousands of religious books for post-apocalyptic use, as shown in the photo below.

The official accounts of Kern’s talks to religious groups tend to be pretty positive. A PhD thesis from Matthew Justin Hall at the University of Kentucky on Southern Baptists in the Cold War suggests that the main concerns that at least that group had with Civil Defense were rooted in whether the post-nuclear state would impose too many requirements on religious organizations, weakening separation of Church and State. Kern, in both his pamphlets and talks, urged that this was not the case, that the plans were only to strengthen existing religious activities.5

Aside from the fact that “clergy” and “church” in this time was limited exclusively to Christian and Jewish faiths (with even latter’s inclusion feeling a bit tokenish), I would also just note that like all Civil Defense at this point in time, it is extremely focused on white audiences. Which is not all that interesting in the context of Eisenhower-era Civil Defense, except inasmuch as neglecting African-Americans when targeting religious communities is, well, excluding a potential audience that would possibly have been quite engaged. There is undoubtedly more that could be said on this point.

Ultimately, both of these pamphlets are interesting artifacts from Cold War America, and the shifting ways in which the efforts at Civil Defense were framed in both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. The push towards an increasingly ideological interpretation of the question of what the role of religious institutions ought to be in preparing for, and recovering from, a nuclear attack, is likely both a reflection of the changing strategic context, as well as possibly a reaction to the growing skepticism towards Civil Defense within the United States. This axis of national security, ideology, and religion is of course quite a potent one in the United States, particularly during certain administrations — Eisenhower, Reagan, Trump — that have sought to explicitly imbue religious sentiment into their ideological pronouncements.

A strange thing: France is on Central European Time (GMT+1), not Greenwich Mean Time (GMT+0), despite being much closer to the latitude of the United Kingdom than, say, Germany. The consequence of this is that “solar noon” is considerably diverged from “local noon” here: we’re an hour or more later than the Sun. So instead of the Sun being overhead at noon, it is overhead at 1pm (13h) or even 2pm (14h).

Why is this? I found a blog post on this from a few years back; I have not tried to independent verify it. It says, in brief: Paris was on Greenwich Mean Time from 1911 until 1940, when the Germans put it on Central European Time — Berlin time — during their occupation of the country. This was not uncommon during the war, as a simplifying measure (the Potsdam Conference was on Moscow time, as it was in Soviet-occupied East Germany). Actually, it was even a little weirder than this: in the early part of the occupation, only the northern part of France was under direct control of Germany (“Occupied France”) and the southern part was autonomous under a pro-German puppet state (“Vichy France”). Only the northern part switched to CET, so the country had two time zones split by their political status. When the Germans officially occupied Vichy France in 1944, then it also switched to CET.

When the war ended, France maintained CET (year-round; it did not have summer time until the 1970s). Apparently there were some “patriots” who referred to switch back even during the war.

All of this is very odd to me. Your sworn enemy occupies your country, changes the time zone for their convenience to one that does not align well with the Sun, and after they have been evicted, you keep the “off” time? This is famously-independent, famously-standardized France we are talking about, too.

It isn’t just France that’s on the “wrong” time zone, it’s also Spain, which is tremendously “off” from solar time as it is also on CET. They also adopted CET during World War II, by choice, and have kept it ever since.

Apparently the total coordination of time zones and adoption of DST was only done in the 1980s and 1990s. I would not be surprised to learn that this was a question of European unity — the idea that many things would be facilitated if one knew that the continent (minus Portugal!) was on the same time zone. But I haven’t dug into that at all; it is just a hunch.

Now, many people here (including in my household) like the fact that Paris is on CET, because you get a much longer day, at the expense of a darker morning. I’m not necessarily objecting to that.

But I still find it strange that the French maintained German time after the war. I suppose there’s a deeper idea buried in there: some times when things change, they can never quite go back to what they were.

This week, among other things, I’ve been trying to fix up some things with MISSILEMAP. The main motivation is financial — every once in awhile it gets enough traffic that it costs me money to maintain it (thankfully paid by a grant), because it is still on Mapbox, which is very expensive, and I would like to switch it over to the Protomaps system I developed for NUKEMAP. And the excitement about missiles earlier this month drove it into territory that is going to cost my grant a little bit — which is grant money I’d rather spend elsewhere, to be honest.

But that’s not as easy as just flipping a switch, because MISSILEMAP was coded up quite some time ago. And while I am in there, “under the hood,” I see lots of other things to improve. One of them is to use a more robust Circular Error Probable function that will allow advanced users to do things like have non-circular CEPs (ignore the apparent linguistic contradiction). And I’ve been looking at implementing a time-of-flight estimator as well (which, to do well, is much harder than you might imagine). I’m hoping to have a little update with these things (and a few rough edges polished off) in the next week, with any luck.

For Doomsday Machines, I wrote up a short piece on “un-inventing the bomb”:

It’s a topic I mentioned on here a few weeks back, as it came up during my teaching, and as I was mulling it over I realized I could tie it in with A Canticle for Leibowitz, so I just wrote it up. And I do love the unreality of photos of aerogel (above). I had another blog post almost ready to go, an interview, but I am delaying it for another week or more, due to some evolving circumstances… so what I put up for next week might be a surprise to all of us. And there is a chance I won’t get anything up at all, as I will be briefly traveling to the United States for a family event, but I’m trying to get something in the hopper before I head out. We’ll see…

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For post-nuclear apocalypses, the trope frequently takes the form of the survivors having only the dimmest or confused memories of what a nuclear weapon actually is. In Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), this manifests as a hidden, subterranean religion carried on by mutant human survivors who worship a massive Doomsday bomb emblazoned with the symbols for Alpha and Omega. In Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), the memory persists linguistically as the “Bad Time.”

