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.

The native peoples on the inhabited atolls of Rongerik, Rongelap, and Uterik were all forcible evacuated for their own safety, American observers on boats were themselves exposed by the test, and the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru, who had strayed into the “danger area,” were exposed to levels of radiation high-enough to make them sick and to cause one of them to eventually die.

The Armed Forces Special Weapons Group assembled one of the earliest reconstructions of the fallout plume, based on a loose model they developed on the basis of radiation readings from other atolls:

The units of the map above are of the H+1 dose rate, in R/hr, which is a standard approach in fallout modeling that can be a bit unintuitive for the average person. You can roughly consider the values to be somewhat on par with what the dose would be (in Roentgens) were you to be exposed to the fallout for a month or so. 100 R absorbed over a short period of time results in radiation sickness and an increased lifetime fatal cancer risk; 400-600 R usually results in death. So these are very high values.

The above model was later re-rendered as the H+96 total dose contour printed in Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3rd edn. (U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and U.S. Department of Defense, 1977), which people are more familiar with:

“Local” fallout contours on this level had not been contemplated prior to the BRAVO test. (Why not? That’s a longer question, one I will be writing more on in the near future…) The prior experience with nuclear fallout for kiloton-range weapons had led scientific and military planners to more or less consider this kind of downwind fallout to be a nuisance, not a serious threat, at least not compared to the kinds of threats you get from the immediate effects of a detonating atomic bomb.

Immediately, they began to ask: What are the implications of something like BRAVO for the future of nuclear war? What would happen if this weapon had gone off over an American city, as opposed to over a coral atoll in the Pacific Ocean? Which led to diagrams like the below, which transplant BRAVO’s detonation point from Bikini to Washington, DC:

This kind of “mirroring,” in which what American did to someone else is transmuted into what could happen to America, can seem somewhat ironic, or even perverse, but it was a core part of how the United States thought about nuclear weapons and their implications for American national security. BRAVO didn’t just cause a radiological (and publicity) nightmare, it created a total re-alignment of how American war planners imagined the atomic threat. Kiloton-range weapons were comparatively limited in their scope and possibility; megaton-range weapons endangered entire regions downwind of their impact.

Which is the context behind one of the earliest attempts to systematically do this kind of analysis, a report by Lt. Col. Norair M. Lulejian, an early pioneer (for both better and worse) of nuclear fallout mapping on “Radiation Hazards During Atomic Warfare,” from November 1954, only a few months after the BRAVO disaster.1

Lulejian’s approach to fallout mapping in general was somewhat crude, fairly idiosyncratic, and could lead to some significant errors. But one has to start somewhere.

This particular report includes Lulejian’s own fallout projection method and calculations (again, far from perfect in many ways), as well as his discussion of the implications for large-scale fallout from megaton-range weapons. Some of his analysis was a herald of things to come, such as his discussion about what this level of fallout meant for future war:

In view of the fact that the lethal concentration of the radioactivity [from megaton range weapons] will cover approximately 30 to 50 times the blast or thermal damage area, it may be possible to relax the CEP [Circular Error Probable = accuracy requirements] of intercontinental missiles. As a matter of fact, it would be possible to wage atomic warfare using ballistic missiles which are intended merely to hit certain areas of the enemy country. In the case of Russia, it may be practical to develop missiles with an accuracy of plus or minus ten miles or even plus or minus fifty or 100 miles. This means that we have to forego the thermal and blast damage that we get from a bomb and use only the radiation damage parameter. If this is acceptable, then it may be possible to relax the stringent guidance problems that we have placed upon our “guided” missiles of the future.

Which is not exactly what happened — American and Soviet missiles did have accuracy requirements that were more than what would be required for just spreading fallout radioactivity as the primary effect — but the idea that fallout would be a major consideration for thinking about the large-scale impacts of nuclear missiles, and the fact that H-bombs did “relax” aiming constraints, is true.

But the most amazing aspect of this report is a figure that Lulejian constructed to make his point. Figure 11, he explained, was meant to demonstrate the “excessive contamination” that would come from several hundred BRAVO-style weapons being used against the United States. It is a thing of wonder:

First, let us address the, err, elephant in the room. Those plumes look very much like… bananas, right? That is what you were thinking. They look like bananas. Definitely bananas. Nothing else. Just lots, and lots, and lots of bananas. A bananapolcalypse, perhaps. I think they look like bananas. What do you think they look like? Bananas, right? Definitely. Glad we’re on the same page about this.

You will notice, looking closely, that a) there are only two different plume shapes represented, and b) that they are not “integrated” at all, but rather just overlap crudely with one another. My theory is that Lulejian made two ink-stamps of two plumes with slightly different wind conditions, and then just… stamped them on. Over and over again. I am imagining his stamping of bananas on the northeast being somewhat violent in nature, but perhaps he was delicate.

He explained Figure 11 at some length:

The figure represents the idealized contamination patterns over this country, if 111 nuclear weapons of 15 MT [BRAVO] yield are contact burtst over target[s]. The targets consist of the 106 cities or this country whose population is 100,000 or more, and five selected airbases. Each fallout plot consists of two areas. The small inner areas covers 12,500 square miles and represents an average infinity dose of 2,700 Rontgens…. The large outer area covers 25,000 square miles and it represents an infinity dose of 190 roentgens…

He further goes on to explain that they did more complex analysis with actual wind patterns over targets, which was “very time-consuming and tedious” to do, and found that the “net total effect” of the variation in plumes “was the same as Figure 11”: “That is, both analyses showed that there was no place to hide in the Eastern part or the U.S. and the North Eastern U.S. was contaminated over and over again.”

It’s a grim calculus, and a grim image, even if its methodology and, er, bananas, give it somehow a bit less gravitas than the underlying topic deserves.

But this period was also when public, communal shelter spaces were being identified and labeled with those iconic three-yellow-triangles-in-a-circle “FALLOUT SHELTER” signs that one can still find on the sides of large buildings in many urban areas.

Most such areas marked as such were not built to be shelters, but were identified as shelter spaces as part of a US government effort in the 1960s. They were meant to be stocked with supplies, including canned food, water, and even “sanitary facilities” (chemical toilets), that would allow some number of the local population (indicated by the “capacity” label on the sign) to ride out a few days, or even weeks, of radioactivity after a nuclear war.1

So think of this kind of “shelter experience” as less of a “you and your family huddled into one small room” experience, and more of a “you and 30-500 other people are crammed into a large room” sort of situation. And those “other people” are going to be men, women, and children of all ages, all walks of life, and possibly all strangers.

During the 1960s, many “shelter experiments,” involving thousands of volunteers, were conducted in the United States, with the goal of understanding how well your average American would handle such conditions. They generally reported that people were pretty good about it, but it’s a little hard to feel like those results are that reliable given the plain fact that they could not truly replicate the state of mind of a full-scale nuclear war for any of the participants. And people could “defect” — leave the experiment — without it being suicidal, which undoubtedly served as a “release valve” for the most unhappy members.

The official guidelines for these shelters recommended that they be run as pretty tight ships. Rationing of food, attending to the sick, resolving differences, keeping people’s minds and bodies active — these all require some degree of coordination. As do other necessary activities like tracking radiation levels, removing trash, and keeping the chemical toilets hygienic.

And so it was recommended that every shelter of this sort have a designated shelter leader. The Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (DCPA, part of the US Department of Defense) had this to say on the value of good leadership in their Attack Environment Manual of 1973:2

The description in this Chapter of the probable shelter environment and ways of coping with it should leave no doubt about the value of trained leadership —shelter managers, as they are called. Of course, leaders will emerge in response to pressing needs, and groups can muddle through very difficult situations. There will be many situations, however, in which trained leadership will make the difference between life and death for substantial numbers of citizens.

I find this entirely plausible. So who would make a good shelter manager? The text continues:

Who should be recruited as shelter managers? It appears virtually impossible to take someone without management experience and turn him into a manager through exposure to a short course of training. It is, however, quite feasible to take someone with a strong management background and in a short time give him the technical information required to manage a shelter effectively. This suggests that upper-level executives from organizations housed in structures designated as shelter facilities are potential candidates.

The ideal manager appears to be one who is capable of working in ill-defined situations; one who can provide structure and direction and then proceed with the tasks at hand; a person who is creative in the face of unique, unprecedented problems; a person used to the tumult of situations demanding decisions; an effective communicator who has practice in dealing with people.

Which is an interesting approach. I am less sure I find this to be as plausible, as it seems a little all-too-convenient that the ideal leaders of a shelter happen to be the “upper-level executives" of wherever the shelter happens to be located. Perhaps it’s our current zeitgeist, but I’m not super enthusiastic about most CEOs being put in charge of collective welfare.