One of the works that engages with this question of forgetting in a sustained way is Walker M. Miller, Jr.’s, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). The novel is a compilation of three short stories (written independently but then “fixed up” into a singular story) that looks at three distinct far-future periods after a nuclear war. As with the Roman Empire, some institutions have survived the fall: notably, the Catholic Church, that enduring institution.2 In the novel, the Church once again becomes a repository for old knowledge, which, over the course of many centuries, leads to the reinvention of a technological civilization — and to yet another nuclear war.

This cyclical (and perhaps cynical) message is at some intersection of a statement about human nature and technological inevitabilities: once invented, the bomb cannot be un-invented, and once they have the bomb, humans will inevitably use it again, it is just a matter of time. It would be an interesting variant to imagine the same story but without the Church’s role; is the problem that the knowledge was preserved, or would that rediscovery have been inevitable eventually anyway?

A relevant and provocative argument from the sociology of nuclear technology can be found in Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi’s “Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1995.3 The argument that MacKenzie and Spinardi make is about the nature of knowledge and forgetting, and its possible relevance to nuclear weapons.

The core of the argument revolves around an idea that was by then quite common in the sociology of science and technology known a tacit knowledge. They explain the distinction early on in the article:

Explicit knowledge is information or instructions that can be formulated in words or symbols and, therefore, can be stored, copied, and transferred by impersonal means, such as in written documents or computer files. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge that has not been (and perhaps cannot be) formulated explicitly and, therefore, cannot effectively be stored or transferred entirely by impersonal means. Motor skills supply a set of paradigmatic examples of tacit knowledge in everyday life. Most of us, for example, know perfectly well how to ride a bicycle yet would find it impossible to put into words how we do so. There are (to our knowledge) no textbooks of bicycle riding, and when children are taught to ride, they are not given long lists of written or verbal instructions. Instead, someone demonstrates what to do and encourages them in the inevitably slow and error-ridden process of learning for themselves.

Anything you can communicate by writing down is explicit: the Pythagorean theorem and instructions on how to use it, for example. Or a nuclear weapons blueprint. But not all knowledge is of this form. “Tacit” means wordless — it is knowledge that you feel in your hands, in your body, in your experience. Riding a bicycle, as above, is the paradigmatic example.

One could write down how to ride a bicycle, but reading that description would not make one capable of doing it. Indeed, the best text about how to ride a bicycle is essentially one that gives instruction as to how to teach oneself how to ride a bicycle:

1. Acquire a bicycle.

2. Understand that the goal will be to continually propel it forward while balancing on top of it and turning the pedals with your feet, in a forward “running” motion. Your hands will need to turn the front wheel to change direction. Observing someone else doing this first would help. You will be continually shifting your balance to maintain stability.

3. Attempt to do this over and over again until your brain figures out how to coordinate your movements and balance in a way that gives you control over the bicycle. You will fail frequently in the beginning. Wear a helmet.

This isn’t really a recipe that you can just follow, it is a program for education, and the actual acquisition of the understanding will come when some nebulous connections “click” in the brain. And like so many things involving tacit knowledge, you can’t really forget it either: if you go 10 years without riding a bicycle, you can still probably do it, you will not need to re-learn anything.

I think the above description gets at both the benefits and difficulties of this term. It does seem to describe certain kinds of knowledge well, although the barriers between it an explicit knowledge are not as iron-clad as they may at first seem. Just because something is tacit does not mean it cannot be learned or taught, it just means that the written word is insufficient for doing it by itself. A lot of what we call experience and know-how is tacit knowledge: the kinds of embodied understandings that one gets over time with close familiarity with any subject that goes well beyond what one can find in a textbook. And this is why, incidentally, “experience” matters so much more than formal knowledge in most contexts: because we recognize there is a difference between “mere book-learning” and “hands-on work.”

Ask anyone who has gotten a post-graduate higher degree and they will tell you that most of the “work” of that experience is essentially an apprenticeship where one “learns by doing.” This doesn’t negate the value of book learning — you need that, too, for a lot of things — but it emphasizes that true mastery isn’t just the book learning, it’s the tacit knowledge, too.

So what is the relevance to nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons are complex technical artifacts that require even more complex technical artifacts to produce the components that make them work. As a whole, “nuclear weapons” aren’t even just the weapons themselves, but the entire large technical system that is required for them to exist and be sustained. Obviously many of the technical details of these systems can be, and are, written down. But MacKenzie and Spinardi argue that much of their production must also be in the form of tacit knowledge, locked up in the heads and hands of the people who build and maintain them.

The article, written in that immediate post-Cold War glow, asks the question: what if nuclear weapons are never tested again? What if, after decades of not making them, the tacit knowledge is lost? It is not fanciful, as an idea. Indeed, MacKenzie and Spinardi base their argument itself on interviews with weapons laboratory scientists at the time who voiced exactly this kind of concern, fearing that the future generations of scientists would become increasingly distant from the hard-earned experience needed to even maintain nuclear weapons capabilities, much less imagine innovate in them.

Are there any examples of this happening? The most concrete example of this “forgetting” actually happening is with a mysterious substance known as Fogbank. Fogbank was a classified component used inside certain US thermonuclear weapons. As one weapons worker put it: “The material is classified. Its composition is classified. Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified.” It was later indicated that it is an “interstage material,” used in the transferring of energy from the fission primary to the thermonuclear secondary inside a multi-stage nuclear weapon. It is also clear that it is fairly exotic: it is not something used in many other contexts, or produced regularly, and has apparently rather unusual properties.

Whatever it is, the point of bringing up Fogbank is because the US government “forgot” how to produce it. As a Los Alamos publication put it:4

Produced by skilled hands during the 1980s, Fogbank is an essential material in the W76 warhead. During the mid-1990s, Fogbank production ceased and the manufacturing facility was dismantled. As time passed, the precise techniques used to manufacture Fogbank were forgotten.

When it came time to refurbish the W76, Fogbank had to be remanufactured or replaced. In 2000, [the National Nuclear Security Agency] decided to reestablish the manufacture of Fogbank. Officials chose to manufacture Fogbank instead of replacing it with an alternate material because Fogbank had been successfully manufactured and historical records of the production process were available. Moreover, Los Alamos computer simulations at that time were not sophisticated enough to determine conclusively that an alternate material would function as effectively as Fogbank.

Although Fogbank is a difficult material to manufacture, scientists soon discovered that restoring the manufacturing capability would prove an even greater challenge. Scientists faced two major challenges:

• most personnel involved with the original production process were no longer available, and

• a new facility had to be constructed, one that met modern health and safety requirements.

Despite efforts to ensure the new facility was equivalent to the original one, the resultant equipment and processing methods failed to produce equivalent Fogbank. The final product simply did not meet quality requirements.

The full article explains (in ever-elliptical descriptions) that the scientists went back into the archives to look at the historical data on Fogbank’s production, discovering that there were indications of similar problems in the past. They found that maintaining a specific level of “impurity” was partially responsible for the quality of the final product, but that the historical records gave no indication about how that was accomplished.

They ultimately discovered that it was actually their newer processes that were causing the issue: they were doing too good a job of removing impurities that would otherwise have been in the original material. The later scientists ultimately discovered that the earlier scientists who knew how to make Fogbank were not themselves totally aware of what it was that was contributing to its success: “The historical Fogbank production process was unknowingly based on this essential chemical being present in the feed material.” Which is an interesting wrinkle on the question of forgetting: the original “knowers” likely have incomplete knowledge themselves!

So can one un-invent the bomb? MacKenzie and Spinardi say, perhaps: one could deliberately un-invent the bomb, by eliminating them and destroying the records of how to make them, but one could also accidentally un-invent the bomb, by simply not making more of them and maintaining that store of tacit knowledge to adequate levels.

The authors try not to overstate the case, though. They acknowledge that there more-or-less simpler ways to make nuclear weapons than the most advanced varieties that make up the bulk of the warheads currently in the world, that there is considerable overlap in some aspects of weapons knowledge with other fields of knowledge, and would certainly not argue that even an “un-invented” technology could not be re-invented. We may not know exactly what the ancient recipe for Greek Fire was, but that has not stopped people from developing other kinds of incendiary weapons.

Still, the argument an interesting and provocative one, even as it raises some obvious objections. There are ways to reduce dependence on tacit knowledge, for instance: that is exactly what many instruments and machines are invented to do, it is the nature of automation.

As a very simple example, a 3D printer is a machine that reduces the tacit knowledge required to manufacture certain kinds of small components. Instead of learning how to sculpt a small figure out of plastic, I can instead take a data file (explicit knowledge) and command the printer to make me the figure. Even this will have some tacit component — I gather than using 3D printers well requires some hard-earned experience — but now we’ve shifted the tacit component from one domain (sculpting plastic) to another (maintaining the machine), and probably reduced it (becoming a competent sculptor takes years of specialized experience; learning to keep a printer functioning probably does not).

Are we locked into these technologies forever? Even after, as A Canticle for Leibowitz suggests, the technologies may have destroyed the civilization that produces them? It is a grim thought. One hopes not. The idea is what my colleague Benoît Pelopidas calls nuclear eternity, and is implicitly built into many discussions about nuclear weapons, even by those who argue against them, without being interrogated.5

One can imagine ways out of the bind. Despite widespread believe that technology has its own driving momentum, technologies do not exist for their own sake. Their creation and maintenance requires an immense about of work and effort. If you have doubt about that, you don’t have to trust the historians or sociologists, just look at the budget requests for “modernization” of American nuclear weapons: if the US does pledge billions, perhaps trillions, for ongoing maintenance and improvements, then its arsenal will wither away to nothingness. While presented as a problem to be (expensively) solved, it is actually a rather encouraging idea, restoring a much-needed sense of human agency to these conversations. As abstract as they seem, nuclear weapons are still just machines.

A satirical, probably vibe-coded app was circulating, and my main issue with it is that the technical aspects are so dramatically wrong that it actually ends up supporting the opposite conclusion than its author desires. That is, it makes digging nuclear canals look too easy.

As I have mentioned on here before (and written up at Restricted Data in more detail), I am in the process of totally overhauling the NUKEMAP code, including the effects code, and so do enjoy the opportunities to look into such things again with fresh eyes. The current NUKEMAP “crater” function is pretty limited, and so I took this nuclear-canal discourse to update my codes (not yet on the NUKEMAP website) for cratering.

I posted a thread about it on Bluesky, which I will just link to above rather than reproduce here. The long and short of it is that nukes are very good at destroying cities but actually a lot less impressive than you might think at digging holes. Even the full-sized, 100 megaton Tsar Bomba, detonated at the optimal depth for digging a hole, can “only” dig a hole the width of Manhattan island. Which, for a weapon that can set the entire New York City metro area on fire, is pretty unimpressive.

The long and short of it is that in order to dig a canal near the Strait of Hormuz, even ignoring the fact that the area is inhabited and has a mountain range you’d need to go through, you’d need hundreds of nuclear detonations. Which is just to say, again, that separate from the political difficulties and issues with nuclear fallout, it is just not a practical idea — it is just not on the table that the US would be able to, on any short-term timescale, set up such a thing.