The DCPA Attack Environment Manual, also, conveniently, provides a “self-assessment test” so that you can rate your own effectiveness as a fallout shelter leader. I have reproduced it above, and re-typed it below in its entirety, with some minor editing to make it easier to do at home. You can also download it as a PDF, if you want print it out and fill it out it as it was intended to have been. As you go through the quiz, keep track of how many points you get, based on your answers to its prompts.

                           RATE YOURSELF AS A POTENTIAL SHELTER LEADER

1. Your age:
     - Under 30 ...... 5 points
     - Between 30-60 ...... 10 points
     - Over 60 ...... 5 points

2. Physical health: 
     - Excellent ...... 10 points
     - Good ...... 5 points
     - Poor ...... 0 points

3. Have you ever succeed at being a... (if more than one, choose the one with the highest points, and add 2 points.)
     - Sales manager? ...... 10 points
     - High school teacher or principle? ...... 8 points
     - Actor, PTA president, or clergyman? ...... 6 points
     - Supervisor of at least 30 people? ....... 4 points

4. Have you ever led men in combat (not just military experience)?
     - Yes ...... 8 points
     - No ...... 0 points

5. Have you ever played an active role in dealing with a natural disaster or serious accident you were directly involved in?
     - Natural disaster ...... 8 points
     - Serious accident ...... 5 points

6. Have you successfully practiced any of the following avocations for at least a year? Mountain climbing, cave exploring, auto racing, power boat racing, scuba diving, white-water canoeing?
     - Yes ....... 6 points
     - No ...... 0 points

7. Do you believe you could manage a shelter effectively after reading this chapter?
     - Yes ...... 5 points
     - No ...... 0 points

RATING — TOTAL POINTS:

     - Over 50 points ....... Perfect Choice
     - 35 to 50 points ...... Likely Success
     - 25 to 35 points ...... Better Than Average
     - Less than 25 points ...... Probably Not

(What's that? You say you're a middle-aged spinster who teaches English at the high school, scuba dives on weekends, and thinks managing a shelter would be a blast? You'd make a good choice. Take me to your shelter, leader!!)

Yes, that final parenthetical — with the two exclamation points!! — is in the original. It is interesting that, per the assumptions of the period, all description of shelter leaders in the text appears to assume that leaders will be male except the last line which invokes a “spinster” leader. I have to say that I would be deeply suspicious of anyone who would say that they think managing a community fallout shelter after a nuclear war “would be a blast,” though.

It’s an an interesting collection of questions. The one about “avocations,” a previous page indicates, is about demonstrating “experience showing tolerance to the stress of physical threat,” and the creators of the test believe that having chosen an avocation that “involves some danger or personal risk” is a good sign of that.

So how did you rate?

One of these requires you to read their chapter, but my little description above gives you some of the flavor of it. I also am not completely clear on what they mean by “played an active role in dealing with” in question 5, or what a “serious accident” means in this context. (I’ve called emergency services after witnessing a serious accident, does that count?)

Taking a very minimalist approach regarding my age, physical health, and interpreting “high school teacher” as having roughly analogous skills to that of a college professor, gets me easily into the “better than average” category, even without reading the shelter chapter, and I could even argue for a “likely success” with a few other interpretations.

Of course, I could always improve my suitability by becoming a race-car driver.

One of my favorites is “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Christmas at Ground Zero,” off of his 1986 album Polka Party! I would embed it below but Vevo apparently doesn’t let one do that, so you’ve gotta click a link.

Is it in good taste? No. But one does not look to “Weird Al” Yankovic’s work for “good taste.” Or, at least, if you do, you will be disappointed. It is not his métier.

The song is not as good as many of his songs — much less what I consider to be his magnum opus, “Dare to be Stupid” — but it is still vintage Yankovic, from his glasses-and-moustache period. This is, to be sure, my favorite period of his work; his later output was sometimes more cleverly written, but there is an authenticity in his “weirdness” here:

It's Christmas at ground zero
There's music in the air
The sleigh bells are ringing, and the carolers are singing
While the air-raid sirens blare

It's Christmas at ground zero
The button has been pressed
The radio just let us know
That this is not a test

The Wikipedia page for the song says that:

The song was the result of Yankovic's label, Scotti Brothers Records, insisting that Yankovic record a Christmas album. However, after Yankovic presented the song to his label, they relented, because it was “a little different from what they were expecting.” After the song was written and recorded, Yankovic wanted to release the song as a commercial single, but Scotti Bros. refused. Undeterred, he used his own money to create a low-budget music video made mostly out of stock footage. … This music video was also Yankovic's directing debut.

The music video is of some interest. I wonder how difficult it was to compile such a film out of stock footage in 1986? Today it would be pretty trivial. But I don’t know how easily available Civil Defense footage was in the late 1980s. Much of it is reminiscent of footage from The Atomic Cafe (1982), and I wonder if that was a convenient intermediary point.

That this was made in 1986, and not, say, 1983, is probably somewhat significant. You’re talking about just enough distance from the great nuclear fear of the early 1980s, but still a point in which the weapons and their possibilities were still quite salient.

It's Christmas at ground zero
Now the missiles are on their way
What a crazy fluke, we're gonna get nuked
On this jolly holiday
What a crazy fluke, we're gonna get nuked
On this jolly holiday

The song was not a hit. Not that one would expect it to be. It is in a category of humor I think of as “intentional dreck,” which I offer up in the most charitable sense of the word, which I associate with things like MAD Magazine — deliberately low-brow, crass, annoying, juvenile, and manic, but occasionally amusing in small doses. I say this with great appreciation of Weird Al, to be sure — it’s dreckiness is, again, intentional.

Apparently the song was one of many removed from air-waves after the 9/11 attacks, because people associated “Ground Zero” with the World Trade Centers. Which sounds plausible, if one can imagine that the song would have otherwise been played on the radio commonly at that time, which seems less plausible.

Nobody seems to have considered what the hibakusha would have thought about the song, but, again, that is somewhat par for the course with this kind of thing. What did Christmas at Ground Zero actually sound like in 1945? Greg Mitchell has unearthed footage of the Catholic mass at Nagasaki that year, which is rather remarkable, and its seriousness and somberness make for quite a contrast.

It has long been one of my favorite “takes” on nuclear weapons, as it is complex both in its aesthetic allusions as well as its social-political-historical arguments. The author has given me permission to post it, so let’s dive into a few parts of it.

First, we have the obvious “weapons diagrams.” As someone who is something of a connoisseur of diagrams attempting to depict the operation of nuclear weapons, I am extremely receptive to what is going on here:

The basic aesthetic choices here are straightforward: take the “encyclopedia-style” depictions of Little Boy and Fat Man, and change the labels to suggest political and social explanations for “how they work,” as opposed to purely technical ones. The choices are not arbitrary — “motivation from within” is the neutron initiator, the transformation of the shock wave from an explosion to an implosion renders “external pressure to innovate further” into “the inability to go back,” and the gun-type’s internal gun barrel is “tunnel vision.” One could imagine just re-labeling these things haphazardly, but that isn’t what is going on here.

The actual image is based on a trope that started in 1960, incidentally, after the first images of the casings of Little Boy and Fat Man were declassified, and publications, starting with Newsweek, began making hybrid diagrams overlaying basic functional diagrams weapons onto their realistic external appearance:1

I have studied the history of nuclear weapons design diagrams extensively, cataloguing some 170 of them over the years, in American, Russian, and even Chinese sources. I am not sure I have ever seen them used in quite the fashion that Rowntree does, with political arguments about the weapons accomplished through clever re-labeling — it is somewhat obvious once you’ve seen it done, but I’ve never seen it before.

The other images in the diagram are about the costs of nuclear weapons. Specifically, they are about opportunity costs, not just resources exhausted. The real costs of nuclear weapons, Rowntree argues, are about what it does to your society — what it precludes. The missile diagram on the right makes this very explicit: the “purpose of the spending” (a small number of MIRVed warheads) leads to the burning of international good will, a social safety net, democratic institutions, etc. There are some more subtle graphic depictions of this in the smaller graphics, like this one labeled “the nuclear wasteland,” in which a functional city is reconfigured into a missile:

This is very reminiscent of an argument made by that known socialist and hippy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his 1953 speech “A Chance for Peace”:

The best [outcome of the arms race] would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

There is a further small diagram that takes this theme in the direction of the human costs of nuclear weapons:

At left, we see the “short-term devastation” from dropping the bomb — a destroyed city. At right, we see a table of life expectancies in the present day, where the lives of those living in American and Russian cities are significantly shorter than those of the occupants of Hiroshima.

My students frequently misunderstood the argument here, believing that Rowntree was trying to argue for some kind of increased longevity as a function of Hiroshima having been bombed. I think it is rather clear that Rowntree is instead suggesting (per the other diagrams) that the United States and the Soviet Union both expended resources on their Cold War militarization at the expense of resources that would have improved quality and length of life of their populations.