But I didn’t mind digging up the equations and graphs for it. I find that kind of thing very enjoyable. It combines a few different faculties that I like: I feel like I’m learning and understanding more, I enjoy transferring things from the difficult-to-use world of printed graphs and equations into the much-easier-to-use world of my new code library (which is set up to just be dramatically easy to use once you get everything into it correctly), and I like feeling like the NUKEMAP upgrade project is making progress (which it is).

I’ve been doing this with other aspects of the effects code, bit by bit, over the last few weeks. The blast overpressure code now goes down to much lower levels of pressure (0.25 psi minimum, instead of 1 psi) which, aside from just giving a bit more sense of the areas affected, also adds some more fine-grained fidelity for how casualties are be calculated. The model for initial (acute) nuclear radiation allows for much more tweaking by weapon type, as different weapons have slightly different gamma versus neutron outputs, and those can be summed up independently. The cloud size model will have many more bells and whistles to it, and be somewhat more accurate to the original data.

In the older NUKEMAP code, I tended to prefer finding polynomials for the various effects functions so that I could extend them a bit beyond the ranges of the original graphs, for example, and in the new version I tend to use the graph data verbatim for the range of yields they cover, and to only use small exponential functions, based on the data at the extreme ends of the data curves, for going beyond the “known” data. It’s a strategy that turns up to be easier to implement, as well, because finding a complex equation that fits the entire curve is much harder than just getting a simple equation for the ends of it.

I don’t know if anyone else reading this does this kind of thing, but if you do, out of all of the software options out there for tracing graph data, PlotDigitizer has become my favorite. It’s very easy to set the scales, and the “zoomed in” view that it allows makes it very easy to fine-tune the plot. It shows you the data as you do it, and you can just copy and paste it from there. There is a free and paid version; I have just used the free version so far, and it works great, but I can see some possible useful features in the paid version… who knows. I used to do my pixel digitization by just manually measuring and recording with Photoshop and Excel and, well, that’s obviously the least easy way to do it.

Using the PlotDigitizer, I can digitize a graph within a few minutes in a way that I find very reliable (I do not trust automatic digitizers, and please do not recommend just feeding them into an AI bot…), plug the data into Excel, come up with the extrapolation equations using Excel’s trend line settings (its “power” equation type usually works best for nuke effects; if I really need to do complicated curve fitting I use FindCurves.com, which will just throw every equation form in the book at data looking for a good fit), and then I have some pretty straightforward means of moving the data into my code framework. I do a quite a bit of testing with any data I import, because it is easy for errors or weirdness to creep in, and just so I make sure that I know that it is doing what it is supposed to do. It is very satisfying.

In case you missed it — which you very well may have, given that I posted it on Saturday rather than Thursday or Friday (I ran out of time) — for Doomsday Machines this week I wrote about a healthy sampling of the photographs that exist of the Hiroshima mushroom and smoke clouds:

I was inspired to do this by a photo of the Nagasaki mushroom cloud that I’ve seen circulating periodically, and some of the confusion that is caused by the difficulty of making sense of its scale. I had thought about doing a single post about both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but as I began writing about Hiroshima I realized that it was, by itself, quite enough of a subject, so I will defer the treatment of Nagasaki for a future time! I had never quite tried to make a survey of what photographs exist of the Hiroshima clouds from below — nor tried to really make complete sense of the cloud structures visible in them (particularly trying to differentiate if they were the mushroom cloud, the mushroom stem, or the pyrocumulus smoke cloud caused by the firestorm itself, so that was a useful exercise.

For Doomsday Machines next week, I will post an interview that I did last week with my friend Benjamin Wilson, a historian of science whose new book, Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended Up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex (Harvard University Press, 2025), has been causing waves and controversy in the arms control community. We had a really great conversation about the history of arms control and its trickier, more hidden aspects. Don’t miss it!

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The most familiar of these photos was taken by S/Sgt. George Robert (“Bob”) Caron, the tail gunner on the Enola Gay, the B-29 which dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb over Hiroshima:

This photograph is surely cropped in the darkroom from a larger negative; it has the gauzy appearance of too little resolution being blown up to too large a size. It is, from a technical perspective, not that great a photograph — the lighting is poor, the focus is poor. This is not an artistic critique, as it was essentially an amateur snapshot taken by a soldier in a combat zone. It does highlight the separation between the “head” of the mushroom cloud and the “stem” of it, a consequence of the weapon’s height of burst.

There is another photograph by Caron that gives us a sense of how much the previous one was cropped. This one is far less commonly used, but I prefer it greatly:

I feel that whatever the cropped version gains in terms of getting a better view of the cloud, it loses its sense of scale and immediacy. The wider shot allows one to better imagine what it would look like to be seeing this in real life, from the air, and gives a better sense of scale — especially since most of us today are very familiar with the view from outside of an airplane.

Is the first photograph simply the cropped version of the second? I think not. If you superimpose them, as I have done below, you can see that there are some key differences:

Even barring my own alignment issues, the cropped photograph (581589 A.C.) seems to have been taken a bit earlier than the second one, as the “head” and “stem” separation is a bit different, the “head” is reaching a bit more upward in the second photograph, and, importantly, the entire cloud is rotated slightly along the axis, presumably because of the movement of the plane. It is difficult to tell but one suspect that the cropped photograph was used (and cropped) because it had slightly more definition in the final cloud than the second one.

There is another photo of Hiroshima after the bombing that is often used to illustrate its cloud:

It is an impressive sight. Taken at a much greater distance, the cloud here is much higher than the previous ones, and casting quite a shadow. But this does not actually show the mushroom cloud from the atomic bomb at all; this was taken several hours later, well after the initial mushroom cloud had stabilized and been blown away in the wind. Rather, this is a pyrocumulus smoke cloud caused by the firestorm in the city. For the sake of simplicity I will call this the “smoke cloud,” to differentiate it from the “mushroom cloud” created by the immediate detonation of the atomic bomb.

The photo above was taken by a reconnaissance plane several hours after the attack. From the perspective of the Army Air Forces, these were not successful attempts, because the smoke from the fires obscured their attempts to photograph the ground for at least another day. Here is another photograph, from much closer, of a later reconnaissance attempt, where the cloud is not really meant to be the subject, but is obscuring the subject — the city:

It would not be until August 8, 1945, that they would succeed in getting a completely “clean” (smoke-free) photograph of Hiroshima.

There is one more photograph that I have seen listed as a view from above, supposedly from the collection of a member of the 9th Photographic Technical Squadron, and only “rediscovered” fairly recently:

The above photograph also shows a pyrocumulus smoke cloud. Is it of the Hiroshima smoke cloud, or some other attack? I can’t really tell visually; the landscape looks like a lot of Japan does from the air at that time, and I’m not versed enough in aerial reconnaissance to really pass judgment. It seems plausible, anyway, but given as the owners of the photograph were listing it as the centerpiece of an eBay auction with a ridiculous price tag, I am wary of taking self-interested claims at face value without some confirmation. It does resemble the other smoke cloud photograph geometry, but perhaps many firestorm clouds look somewhat similar. (I have no idea what price was ultimately achieved on the auction, if any.)

Lastly, there is also 16 mm film footage of the Hiroshima cloud, shot from the instrument aircraft, The Great Artiste, by the physicist Harold Agnew. A copy has been digitized by the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, which houses the original:

The technical quality is, again, understandably poor, and the movement of the plane dominates it. The two sequences show different times of the clouds evolution. Both look to be somewhat after Caron’s photographs, as the cloud head in the first one is quite broader and looks more stabilized. In the second one, it appears that the cloud head is starting to break apart in the winds. The separation between the head and the stem is quite visible in the first one, as is the fact that there is some significant horizontal displacement between the two; this is present in Caron’s photographs but less obvious.

These are, to my knowledge, the main photographs of the cloud itself from “above”: the view of the bomber, or the reconnaissance plane. It is a view of destruction from several miles up, quite different than the view from the ground. There are a few photographs from the latter perspective, which I will write about at a later time. For now, I just want to highlight a few other photographs of the cloud and smoke itself: these ones taken by the Japanese. The Hiroshima Peace Museum said in 2013 that it knew of 21 confirmed photographs of the mushroom cloud from the ground. I have only seen half a dozen or so, shown below.

The first set are a sequence of three photographs taken by the photographer Mitsuo Matsushige, who was at home some 7 km / 4.3 miles north of ground zero. He appears to have rushed outside and photographed the cloud within a minute or two of the detonation:

The above photograph is really perhaps the most amazing photograph of the cloud that I have seen. The immensity is obvious. The houses give it an immediacy and some sense of scale. Anyone who has tried to photograph large clouds or buildings knows that it is very difficult to really capture the lived sense of scale, so if this is what the photo looks like, the reality must have been even more awesome. We are, I think, looking up at the mushroom stem, with the separated mushroom head much further above and harder to make out.

At this distance from ground zero, Matsushige was far-enough away that blast, acute radiation, or thermal radiation were not a threat. He may have been in an area that would be exposed to “black rain” — precipitation caused by the aforementioned smoke clouds — which contained some amount of radioactivity. The question about whether the black rain from Hiroshima measurably increased cancer rates is a controversial and tricky one.

Matsushige has another photographs of the cloud from the ground, presumably taken shortly after the first one:

Again, it is a striking photograph, and again, I think this is only the “stem.” The “poor” quality of the negative — my photography teacher in high school would have rejected this for its spots and problems — adds to the reality-effect in this case, given the context.

Mitsushige also took one more photograph, at what looks like a later time, and from a different vantage point:

This photograph was apparently taken around noon, several hours after the attack, and as such is a complement to the aerial photographs of the smoke fire.

There are a few other such photos from the ground, such as this one taken from Kure Naval Arsenal, some 20 km / 13 miles to the southeast of Hiroshima:

This looks either like a quite late mushroom cloud, or an early stage of the smoke cloud. I suspect the latter, just based on its particular size and geometry, but it is hard to tell. Whatever it is, it is not very mushroom-like in its appearance at this point; mushroom clouds do look more like “columns” after they stabilize, so it is not impossible, although I suspect it is the smoke cloud. The Library of Congress lists it as an “unusual photo of the Hiroshima bomb explosion,” which is an odd choice of words. Do not all of the photographs qualify, in some deep way, as “unusual”?

There is also this photograph that is listed on Wikipedia as being “found in Honkawa Elementary School in 2013 of the Hiroshima atom bomb cloud, believed to have been taken about 30 minutes after detonation of about 10km (6 miles) east of the hypocentre”:

That is definitely the Hiroshima mushroom cloud, with a clear separation of the “head’ and “stem.” I do not think this is 30 minutes after the attack; this looks to be only a few minutes after the bombing, on par with the cloud shown in the Agnew film. My guess is that it is still before the mushroom head had reached its stabilized altitude (in which is temperature and density matched the air around it, which stops its ascent), so that would put it at 10 minutes or less after detonation. Apparently the Hiroshima Peace Museum put the time at 20-30 minutes, but even 20 minutes feels a bit late to me. The photographer is unknown.