The poster is no longer available for purchase in the store for Subnormality, which is a shame. The heyday of nuclear-weapons posters is, I fear, quite over — but it is a genre of artistic statement that I think could be still quite rewarding. What I appreciate most about Rowntree’s cartoon is that its message about the bomb is politically and historically complicated (whether one agrees with it or not, it is not simply a “nukes are bad because they could kill everyone” message, which is a much more common and simple political take on nukes), and that it re-appropriates the visual language of nuclear weapons towards this end.

One of the earliest posters in its collection is that of Swiss designer Hans Erni, whose Empèchons Cela (“Let’s stop this”) (1955) was commissioned by the Swiss Movement for Peace and is considered one of the first specifically anti-nuclear war posters, and published with German, Italian, and French variations. The imagery is reminiscent of the some of the 1940s imagery promoting international control of nuclear weapons (like One World or None, from 1946), but is more impressionistic, abstract, and direct.

On the more cheerful side, the exhibit had the largest collection of posters by the (also Swiss) designer Erik Nitsche, whose work promoting the work of General Dynamics I have long been a fan of. The above poster, promoting the Atoms for Peace program and conferences, was published in 1955 as well, the same as Erni’s “Let’s Stop This.”

What an impressive juxtaposition they make with one another, coming out the same year, from designers both heralding from neutral Switzerland. In principle, there need not be any conflict between the two messages — one could be pro-atoms for peace, and anti-nuclear war, and many were. But one was commissioned by a “pro-peace” organization with links to the Soviet Union, and the other was commissioned by a US defense contractor.

The exhibit also contained some Civil Defense posters, including the one above supporting The Family Fallout Shelter, by a “Lee,” from 1959. This is one that I have written about before, because I find it to be rather remarkable that, unlike most Civil Defense imagery from the period, it shows the female of the household both fairly fashionably dressed (not coded as merely a “mother”) and also helping, to some degree, with the construction of the shelter. Progressive stuff for the Eisenhower-era Civil Defense!

There are many other fascinating posters as part of the exhibit, most of which were purchased by Poster House for its permanent collection. The anti-nuclear ones, from the 1960s-1980s, are of varying graphical quality, but some really stand out. The one above I thought was particularly striking, like this one created by Jaroslav Veverka in 1963 for the Prague-based (and Communist run) International Union of Students, which managed, with its inclusion of the mortarboard, to make its imagery more specific and impactful than it might have otherwise been had it been left out (there are only so many skulls and mushroom clouds one can combine).

The one above, at outgrowth of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, Stop the Neutron Bomb (c. 1978), was one of my favorites of the anti-nuclear ones — it has bold imagery that co-opts the “circles of death” from Civil Defense diagrams, it makes good use of the one color, and it uses all of this in favor of a strong message (“You are the target!”) and includes a call to specific action (“Write President Carter and Congress”).

I do somewhat mourn that actual real, printed posters are such a dying art form. There’s something to a large-scale, carefully-designed, boldly printed image. The physicality of a real poster, made with offset printing, is so intense. As the curator at Poster House explained, while giving a tour of the exhibits, the rich black shades used in one of Nitsche’s later posters required multiple printing passes, all of which had to be perfectly aligned. This is not at all obvious from the online image, and the experience of viewing the posters on a screen is simply not the same. So much of the effect is lost.

As someone who has designed more than a few posters over the years — mostly advertising academic talks — I appreciate that the work to do this sort of thing was exponentially more difficult prior to the development of desktop publishing. It has become much easier to do, but that also has robbed it of its craft and, arguably, its impact. To make something like Peter Kennard’s Protect and Survive (1980) at the time took a lot of planning, and the result is an impressive piece of design, rising to the level of art, whatever one may think about the political message it is trying to convey.

The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.

Poets may dream of such beauty, but filmmakers try to realize such dreams. For nearly 80 years, filmmakers have repeatedly attempted to capture the visual experience of the Trinity test. Did they capture it? Or were their attempts, in Farrell’s words, poor and inadequate? Let’s take a look.

Trinity newsreel footage (1945)

Before we get into the Hollywood footage, let’s take a look at the original footage that was taken of the actual test. Trinity was photographed by over 50 cameras, but only a few were trying to capture “general” or “newsreel” footage of the explosion. The most famous of this footage was that filmed by Berlyn Brixner. Here is a short, 12-second clip of his footage, which was re-scanned at high resolution from Los Alamos a few years back:

This is only a tiny excerpt of even this shot, but it’s wonderfully high-resolution compared to most versions of it. Peter Kuran, of Trinity and Beyond fame, has a very nice compilation of the three main “newsreel takes” of the Trinity test — the first one, which was hand-shot by Brixner, a second one that has a tighter framing, and a third one that was centered on the sky near barrage balloons, giving a very different view:

The first one is, arguably, the best footage overall. There’s also a little moment, at 0:40 in the above video, where the camera abruptly pans up. Brixner explained the moment to Robert Del Tredici in an interview with him that was later published in Del Tredici’s excellent book of photography, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (1987):

Did you use your camera's pan-and-tilt capability?

Yes, I did. I was so amazed, though, initially that I just let the camera sit there. Then suddenly I realized that the ball of fire was going out of the field of view of the camera, so I grabbed the controls and started tilting the camera up to follow the ball of fire.

Does that mean that in this historic footage there's a kind of a jerky movement at that point?

There is. For the first twenty seconds on the standard-speed camera it’s just sitting stationary, then suddenly you will see the field of view jump as the ball of fire is going out the top of the frame.

I guess you could call that the atomic tilt technique…

Well, I guess that's it, yes. …

I think that’s pretty interesting — you’re seeing a different kind of record, of sorts: of the photographer having realized that his shock was causing him to mess up the shot.

Brixner also emphasizes, in the interview, some things not obvious in the footage. There was no audio recorded for the first atomic test (nor most atomic tests). Brixner says:

…At about thirty seconds the shock wave reached our station with a very loud bang, and then again it was silent. If you’ve ever been close to a lightning bolt and heard that, that’s the type of sound it made—just a tremendous bang and crack!

All of the above is prologue for what I really want to talk about, which is how the Trinity test has been depicted in Hollywood recreations. Below is a definitely incomplete survey of examples from across almost eight decades.

The Beginning or the End? (1947)

The Beginning or the End? was a 1947 film produced by MGM about the Manhattan Project, with official cooperation from the Department of War and the US government. The circumstances behind its creation, release, and content are recounted in great detail in Greg Mitchell’s The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood―and America―Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (2020).

Here is their take on the Trinity test:

This footage is very interesting to me, because it is necessarily “practical” in nature. It is also pretty good, especially for its time! The cinematographer, A. Arnold Gillespie, won an Oscar for these particular special effects.

It looks to me like there are three distinct “shots”:

1. The initial fireball (0:05).

2. The rising cloud (0:20).

3. The close-up cloud (0:25).

4. The cloud base (0:51 and 1:20).

Of those three, #3 is actual footage from Trinity, and is the third “newsreel” clip in the video up above (about 30 seconds into it). As for the others, let’s also take a look at the other VFX shot from the film, which was the bombing of Hiroshima:

I did a little digging about the effects for this film and found some lore that ultimately traces back to an article from the mid-1970s which claimed:

A. Arnold Gillespie, Oscar-winner for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Green Dolphin Street, Plymouth Adventure, and Ben-Hur, even created in miniature an A-bomb blast so realistic that it fooled the Manhattan Project people, and the U.S. Air Force used the footage for years in a training film. The movie was The Beginning or the End, which was supposed to show the bombing of Hiroshima, an event that was not officially photographed. Also, all technical details were classified at the time (1947). Gillespie, recalling a Tarzan film he'd seen, observed that each time the ape-man stabbed a crocodile underwater, blood would float up to the surface in the shape of a mushroom cloud. So he put his camera underwater, inside a tank, and shot his "holocaust” with exploding sacks of dye.1

The article contains no references for its claims, and at least part of it is clearly nonsense. Hiroshima was, in fact, filmed by the physicist Harold Agnew, who was a crew member of the instrumentation plane on the mission. You can see his brief 16mm footage here for a comparison. I express extreme doubt that the 1947 footage would “fooled the Manhattan Project people” or that the Air Force used it as training footage — this sounds like Hollywood lore. It is true that some technical details were classified at the time, but the Trinity test newsreel footage was not (some of it was actually used in the movie!), and there was, by 1947, footage of Operation Crossroads that had been declassified.

Of the shots, what I’ve labeled as shot #4 of Trinity definitely looks like underwater dye packs to me. #1 might be — it has some very good Rayleigh-Taylor instability on display with regards to the stem, and that would be what a mixture of fluids in waters would give you. If that’s true, then the technique for #1 is also pretty great because of the way they are handling the lighting of it. It’s a effects shot for 1947.

#2 does not really look like dye packs to me, but I could be wrong. If it’s not a dye pack effect, I wonder if it is some kind of fog generator that is being raised. That would produce, I think, a very similar effect (and is not unlike how one can very simply simulate decent mushroom cloud effects with CGI today).2

The shots of the “base” of the Hiroshima cloud from the film look like dye packs to me, just in how they hang around and writhe. I’m less certain that the rising cloud is dye packs, although I don’t really know how dye behaves underwater. It could be. It’s a very nice effect, though.

Anyway, for 1947, this is peak. Very compelling. Better cloud dynamics than a lot of later entries. A great use of practical technique. One could imagine much cheesier effects for the time.

If I were judging it on its pure accuracy, I would say that the speed is not quite right — I would have slowed it down a bit, to give a better sense of its “mass.” And with some slightly better (less direct) lighting, one would have less of a sense that it was being filmed on some sort of movie set. It does go to show you how difficult it would be to “fake” a realistic mushroom cloud in the 1940s.

Fat Man and Little Boy (1989)

Next up is Fat Man and Little Boy, a 1989 film about Los Alamos directed by Roland Joffé and starring Dwight Schultz as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Paul Newman as General Leslie Groves. Here’s a minute of their Trinity test footage, capturing the moment of detonation:

I actually appreciate the choice of showing Oppenheimer’s face as the initial view of the test — if you can’t actually capture the experience on film, just try to capture the experience of someone experiencing it, perhaps. But in this case there are really execution issues. The sound is all wrong — instantaneous with the flash — and the arrival of the blast wave is far too quick, and choosing to represent this as Oppenheimer with a leaf blower trained on his face is, well, unintentionally comical. It robs the experience of any power it might have and looks ridiculous.

As for the detonation itself… aside from however they did it, which I don’t know, (someone needs to get Corridor Crew onto this sort of thing…), there are a lot of accuracy issues that are hard to reconcile. It looks to me like they took more inspiration from H-bomb tests in the Pacific than the actual Trinity test. It’s also such a quick SFX sequence compared to the prolonged Oppie-gasm we just witnessed, which is a strange choice. I have mixed feelings about over emphasizing the power of the weapon in this way — it’s not very accurate looking, but I can appreciate the attempt to be impressionistic about it.

Overall I appreciate the ambition and the concepts they were going for, but the execution is rather flawed and it mars the experience of it.

Day One (1989)

So this is an honorable mention, something rather obscure, and a very different and low-budget approach. Day One was a CBS mini-series that aired in 1989, starring Brian Dennehy as Groves and David Strathairn as Oppenheimer. I haven’t been able to find a copy of it, but I have found a copy of the Trinity test sequence on YouTube… but it’s the French dub. Still, amusing and interesting:

This is pretty fun. The “explosion footage” is a compilation of different actual nuclear test footage made by the government. Some of it is from the actual Trinity newsreel footage, some of it appears to be shots at the Marshall Islands.

Does it totally work? Of course not — the footage doesn’t “blend” with the rest of the film at all. Is it good-enough for a made for TV movie? Sure, why not?

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

Jumping forward, we have a clip of the Trinity test from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, the 2017 season 3 of his famed surrealistic noir television show. I have not (yet) actually watched Twin Peaks (I am sorry!), so while I was made aware that it involved the Trinity test, I know very little about its significance in the show other than it is significant somehow. So I am looking at this as on purely aesthetic terms:

So this one is clearly CGI. I appreciate the choice to do it in black and white, which aligns well with the original footage. The audio design is appropriately intense. The long zooming is an interesting choice as it misses most of the “early cloud” of the original footage and focuses instead on the “late cloud” that looks more mushroomy. It is not entirely clear to me whether this is meant to showing the evolution of the cloud in realtime. The “base” surge of the cloud seems like it is expanding very slowly, and is pretty large in proportion to the rest of the cloud.

The actual modeling of the mushroom cloud effect is… not that accurate. My guess is that whomever did this did not really understand the underlying physics that they were meant to be emulating very deeply and sort of “winged it” with some inspiration from footage of Trinity and other nuclear tests. This may be why it looks more like a videogame mushroom cloud than a real mushroom cloud.

It is possible to do pretty good mushroom cloud physics with modeling tools like Blender these days (for example, this approach is a pretty good place to start, and is not hard to set up or tweak), and certainly there are other films and shows that have managed to make more plausible CGI mushroom clouds. (I will not be surveying all of those, right now, because I am focused exclusively on the Trinity test — but at some point I’ll do another of these that looks at other films/shows/etc., like The Day After, The Sum of All Fears, and Fallout.)

But while there is room for improvement, the aesthetic choices are great and I suspect most people aren’t going to be nitpicking it to quite the same level that I would, and would not be bugged that it is not really displaying much understanding of Rayleigh–Taylor instability. The starkness of it, the length of the bright flash, the intense audio, the strange flying into it — it all works aesthetically.

Oppenheimer (2023)

And, of course, we have our most recent entry — Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer, which has the Trinity test about midpoint through the 3 hour film:

Nolan’s approach is a combination of practical effects — he famously eschewed doing this with CGI for artistic reasons — and editing, with lots of cuts that jump back and forth between different perspectives, the explosion, the fireball, etc. It’s largely silent, which is both uncharacteristic of him (I kept waiting for the THRONGGGG noises from Inception) and allows him to center it on the breathing of Oppenheimer.

I have very mixed feelings about how it came out. I think most of the footage that lets one see the “scale” of it makes it look small. It does not look very “nuclear” to me. It’s not hot enough, for one thing — the colors are too orange and too red, all too early. It’s not very mushroomy. It doesn’t move at the right speed for it to be as large as it was. Large things appear to more slowly than smaller things, because there’s much more to move. It’s why plausible kaiju are pondering and lumbering and men-in-suits kaiju are so obviously men in suits.

Also regarding the scale, there are way too many “sparks” — each of which would be the size of an automobile or larger if the explosion was properly scaled to kiloton range. Nuclear explosions don’t send out a shower of visible sparks.

If I were presumptuous enough to suggest what kind of editing might salvage this, I might suggest: color-grade it so that it felt hotter (more white-yellow, less orange-red) for longer, focus more on the zoomed-in shots, and slow it down considerably. That would get you something more like the third of the three original Trinity newsreel clips, done practically. For any other shots I would simply not show it in a way that would make it clear what its actual scale was, because it’s really hard to fake kiloton scales with what was probably only a few tons of TNT equivalent.

I think the final mushroom part of the fireball looks good — starting around 1:29 in the above clip — and I would linger on that a lot longer.

This is not my main critique of the Nolan film, but it’s bugged me ever since I saw it, because I feel like even with the commitment for purely practical effects, which I am totally fine with, there is a lot of room for improvement here. It doesn’t convey the awe to me.

But, again, I’m not the target audience, so maybe my sensations of it weren’t universal, and other people were more impressed by it.

Am I being too nit-picky? It’s entirely possible! But for me, the goal of a Hollywood version of the Trinity test should prioritize, above almost anything else, trying to convey that experience of it that someone there might have had. Something that goes beyond just watching the original footage. Awe, horror, “now we’re all sons of bitches,” the whole shebang.3

That’s the holy grail of a Hollywood Trinity test. I’m not sure any of the above fully pulled it off, but they each have their glimpses of it.

The length of time one might need to stay in the shelter would depend on how intense the fallout was, which could range from not at all (and thus the shelter could be left immediately after that became clear) to intense-enough to require staying inside for two weeks or so.

So how do you get people to spend their money, and their time, building additions to their homes to prepare for nuclear war? For this plan to work, tens of millions of people would already need these shelters in place whenever the war started, and the shelters would need to be build with some care (and kept stocked with emergency supplies, and tools like flashlights, radios, and, ideally, passive dosimeters that would give the people inside an indication of their radiation exposure).

Among the answers pursued to this question was, in classic governmental fashion, to produce pamphlets and reports. These made the argument for the shelters themselves, explained the science and reasoning behind them, and, in some of them, gave suggestions as to how to build them.

As I mentioned when I wrote about Civil Defense last week, I’m fascinated with the imagery in these pamphlets, especially in the way they imagine what life would look like in a shelter during a nuclear war. I’m particularly interested in how they depict the people making or using the shelter, both in who is in the shelter — you’ll be shocked to learn it’s the most generic white, Middle American suburban family possible — and how they are using the shelter. So in this post I’m just going to be looking at the visual imagery of the family in just a handful of the many, many fallout shelter pamphlets and reports from this period.1

The Family Fallout Shelter, 1959

The Family Fallout Shelter was a pamphlet published by the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization in June 1959, and meant for widespread usage by the general public.2 It was 32 pages long, entirely in black and white, and surveyed a number of different shelter types (and even included architectural diagrams in the back). Its internal art varies in style and quality enough that I suspect it must have had multiple artists involved, and perhaps was cannibalizing a previous pamphlet for parts of it. Most of its illustrations are of solitary young-to-middle-aged white men with tight haircuts building the shelter itself. But there are several drawings showing the “occupied” shelters, such as this basement shelter.