The last one I will put here is from a very remarkable perspective:

It is a remarkable photograph — a truly literal “view from below.” The above image comes from the Chugoku Shimbum newspaper’s Hiroshima Peace Media Center, who say (per Google Translate) that it was taken by Seizo Yamada, an employee of the Chugoku Shimbun, and that he was some 6.5 km / 4 mi from ground zero at the time, visiting a friend. Yamada described the fireball as “dark red” when he took the picture. The Chugoku Shimbun says that if he had been at work as usual that day, he would have been more definitively under the cloud. The perspective gained by being just a bit further out than Matsushige’s photographs is striking: close-enough to look like it is right on top of the photographer.

The scale of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud, and the smoke cloud, is immense, and hard to fathom. In fact, it is hard to know the exact height: while later equations were developed for generalizing the stabilized heights of mushroom clouds as a function of weapon yield, the “raw data” of these, derived from nuclear testing, shows considerable messiness. But from a human perspective, they are huge — many multiples of our tallest buildings. The next time you are at the base of a building like One World Trade Center in New York City, consider that the Hiroshima cloud was well over 10 times taller than it.

In a future post, I will talk about the similar cloud photography from Nagasaki — which has many interesting differences in terms of appearance and documentation — as well as other kinds of “on the ground” accounts of the atomic bombings.

My pal Cheryl Rofer has a good post up at Lawyers, Guns, and Money this week which hits at something I have felt, and been saying privately, especially this last week:

This week, I’ve talked to or messaged with a number of reporters. Rob has been doing a crazy number of interviews. That adds to the personal distractions. The wearing-down means I no longer have patience for certain types of foolishness, including the media’s willingness to consider Trump a rational actor. Others are giving up that pretense as well.

I have also been queried by a number of reporters this week (sometimes I get back to them, sometimes I don’t, I am trying to take the attitude of “it is not on me to be the expert on every single aspect of this world,” and I do not claim to be any kind of Iran expert), and I’ve felt a similar weariness.

There is a journalistic assumption that somehow we should be parsing Trump & Co.’s actions and phrases as if they were made with some intent at conveying meaning, truth, or rationality to them. I am convinced, for example, that Trump does not know what “unconditional surrender” means as anything other than a clichéd war-related phrase, and that Hegseth does not know what “give no quarter” actually literally means (much less its legality under American or international law).

I do not think there is any reason whatsoever to trust the Trump & Co. are being truthful in any statement. I do not think there is any reason to think that they have some kind of real plan. I do not think there is any reason to assume they have earned any benefit of the doubt, or that they have either the interests of the United States or the greater world in mind.

My sense is that the American journalists I know are all too aware of all of this, yet feel obligated to go through the motions of pretending. It’s has always been tiresome but it also increasingly feels dangerous and deluded. The media continues to “sane-wash,” to assume good faith and rationality, to phrase bald-faced statements of racism and idiocy as if they are perhaps “controversial.” Can we be done with it, already? When will the time come that we can just say, plainly, that the Emperor has no clothes, and not feel like we are saying something controversial?

Cheryl made another point that was on my mind:

As the stories came out about the White House deliberations, though, the military (presumably) did feel stung enough to leak that it wasn’t them who ignored this Gulf of Hormuz thing. They specifically pointed to the President, but as long as they are carrying on this improv war, they’re culpable too.

They are culpable, as is everyone keeping this show on the road, whether they agree with every aspect of it or not, whether they believe they are holding back some bulwark of even worse ideas. (I will admit that even paying taxes right now feels like collaboration, to a degree. I guess I’m feeling very Henry Thoreau about the whole thing at the moment.)

The whole thing makes me furious. Not “angry,” in the sense of a quick emotional sensation, the kind that everyone is trying to monetize one way or the other (including the endless text fundraising spam from Democratic candidates — like, are you kidding me? Are you for real right now?). I mean really furious. It is all so morally and ethically and civically offensive. On a level that mocks any safe and empty phrases about the desire to “resist,” much less the pathetic letters of disapproval registered by “concerned” politicians.

One of the things I write about in The Most Awful Responsibility is how the Korean War was the real “Cold War turning point” for Truman, the event that really and truly caused him to be a “Cold Warrior.” What I mean by this is that Truman’s view of the world situation, and the Soviet Union, prior to the summer of 1950 was about the tenseness of it, but he essentially thought of it as some kind of misunderstanding. The Soviets he seemed to regard as an essentially petulant teenager of a world power, testing boundaries and acting out, paranoid and problematic, but not really an existential risk to world peace and stability.

Even well after most of his cabinet and advisors had moved to be more anti-Soviet, Truman seemed to think that it was a salvageable situation — that eventually the Soviets would see that the United States was not really going to be all that aggressive towards them or their interests, so long as the Soviets didn’t push things too far. In one of the more bizarre moments, in the spring of 1949, Truman told people (including Oppenheimer) that he believed that by 1951, the world would probably agree to nuclear disarmament — which Oppenheimer plainly thought was nuts. As it happened, the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb a few months later.

But the invasion of South Korea by the North, which Truman (and those around him) credited to the Soviet Union (rightly or wrongly; we now know it’s a bit more complicated than that), really made him furious. It offended Truman’s sense of moral and civic virtue in a truly deep sense. Why? Because Truman was, in fact, quite personally committed to the idea that the proper response to the horrors of World War II was to create some kind of lasting peace. And here the Soviets were, not 5 years later, starting a new war of choice. One gets this sense that this is really just too much for him. Sure, play games in Berlin and Greece — none of that is great, but it’s a bit of jostling inside the constraints of war. But to embrace war itself, just to do it, just to see if you can get away with it — this disgusted him.