And this aboveground shelter:

And this standalone, underground shelter:

These are very odd, fascinating images, if taken as scenes from a nuclear war. It’s easy to gloss over them, but look at them closely, as if they were full of meaning and portent, and they’re quite interesting.

Why does the “mother” always sit, and with her back to the viewer? While the “child” is always positioned so we can see their face. In the first one, the child is staring at… the wall? In the second one, they are looking at the “mother.” In the last one, the “daughter” lies in bed (sleeping? injured? sick?), while what I presume is meant an older “son” is standing in the under-furnished shelter.

The “father” of the first one is projecting the stoic confidence we expect our leading man to have in this kind of drama. In the second, he is only potentially hinted at — a lone arm at the far left. (Presumably the opened doors are merely illustrative of their function, but there is a certain fun mystery to imagining that they were intentionally left open.) In the last image, I am imagining that the seated figure is the “father” — why is his back to the “mother”?

These are all such odd arrangements. If I were a screenwriter or playwright, I would want to imagine the conversations that these drawings are illustrating.

Later in the pamphlet are other images of the family, in a somewhat different style. These ones are very vertical so I have included the text accompanying them.

Now, under what appears to be a different artist, the “mother” is now facing the viewer, and it is the “father” whose back is towards us. The child is engaging in “simple recreation” — playing with a doll. This time, rather than just sitting idly, the “parents” having reading materials. Are they reading survival pamphlets? Magazines? What does one read to pass the time — hours, days, weeks — in a fallout shelter?

The above drawing comes from a section on “housekeeping problems” in the shelter. It is just very interesting that this pamphlet, most of which is about constructing shelter, presumes to tell families how to organize their domestic affairs within it. But I do appreciate that they highlight the difficulties of sanitation and toilets, which is something that gets left out of a lot of fallout shelter imaginations. Where are people going to poop, if they are down here for two weeks? (Answer: If there is a toilet nearby, maybe in there. Otherwise, you’ve got to have barrels or something for people to go in. Perhaps the living will envy the dead.)

I also just want to highlight that family drawing above is only of one in a “shelter” because the text implies it; they could be anywhere, out of context. We appear to have a “father” laying out the “housekeeping rules.” We have two “daughters” this time, of varying age. And we have a “mother” who is wearing slacks! Which, while not totally taboo for the time, is still a bit progressive for a government pamphlet published in 1959.

There is one more image I want to highlight, which comes not from the pamphlet itself, but from advertising that was produced for the pamphlet:

I don’t know the story behind why these were created or how they were distributed. The measurements are apparently (based on online auction records of several) 28cm x 53cm (11 in x 21 in), so they weren’t that large. They were made out of cardboard of some sort. The art is actually signed (“Lee,” to the left o the pail), which is a rarity for this sort of thing.

What makes this stand out to me is how different it is from the pamphlet it describes. It is vivid and colorful, obviously. Its typography feels bold an intentional (if a little too jaunty for the subject-matter). It shows a woman who is not obviously coded as a “mother” (!), wearing much more fashionable (and skin-showing) clothing (!!), with a much more fashionable hair-cut (!!!), and she appears to be helping in the construction of the shelter (!!!!). These choices both make this such a more interesting image by itself, but these choices really just highlight how much the pamphlet itself is committed to a “passive mother” role for its adult women. Fascinating differences…!

Survival in a Nuclear Attack, 1960

Survival in a Nuclear Attack was a report written by the New York State Committee on Fallout Protection, with its stated audience being Governor Nelson Rockefeller, dated February 1960. So it is coming out only a few months after The Family Fallout Shelter, and does re-use some of the imagery (such as the nuclear attack scenario). But most of its imagery seems original, and it has a distinctive and consistent graphic style that The Family Fallout Shelter did not have. And despite being a “report,” it is clear this was meant for mass distribution and consumption, and it had pretty high production standards and apparently plentiful copies were printed (you can pick them up for a song online; I have one).

The front matter makes clear that the Committee on Fallout Protection was assembled in July 1959, so right about the same time that The Family Fallout Shelter was published. The report is about twice as long as The Family Fallout Shelter, and is not strictly about how to build home shelters (it had an annexed “Report on Shelter Design” by an architectural firm that was designed for “architects, builders, and engineers”).

So it’s a very different “beast” than The Family Fallout Shelter. But I love its imagery so much that I couldn’t not include it.

What a cramped little space for four people to spend hours — much less possibly weeks — surviving in. One chair. The “father’s” head grazing the ceiling, only about two feet from the settled fallout above. The two children — one obviously a “daughter,” the other presumably a “son.” But it’s more fun to imagine them as just two different “daughters.” “Father,” what are you doing, here? Why are you standing in the middle of room? What do you have in your hand? (Why don’t you have any feet?)

But if you thought that one was uncomfortable looking, the “compact shelter” is here to make it look spacious by comparison. Imagined being stuck in this cramped space, not being able to sit up straight, much less stand. They try to make it look bearable — the people in the photograph are almost comically absorbed in their reading material — but even spending a few hours in such a space, much less days on end, sounds like it would be a miserable affair even if you weren’t spending the entire time worrying about whether you were getting a fatal radiation dose, whether everyone you knew outside the shelter was dead, and wondering what would be coming next.

This is a more fleshed-out shelter for our nuclear family. Both “mother” and “father” are looking at the sleeping children, which is a better pose than any of those in The Family Fallout Shelter, but “father,” please sit down, you’re making me uncomfortable with your acing about. “Mother” is reading what appears to be a magazine, and seated in a way that reads as casual confidence to me. She’s not worried at all. The kids are, against all odds, sleeping calmly. She’s got a magazine, a dosimeter, lighting, a radio, a first aid-kit, food, water, clean air, and a place for “waste.” What’s there to worry about? They’ve got this. It’s going to be fine. I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed.

I will say that I think they really did good work with their color accent in this pamphlet. If you only get one color, run with it. It gives the whole thing a sense of polish and shine that The Family Fallout Shelter’s grim black-and-white just can’t compete with. Arguably, though, the stylized nature of the art bleeds through a bit too much into the “message” of it — it’s just a bit too slick, and a bit too calm, to feel believable.

Fallout Protection, 1961

One last pamphlet to look at is Fallout Protection: What To Know About and Do About Nuclear Attack, which was published in December 1961 by the Office of Civil Defense in the Department of Defense. Where Survival in a Nuclear Attack used red as its accent color, Fallout Protection uses what I think of as “Civil Defense yellow,” the yellow paint that became ubiquitous with fallout shelter signs and Civil Defense hardware (dosimeters, Geiger counters, etc.) in the Kennedy administration.

This pamphlet is more like the Survival in a Nuclear Attack report than it is The Family Fallout Shelter, in that it deals with a lot of generalities, but it does try to depict some actual different kinds of shelter designs, even if it doesn’t give explicit instructions on how to make them.

I pulled out the above image just because it shows the same kind of “compact shelter” as seen in Survival in a Nuclear Attack, but shows it being constructed, and — importantly — by the whole family! That’s right, even your wife can help make your basement shelter in the 1960s (as long as she’s wearing an apron, and not actually handling any of the tools… actually, is she just “supervising”? Is she wearing shoes?).

I also like this drawing of the “cheap” option, which is just a series of pipes covered in dirt. Still, it looks a lot more comfortable than some of the other “compact” shelters, when you draw them with a little depth. Here the “mother” gets a dress in “Civil Defense yellow,” which is appropriate clothing given the occasion. “Father” is engaged in the conversation (presumably about whatever “mother” is reading) while taking some time to bring some fresh air into the shelter. It’s still hard to imagine spending weeks in there, but it does a bit better at making this feel like a lived-in scene, even if it still a bit too clean.

How many shelters got built?

I’m not trying to be too critical of the art for all of these. It is serving a purpose, I get that. But there’s a disconnect, here, that it inevitably provokes. What would people actually look like inside a family fallout shelter, under the circumstances of nuclear war? What would their body language look like? What would their clothing look like? What would their children be doing? What would they be thinking and talking about?

I’m not saying these reports and pamphlets ought to have tried to capture something real. That would defeat their purpose, which was trying to sell people on the idea of building these shelters. A realistic depiction of how people might look in a shelter of this sort, under the conditions in which you’d be using one, would be… disturbing, to say the least. The tension and anxiety alone would be difficult to look at. It would not be people at their best. And, of course, showing that sort of thing would probably not encourage people to build these things. If you can’t imagine yourself having a good time inside a shelter — if you only can imagine them as tombs — then what are the odds you’re going to spend the thousands of dollars (in modern currency) to make one?

So what do these images tell us about the “family fallout shelter” in this period, in general? The target audience is clearly a very white, very middle-to-upper-class one, and the person making the shelter is presumably the “father” figure. If you are going to be charitable, you would say: well, that’s the target demographic, because high-density urban areas are probably dead in the immediate attack (and have a different sort of Civil Defense profile), and they are targeting people with disposal time and income who will be persuaded by the idea that through their hard-work and preparation, they’ll protect themselves and their loved-ones. So they would naturally take dead aim at the suburban dads in this period, if they even considered any alternatives at all.

In practice, it isn’t clear how many people did actually make them; perhaps around 200,000, all together, which is perhaps more than you might expect, but is very low given the population size they were hoped to protect, and the fact that, by 1961, 53% of Americans believed that nuclear war was a likely possibility. As Kenneth D. Rose put it in his book, One Nation Underground, “What is clear is that at the height of Cold War tensions Americans talked a great deal about fallout shelters, but relatively few Americans actually built fallout shelters.”3

These pamphlets weren’t the whole of the Civil Defense effort, to be sure, and this imagery wasn’t what made it succeed or fail. But I’ve had suspicions for a long time that part of the difficulty that Civil Defense faced in the United States is actually visible in such products: a limited imagination about who could be enlisted in the idea, and a vast, obvious, yawning disconnect between the official imagery of nuclear war — so clean and comfortable — and what most people imagined it would look like, if they tried to imagine it at all.

This page contains it retyped with the appropriate spacing. And if you want to hear Corso read it aloud, here you go:

My own sense is that it starts out strong and then becomes perhaps a bit too associative for my tastes. The mushroom head starts out boldy:

               Budger of history   Brake of time   You   Bomb
      Toy of universe   Grandest of all snatched sky   I cannot hate you

And there’s a really smart section that faces whether death-by-bomb is so different than any other death in this world (apologies that the formatting is not quite capable of being preserved):

 Bomb   you are as cruel as man makes you   and you're no crueller than cancer
  All Man hates you   they'd rather die by car-crash   lightning   drowning
Falling off a roof   electric-chair  heart-attack   old age   old age   O Bomb
     They'd rather die by anything but you

Once you get further down the “stem” of it, it becomes a little less clear to me what’s going on. A poem is not merely a means of conveying ideas or a “message,” of course, and I can respect a strong turn of phrase. But I’m not really sure this works as well as the above:

                         Oppenheimer is seated
                       in the dark pocket of Light
                    Fermi is dry in Death's Mozambique
                         Einstein his mythmouth
                 a barnacled wreath on the moon-squid's head

And it does resort to perhaps a bit too much of the, err, “BING BANG BONG BOOM” towards the end:

                        O resound thy tanky knees
                     BOOM   BOOM   BOOM   BOOM   BOOM
                      BOOM ye skies and BOOM ye suns
                    BOOM BOOM ye moons   ye stars BOOM
                     nights ye BOOM   ye days ye BOOM
                 BOOM BOOM ye winds   ye clouds ye rains
                    go BANG ye lakes   ye oceans BING
                     Barracuda BOOM and cougar BOOM
                       Ubangi BOOM   orangutang 
                 BING BANG BONG BOOM   bee bear baboon
                        ye BANG ye BONG ye BING

I’m not an expert on the Beats, but I gather this sort of thing was bold in the 1950s, so I will give it due credit as a historical artifact while not finding it quite so compelling today…

It does have one really good line at the end though:

         that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be born

I’m not a poet nor much of a reader of poetry, but I have a lot of respect for that ability to craft a strong, resonant, powerful line. “In the hearts of men to come, more bombs will be born” works for me. “BING BANG BONG BOOM,” uh, doesn’t.

There are a lot of commentaries on “BOMB” over the years, and even at least one graduate thesis dedicated exclusively to it. The reception to the poem has been mixed — some heralding it as one of the great Beat offerings, some deriding it as fairly silly. A reviewer at Time magazine referred to it as “Beat blather,” which feels like one of those opinions that doesn’t age well. I find some Beat poetry very moving, and some parts of “BOMB” are great, even if a lot of it does very little for me.

There is a story that when it was read to a poetry group at Oxford, they disapproved of it. Many of the quotes about this reading say that shoes were thrown, although a later commentary from someone in attendance suggests this is an exaggeration, that the sentiment was rather that: “We thought it a lousy poem, but we threw no shoes.”

In 1981, Corso would call back to “BOMB” in his short poem, “Many Have Fallen”:

In 1958 I took to prophecy
the heaviest kind: Doomsday
It was announced in a frolicy poem called BOMB
and concluded like this:
Know that in the hearts of men to come
more bombs will be born
. . . yea, into our lives a bomb shall fall

Well, 20 years later
not one but 86 bombs, A-Bombs, have fallen
We bombed Utah, Nevada, New Mexico,
and all survived
. . . until two decades later
when the dead finally died

Which is far less “frolicy” than “BOMB,” and its brevity and focus is, at least for me, more powerful overall, even if it is a sort of grim victory lap to run on one’s career.

Bob Dylan wrote in Chronicles about his experiences with the Beats and “BOMB” in particular as he contemplated exiting from the world of fraternities, jobs, and the straight life:

I suppose what I was looking for was what I read about in On the Road — looking for the great city, looking for the speed, the sound of it, looking for what Allen Ginsberg had called the “hydrogen jukebox world.” Maybe I’d lived in it all my life, I didn’t know, but nobody ever called it that. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the other Beat poets, had called it “The kiss proof world of plastic toilet seats, Tampax and taxis.” That was okay, too, but the Gregory Corso poem “Bomb” was more to the point and touched the spirit of the times better — a wasted world and totally mechanized-a lot of hustle and bustle — a lot of shelves to clean, boxes to stack. I wasn’t going to pin my hopes on that.

…which is high praise, indeed.

I’m not sure “BOMB” does as much for me today, but hey, perhaps it shouldn’t — if something as rooted in its moment like “BOMB” didn’t feel a bit out of date 70 years later, what would that say about it, or us?

One of these was the highly eccentric Nuclear War Atlas by William Wheeler Bunge, published in 1988. Bunge was a “radical geographer” who believed that good cartography could be a political argument in and of itself, and a method for pushing a strong political agenda. He had (I later learned) published a poster-sized version of The Nuclear War Atlas in 1982:

The 1988 book took the same images and coupled them with considerably more text and some additional diagrams, and makes for an improvement, I think, even though the poster is a fascinating artifact in and of itself (if slightly deranged looking, from afar).

Bunge’s aesthetic choices, data sources, and general arguments are very early-to-mid-1980s. Some have aged better than others. A lot of them are adapted from previously existing images, some well-known and some obscure, but put into a common visual language (with the “red is the only color we need” color scheme). For example, this “dot map” discussing the total megatonnage of the global nuclear stockpile is pretty well-known, and pretty effective at conveying the orders of magnitude involved:

This is an effective image! Is it… accurate? I did some counting and concluded that it’s essentially correct, at least within the error bars of what was known (and not) in 1982 and what we know (and don’t) today.1

These kinds of graphics are sort of a dime a dozen in nuclear publications from the 1980s. The ones that stood out to me are the ones that Bunge himself made, which have a certain unhinged flair to them. He has a series of maps showing the progression of a 20-megaton H-bomb explosion in Chicago (a yield not outside of the possibility of what the Soviets were fielding in the early 1980s), and specifically his use of pictographs makes them stand out quite dramatically from what such maps usually look like:

It’s the little faces and labels that have always struck me about these maps. The “burns” and the “blind” and the “insane” and the “marauding zombies” — it’s just something unusual, even for anti-nuclear weapons literature. They simultaneously undermine any sense of serious objectivity while also emphasizing the grim horror of what is being contemplated.

Bunge was plainly trying to both use and subvert the tropes of these kinds of post-attack maps, which were by that point a routine fixture of Civil Defense publications. I’m torn between whether this increases or decreases the effectiveness. It probably depends on the audience.

Bunge’s text similarly makes no pretense of providing sterile analysis:

The “Proximity Argument,” the revolution in our planetary spatial relations, is forceful enough intellectually to match the horrendous situation. “Are we in a biological crisis of existence?” Yes! “How can we prove that?” Because there are no longer any safe interiors in which our babies can survive the next war. The weapons are up. Reproduction will be impossible. The battlefield is everywhere. Therefore World War III is treason — treason to our species, to say nothing of our nations. Species patriots, the humble mothers and fathers of our world, must save our kind. And to prepare for this titanic effort, we first must grasp where we literally stand, the true reality of our space, our modern geography.2

What follows are a few more of the graphics from Bunge that I thought were the most interesting and unusual. I apologize that the scans are not perfectly aligned — I made these some years back with the overhead book scanner at the Library of Congress, and my experience is that trying to get these perfectly aligned is not worth the effort.