That’s the level of disgust and fury I’m at right now. It’s not that the many other horrific, immoral, disgusting policies pursued by Trump & Co. didn’t deeply offend me. They all did. But the Iran war situation is one that has been war-gamed and discussed and — quite rightly — avoided by multiple presidents, of all parties, for a long time now. Because all of the scenarios about its outcome have consistently suggested that it would be very risky, that the costs would not be worth the benefits, and that there were going to be better options on the table. And yet, here we are, and Trump & Co. didn’t even feel the need to try and actually “sell” it to the American people or American allies.

We’re all going to get stuck holding the bag on this one. Even if one imagines that Trump & Co. will someday get their comeuppance — one can dream — it won’t actually remove the costs that they have imposed on everyone else. And there will be high costs, of different forms. We’re well past pretending otherwise.

I don’t usually write that much about politics on here, both because it is not my métier and because I really don’t want to spend all my time thinking about them — I find thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear war far less depressing, whatever that says about me. I figure you have plenty of sources of that in your life right now, if that’s what you want to read about. But one can’t escape it.

Well. In other news, I was asked by some reporters whether NUKEMAP had seen increased usage over the last week or so, and indeed it did. Here is just a quick snapshot of my “unique visitors” according to Cloudflare, which is just one (easy to access) way to see the change over time, even if I don’t really trust the exact numbers (web analytics are an impressively large sham, and only are useful in relative terms):

This is still quite low compared to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which is probably a good thing for the world, and my servers and their bills. I’m happy to say that the latter are at least much more robustly done since 2022, however.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote about “PLAN A,” a visualization/simulation that I worked on some years ago with researchers at Princeton University:

I will admit that this was a bit of a punt — I had a busy week and did not feel I had the time to do something more substantive, and talking about my own software is very easy for me to do, even if (as in this case) I had to “reconstruct” how things worked because I didn’t really take good notes on it at the time. I have something more substantive planned for next week.

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Building up a plausible “scenario” for such a war is hard. To do that, you need a sense of targets, of attack capabilities, and targeting philosophies — as well as some sense as how these might be adjusted as things unfold. These matters are, understandably, highly classified. We have some sense of what all of these things looked like in the past, but even then there are some pretty murky areas and strong differences of opinion. And given how an actual full-scale nuclear war has never taken place — which is a very good thing! — we have a dearth of data on how these things might actually happen in the real-world.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t think about it — or that we shouldn’t. Thinking about these kinds of “scenarios” is important if we are to have a grounded, tangible, and concrete understanding of what these weapons are and what they imply about the world. And, as I think is pretty clear by now, I am one of those strange individuals who actually finds thinking about the “end of the world” quite interesting.

“PLAN A” was a project that I worked on with three researchers at the Princeton Science and Global Security Program — Alex Glaser, Moritz Bastian Kütt, and Tamara Patton — in 2017. I have only vague memories of the earliest conversations and meetings we had about it (my e-mails from the time about this start in media res, and so that suggests that we first had conversations and meetings about it prior to writing anything down about it), but my basic recollection is that there was going to be an art exhibition at Princeton about nuclear weapons, and Alex Glaser, a physicist who I have known for many years now (and written about a bit) had reached out to me about an idea they had for visualizing a nuclear exchange as part of the exhibition.

Here is the final video output, which is useful to watch before I talk about how it works “under the hood”:

At the time, I was doing a lot of programming and teaching with D3.js, a Javascript library for data visualization that has a very good support for geographic data.1 So what I believe I suggested (again, my memory is hazy on the details nearly 10 years later) is that it would be relatively straightforward to build a quick-and-dirty browser-based Javascript application that would allow one to “plug in” some data files about your nuclear attack “scenario,” and then it would allow you to visualize what it would look like. Then they could make screen captures of the Javascript application and integrate those into the final piece of video art.

I also ran the final list of “detonations” through NUKEMAP’s casualty calculator to come up with some rough numbers as to how deadly the attack would be, at least as a result of the initial effects (NUKEMAP’s casualty calculator does not, at present time, estimate possible fallout casualties).

A few years later, well after the exhibit had ended, Alex G. uploaded the output to YouTube, where it has enjoyed an amount of exposure (several million views) that nobody really expected. Because Alex G. generously (?) listed me first on the Princeton website about the video, I get e-mails periodically from people — journalists, scholars, random people — wanting to know details about the simulation. I generally send them to Alex G., because that wasn’t really my part in the whole thing.

My understanding is that Alex, Moritz, and Tamara, along with some input from the late Bruce Blair and the thankfully-still-with-us Sharon Weiner and Zia Mian, came up with the “scenario,” which unfolds over several “phases.” First the had to define a list of “locations,” each of which corresponded to icons on the map, and could be the origins or destinations for attacks. Here is an example of what the “locations” file looked like:

I (very unhelpfully to future me) did not document what these fields meant, but I can reconstruct most of them. “State” was either “NATO” or “Russia,” and was mostly for internal record-keeping (I don’t think it changes anything about the output). “Type” specified categories that would correspond with how the data appeared on the visualization (there was a separate file that defined what each of these appeared like, if they appeared at all — one kind of “type” was basically an invisible waypoint that planes could fly to).

Each “location” clearly had a unique ID (e.g. “saratov_1”). The latitude and longitude were its initial location, obviously. “no_of_dv” defined the number of delivery vehicles (which could be missiles or planes), “wh_per_dv” was how many nuclear warheads were contained on each delivery vehicle, and “subtotals” looks like it is just the total warheads per location if it had warheads (which I think was just for our own record-keeping; it is not used in the code). “yield_per_wh” is the explosive yield per warhead and does not seem to have been used (that would only have been used for the casualty calculation and I don’t think we used these files for that). I think “mirv_target_group” was something used for planning purposes because it doesn’t show up in the visualizer code anywhere.