Bunge’s work on nuclear matters is, for both better and worse, creative and bold. Bunge himself had a generally quite colorful and influential-if-unusual career, and was once apparently well-known among geographers as “Wild Bill.” He was born rich, and never quite evolved out of that sensibility (apparently), but had been a a member of the Communist Party in the 1960s (and expelled twice), and had a period of his life in academia prior to a mutual disentanglement. The stories from his friends about his behavior and manner give the impression that he was the kind of person that would euphemistically called “difficult.” I was struck by one line about him in particular, written by a friend of his:

We may never know whether Bill had been driven to madness by sinister hidden forces. It is doubtless that William Bunge was considered “crazy” by many who interacted with him. I would say “obsessed” was more to the point.3

Of course, one might wonder: was Bunge the insane one, or was (or is) the world insane? Well, perhaps “both” is an acceptable answer. Still, there are less productive and interesting ways to be insane.

And then… the screwdriver slipped. The top hemisphere slid over the plutonium, and it tipped just slightly over the edge of prompt criticality, creating a brief but intense nuclear reaction that showered Slotin and those around him with radiation and created a brief flash of blue light in the air around them. In less than a second, Slotin had reflexively knocked the top hemisphere off, and the reaction had stopped, but it was too late: he was walking dead, having absorbed enough radiation to kill him horribly and painfully within nine days.

The story of the so-called “Demon Core,” which was involved in two criticality accidents — the one that killed Slotin, and another, different accident that killed another scientist, Harry Daghlian, a year before — is part of the lore of the atomic age. A fictionalized version of the accidents was featured in the very first Hollywood film about the Manhattan Project (MGM’s The Beginning or the End?, from 1947), as well as in the 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy. And over the years there have been many non-fiction accounts of the accident, with ever more details emerging over time; if you do want more details on the accident, the core, and the aftermath, you might take a look at an article I published on it a few years back, for example.

What really has fascinated me about the Slotin accident in particular, though, is the emergence of an entire ecosystem of “memes” about it. The first one I can remember seeing in this one, in 2019:

You could, at the time, only buy it on a T-shirt from someone on Etsy based out of Japan, but now there are a million knock-off/duplicates available on the Internet. I don’t know who the original author was, but at the time I was pretty amazed at it — it felt like something of a “deep cut,” because you had to recognize the entire Slotin set-up in order to see why this somewhat kawaii rendering of the Slotin experiment, along with the “I love science” phrasing, was a form of dark humor.

I don’t remember seeing “Demon Core” memes prior to the above. I am sure one can find earlier ones — that was just the first one that came across my computer screen. Google Trends has some interesting results on this:

The above is showing the relative search volume of three terms: “Louis Slotin” (red, always very low), “Demon Core” (blue, interesting spikes, and a growing relevancy from 2019 onward), and “NUKEMAP” (yellow, included as something of a “control” — something I consider “somewhat well-known in certain circles” but not “universally well-known”; about 1/4th of my engineering-school freshmen this year had heard of the NUKEMAP before taking any courses with me). My reading of this is that the “Demon Core” was still pretty obscure among non-nuke-nerds until around 2019/2020, when it “broke through” some barrier and is now something that can readily referenced online and you would expect a significant fraction of the readership (esp. geeky boys, I imagine) to recognize.

Since 2019 or so there has been an, er, explosion of “Demon Core”/Slotin experiment memes. The veritable source Know-Your-Meme created a dedicated “Demon Core” page in May 2021, showcasing some of the variety of the meme. Most of the initial ones seem to be of the same sort of kawaii (Japanese for “cute”) model as the one above, transporting it into a context of anime girls, cats, and anime cat girls:

What is going on here? I am not exceptionally well-versed in anime or manga tropes, but I think the “obvious” reading of this is a classic case of “unexpected juxtaposition creates humor.” That is, moving something from one context (“Demon Core,” radiation experiment, horrible death) into another (cute, anime, girls) creates something that feels novel and unusual. One could no doubt analyze many different dimensions of juxtaposition at work here, including the gender roles: Slotin was not just male, but the entire accident was caused by the sort of risk-taking bravado (which had he been explicitly warned about) that anyone who has spent time as or around young men recognizes immediately. So having a cute Japanese schoolgirl performing this very male-coded experiment is quite a switch in tone — and one that probably also is dually resonant with the “geeky boy” demographic that I suspect is largely the primary “receiver” and “transmitter” of the meme.

The Slotin accident has also achieved, in recent years, that “sweet spot” of “if you know, you know” virality: it’s not so well-known that everyone would get it, but it’s also not so obscure that only dedicated wonks or experts would know about it (a reference to the Kelley accident, or the SL-1 accident, would be probably too deep a cut to go viral).

I have not made a full survey or taxonomy of these memes; there are dozens and dozens, if not more. The ones above I would categorize as “entirely new drawings,” in which the Demon Core pictures are used as reference, but the entire style is novel. There also cases where the Demon Core pictures (or self-serious drawings/renderings of the experiment) are added to existing meme formats, such as the “pondering my orb” wizard:

There is also quite a few of the “take a stock photograph of a product and add the Demon Core to it” variety:

And so on — there are an almost unlimited number. There are arguably no tasteful versions of this meme, of course. (XKCD, perhaps, comes closest.) Because it’s a meme derived from human suffering. It’s meant to be in bad taste — that’s the source of the humor.

The medical details of the “Demon Core” accidents are pretty horrible. The photographs of the victims are not something you probably want to see — they are bad. I have described them elsewhere. Suffice to say these were extremely painful deaths, involving a body whose internal cellular processes were breaking down in real time under the influence of billions of tiny cellular cuts, and all the while the poor scientists were being monitored, photographed, and (ultimately) inventoried. Slotin’s hubris and bravado caused his death, but it didn’t mean he deserved that suffering, and it doesn’t mean we can’t feel sorry for him, one human to another. I am not trying to be a scold. We just have to remember that we are not making fun of an abstract idea, here. There was real suffering involved.

And… yet. What is interesting to me about many of the initial memes, especially the anime ones, is that they appear to have originated from Japan. And that adds a wrinkle to the sentiment here.

The “Demon Core” was, as people who know the full story are well-aware, was actually the third plutonium core fabricated, after the one detonated at Trinity and the one detonated over Nagasaki, and would have almost surely been used over a Japanese city had World War II continued for a few more weeks. The plutonium core before it killed some 40,000–70,000 people, mostly Japanese civilians but also Korean laborers and even some Allied Prisoners of War, at Nagasaki. The “Demon Core” killed two American weapons scientists, and at least in Slotin’s case was entirely preventable and due to a lack of proper procedure and respect for the hazards involved.

So perhaps if anybody has a “right” to make jokes in poor taste about the “Demon Core”… it might be the Japanese? Because Americans have made jokes about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki since they occurred. One can’t just attribute it to wartime sentiment. Well after the suffering of the Japanese victims was public knowledge, and after the Japanese became a key American ally, there were still novelty songs about the killing of cities. Even just a few weeks ago, Saturday Night Live featured a joke in particularly bad taste about the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to atomic bomb survivors. I’m not here to be the humor police, or to say things should be “off limits” for comedy, or that it’s “too soon,” or make any other scolding noises. Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world. The bomb is no stranger to such treatment, of course — consider Dr. Strangelove, or Tom Lehrer — although my sense is that the “Demon Core” memes are not, in any serious way, making conscious “interventions” in how people think about the risks of the nuclear world.

In 1963, Dylan (under a pseudonym) sang a duet version of the song with the folk artist Happy Traum, and this version was included on an album of folk protest songs:

The song’s lyrics are haunting and interesting even without knowing that they are about fallout shelters:

I will not go down under the ground
’Cause somebody tells me that death's comin' 'round
An' I will not carry myself down to die
When I go to my grave my head will be high,
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground.

There's been rumors of war and wars that have been
The meaning of the life has been lost in the wind
And some people thinkin' that the end is close by
’Stead of learnin' to live they are learning to die.
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground.

The song was written a few months prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which makes it feel particularly topical. But in an interview for the liner notes of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), Dylan said the song was inspired several years earlier by watching the construction of a mass shelter:

I was going through some town and they were making this bomb shelter right outside of town, one of these sort of Coliseum-type things and there were construction workers and everything. I was there for about an hour, just looking at them build, and I just wrote the song in my head back then, but I carried it with me for two years until I finally wrote it down. As I watched them building, it struck me sort of funny that they would concentrate so much on digging a hole underground when there were so many other things they should do in life. If nothing else, they could look at the sky, and walk around and live a little bit, instead of doing this immoral thing.

The quote above, and the song, were ultimately cut from the album. Why? Who can say — perhaps it just didn’t make the cut (and it was one of several dozen songs that didn’t make the cut). In many ways, it is a very traditional sort of folk protest song, at least compared to several of the other “war-related” songs on the same album, like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “Talkin' World War III Blues,” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” The latter, in my view (again, a subject for a future post), is just a shockingly dark and fascinating work of art. “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” is interesting, but it doesn’t quite rate.