Then we have the “phases,” which are the attacks themselves. These were scripted also using data files. Here’s a selection from phase 2:

These described how and when different attacks would be taking place. “attackid” is a unique identifier, and “type” is the kind of thing that was launching the attack (e.g., an ICBM silo, a submarine, a mobile ICBM launcher, a tactical fighter, a tactical missile). The “launch_id” is the location (from the previous “locations” file) sending out this attack.

The “target_id” is a list of locations that are being aimed at by the weapon. In some cases there would be a single location, but in some, as above, you can tell they are MIRVed, and a single missile is meant to hit several different targets. “trigger_at” was a timestamp (in the above, they are set to begin immediately) at which this part of the attack would take place.

These lists were all made by hand, which is definitely not the easiest way to do it, and I’m sure it was very time-consuming! I am glad I did not have to do this part — the programming was much more fun than the tedious compilation of lists.

The code could read these data files and then “step” through the time in regular intervals, triggering, say, a missile launch, and then locating (and visualizing) where that missile ought to be at any given time after the attack. We used some very simple assumptions for the speed of everything, reasoning (if I recall) that the fine-grained differences a) would not likely be visible at this scale of the map anyway, and b) didn’t matter for the evocative purposes of this visualization (which was not meant to be any kind of “perfect” simulation). For MIRVs, the code treated all of them as the same missile until about 50% through the trajectory, in which it then split them into multiple warheads. This was, again, somewhat arbitrary.

Here is what the “visualizer” looked like in its most basic state:

As you can see, it is a little different than the final product. It allows one to load any given “phase” datafile, and rearrange the visual display of the map, and then “start” the attack. The default time factor for development, as you can see, is 100X realtime, because realtime is slow.

How slow? Below a little screen capture I made showing the first minute of phase 2 at 1X speed.

I actually sort of love it in realtime, because while it is slow, it is not imperceptibly slow. It is disturbing to imagine that those are actual missiles, and that their slow crawl would mean that they would find targets in 20-30 minutes or so. There’s a Weeping Angels quality to it, where it barely seems to be moving at all, but if you look away and look back, you perceive the jump.

The visuals of “PLAN A” were quite deliberately and obviously inspired by the “Big Board” shown in the 1983 film WarGames:

Alex G. is fairly blatant about his nostalgia for 1980s digital culture (he snuck a Space Invader-inspired sprite into a paper in Nature, which takes some chutzpah), and I’m not opposed to it either.

I also appreciate that by doing that kind of retro visual riff, you are signaling to the savvy viewer that this is not pretending to be some kind of perfect modern simulation. I am deeply suspicion of anything that really pretends to be a perfect simulation, and with NUKEMAP and MISSILEMAP have gone to some lengths to make sure that it is visually clear that they are meant to be evocative and back-of-the-envelope, not perfect simulations.

I don’t recall it coming up in active discussions, but the game DEFCON (2006) probably informed some of my aesthetic thinking on it, too, particularly with the planes, submarines, and other little icons, which are not part of the original WarGames maps (they just have little white dots for targets). DEFCON, of course, also took its aesthetic cues from WarGames.

Another thing that I am sure we had in mind for the overall inspiration was Isao Hashimoto’s 2003 video art project of nuclear explosions, titled “1945-1998.” I am sure that at the time I said something like, “this is the kind of art that would have been pretty hard to make still in 2003 but could be basically programmed in a day a decade later,” because I am prone to say things like that.

I like Hashimoto’s piece a lot, and often show it to students in class. The almost unbearable slowness of its early periods is offset but the sudden, musical cacophony of the years of heavy testing. When things like the test moratoriums occur, their sudden silence is also quite profound, and leads to interesting conversations.

“PLAN A” is, thankfully, a work of fiction. It is a work of creativity and imagination for all involved — no less so for the programmer/designer (me) and the people coming up with the target lists and sequences (the Princeton crew). That does not mean it is not plausible or grounded. Plenty of fiction can be plausible and grounded, and plenty of even implausible or ungrounded fiction can and does reflect some kind of fundamental truths about reality. All simulations are fictions, really, and that does not mean they cannot be useful. Is it “accurate”? I don’t really know what exactly that means in this context (or how we would know).

Again, the terms I personally prefer for talking about it are evocative and plausible. At its best, it is meant to give a view of modern nuclear war that is more grounded than “everybody would die” (lots of people would die, but not everybody, for both better and worse), and is probably within some order of magnitude estimate as to what the immediate effects would be of a war of this sort, and is a not-at-all-impossible scenario that could be imagined occurring (although it is not the only possible scenario that one could imagine occurring). Evocative and plausible are really is about as ambitious as I personally would be for its predictive power, but I’m also not a scientist of any sort (“just” a historian), and so not under any obligation to aspire to much more than that.

“PLAN A” has definitely been a lot more successful, in terms of audience exposure, than anyone involved expected it to be: it was designed to be a very localized kind of art, part of a specific in-person exhibit. I think the exhibit “toured” a bit, but any art exhibit’s audience is necessarily pretty small. Its second-life on YouTube increased its reach exponentially. To what end, I have really no idea. Does watching “PLAN A” alter or affect the viewer’s understanding of nuclear war? If so, how? In what directions? Would it impact how they thought about different kinds of nuclear policies? (Does asking such a thing signal that I am thinking too functionally about art? Is it art, or some kind of design, or what? Does it matter?)

I don’t have the slightest clue about such things, to be honest — and I’m not the target audience — but I like asking the questions, and I like to believe that things like “PLAN A” might cause others to ask questions, as well.