The plans for public blast and fallout shelters had begun during the Eisenhower administration, but it was Kennedy who made the biggest push for specifically fallout shelters. The two main prongs of this were the efforts to encourage suburban homeowners to build their own basement and backyard shelters, and a massive program for identifying and labeling existing spaces in urban areas that met certain structural requirements and could be used as mass shelters in the event of a nuclear war, assuming they were stocked with adequate supplies. This had started in 1961 and was in full-swing by 1962, and was accompanied by a major publicity blitz.

Unlike a lot of Civil Defense planning, the mass shelter identification program, which was coupled with a push for more suburban homeowners to build their own fallout shelters, was the kind of thing that necessarily became part of the public zeitgeist, because it reached out and very visibly modified the everyday world.

Even today one frequently sees remnants of the program when walking around New York City, with signs in various conditions — some perfectly preserved, some which have acquired a thick patina of paint and graffiti after 60 years of service.

The program was instantly controversial, and viewed by many with deep suspicion and cynicism. Who was profiting from this? Would it matter or help? Is this the best we can do?

Dylan’s song makes its own argument very clear. Towards the end of the song, he offers up an alternative, contrasting the concrete tombs with an opposite existence rooted in tropes of nature and life:

Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood
Let me smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood
Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves
Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace.
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground.

Of course, the Civil Defense planners would say, you’ve got it all wrong! Standing out in the field is how you die, in this case! The shelter is for survival, for living! Which gets at the core question: if a nuclear war happens, is it better to be a survivor, or among the dead? (There will be more on the trope of “the living will envy the dead” in a future post.)

The association between fallout shelters and death was, and still remains, a common popular critique. The official fallout shelter messaging of the 1960s tried to make them look less grim. The graphics developed by New York State and the Department of Defense for their various pamphlets justifying the suburban shelter program make it look like it would be barely an inconvenience to wait out the aftermath of a nuclear war. White, middle-class nuclear families lounge around in their immaculate homemade shelters, reading books and engaging in thoughtful conversation, while they wait for the outdoor levels of radioactivity to drop from acutely dangerous to merely a chronic hazard. Sure, millions of people may have just been killed, but that’s nothing to panic about.

The absurdity of such imagery, juxtaposed as they must be with the lurking horror of the possible realities of the war that would require such a shelter, is obvious on its face. It is so absurd, I suspect, that the rest of the message gets completely lost. These are not shelters for living in for years and centuries, as many then and today imagine them; they are meant for a maximum occupancy of 2 weeks. Which, while a lot less than a century, is still a lot of time to imagine being crammed into the “prefab backyard shelter for four” shown above. (Do note the lack of a toilet.)

Mass shelter imagery is a bit more grim — even if you depict a large number of people massing in tight underground barracks getting along reasonably well, it still takes on an instantly dystopian, disturbing vibe. It is distinctly subterranean, and it is hard to put a good face on that. This is survival, perhaps — but is it living? We know what Dylan thinks.

Protests against Civil Defense stretch back a bit prior to the fallout shelter program. In the 1950s, many American cities were the subject of annual Civil Defense exercises under the heading of “Operation Alert,” in which citizens were required to simulate and practice what they would do in the event of a nuclear attack. One can understand the practical rationale for these exercises — if people acting in the right way en masse during a nuclear attack would save millions of lives, then you’d want to make sure that they already knew what the “right way” was before the attack, and would want to make sure that in a city of millions, you had some idea of how well it might work and unanticipated problems — while also appreciating how polarizing this would be, to suddenly have millions of people “practice” for nuclear war.

One can also understand why many people, especially those opposed to nuclear weapons and militarism in general, saw this as a dubious activity — “learnin’ to die,” as Dylan put it. Over time, these events began to become the focus of protest activity and civil disobedience by people who believed them to be masking the grim realities about nuclear destruction.

In Dylan’s New York City, the first Operation Alert exercise, in 1954, had occurred without obvious incident. But the 1955 exercise provoked a protest by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers outside of City Hall. They refused to take shelter, and instead handed out leaflets which read:

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.

Nearly 30 people were arrested as a part of these protests. Bill Geerhart, who has maintained the blog CONELRAD Adjacent for over a decade, described the entire incident very vividly in a post from 2010, including the outcomes fro the protesters.

I find the protests against Civil Defense quite fascinating. It is easy to see how the Civil Defense planners would respond to the particular complaints and charges by the protesters, which are based less on a detailed technical analysis of the viability or futility of the specific countermeasures proposed, but on the sense that at its heart, these kinds of preparations for nuclear war are darkly absurd at their very core, so absurd that they are impossible to take seriously as anything other than propaganda.

The historical reality of that is, I think, a bit more complicated — they were not quite so cynical or sinister as they were charged to be, and their technical feasibility depends on a lot of assumptions and factors — but this strong, almost instinctual rejection of Civil Defense, which started with relatively “fringe” figures like pacifists in the 1950s and gradually became the “standard” public sentiment by the 1980s is an extremely interesting case study in the difficulties of communicating effectively about a large-scale existential risk.

When I first moved to the area, I believe this sign was used to tally up the national debt or something like that. I recalled that a few years ago (in 2020, it turns out) it had changed to something new: the Climate Clock, counting down “the critical time window remaining for humanity to act to save itself and its only home from the ravages of climate chaos,” as its website explains:

To stay under 1.5°C warming, and prevent the worst effects of climate change from becoming irreversible, in September 2020, the Clock told us we have an alarmingly short 7 years, 102 days, and counting to make a radical transition off of fossil fuels. It struck a nerve across the world, and quickly established itself as an iconic reference point for the urgent need for climate action.

What I thought when I saw it this time was, oh, a little over five years — that’s apt. One of my favorite songs, from even before I started bathing in apocalypses, is David Bowie’s “Five Years,” the first track from his groundbreaking 1972 glam concept-album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

“Five Years” is a great track, and having it start off an album like Ziggy Stardust is just so striking. The slow fade-in really makes you feel like you’re entering into some kind of other world, and the ballad’s lyrics are a master-class in world-building science fiction as pop song:

Pushing through the market square
So many mothers sighing
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in

News guy wept and told us
Earth… was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying

I heard telephones, opera house, favourite melodies
I saw boys, toys, electric irons and TVs

My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there

And all the fat, skinny people
And all the tall, short people
And all the nobody people
And all the somebody people
I never thought I'd need… so many people

[…]

We've got five years, stuck on my eyes!
Five years, what a surprise!
We've got five years, my brain hurts a lot!
Five years, that's all we've got!

What the song has always done for me, since the first time I really, truly listened to it (which was either late high school or early college), is conjure up a mindset. What would you do, and feel, if you knew the Earth only had five years left? How would you spend that time? What choices would you make?

The song never specifies the nature of the disaster in “Five Years,” which is what keeps it from being an “issue song,” in part — it really wouldn’t work, narratively, if it was about an alien invasion, or climate change, or an asteroid strike, or whatever. And it would probably have dated itself much more acutely.

In interviews, Bowie doesn’t seem to have elaborated on the catastrophe he had in mind. For him, it was primarily part of the quasi-concept album set piece (Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars were a band for the end of the world), although he once said that it was about the Earth running out of resources. Which would fit with the time period as a threat more than, say, nuclear war (the naturalistic apocalypticism of the early 1970s was more about things like economic collapse and resource depletion than it was about nuclear war or nuclear meltdowns).

Which brings us back to the Climate Clock. Do we have only five years left before disaster is “baked in” to our present world? I don’t know — I’m sure there are those who say yes, and those who say no (including those who say that it is actually a shorter interval, or already has been baked in). I don’t need a lot of convincing to think that we’re careening towards a cliff on climate matters, personally, even if I am unsure of the specifics (and unsure that anyone is sure of the specifics).

The more interesting question for me is: What kinds of emotional and practical responses does the Climate Clock evoke? What kinds of goals is it trying to achieve? The short answer is that the goal is to capture attention and generate a sense of urgency, and the website of the organization that runs the clock has lots of possible places where people can pledge their time (and money) if they are so moved to do so. My guess as to the emotional state they are trying to conjure up is… Anxiety? Unease? Fear? Urgency?

Is this kind of thing the best approach to getting action on climate change? I don’t think there are easy answers, there, and I am positive that if you sampled a large group of relatively informed people you’d get different perspectives. Even if you did controlled experiments on a representative sample of people, you’d certainly get different results based on things like age, education, and (of course) political ideologies. I’m aware that within the climate communication community, there are really divergent views on the value of “scare tactics” as a way of provoking either urgent action or long-term engagement.

The main argument against them is that the can easily encourage a numb fatalism, especially over time. This is the case even with, or perhaps especially with, people who believe climate change is a real and urgent threat, like myself. It’s almost too easy to conclude, after years of seeing this kind of message (almost literally) shouted from the tops of buildings, and feeling like the actions being taken are all underwhelming and inadequate. And every step forward seems like it comes with the possibility of ten steps backwards; there are real reactionaries out there, and they would literally burn the planet down just to spite the people who care about it. It’s almost too easy, and too tempting, to just throw one’s hands up and say: fine, if you can’t see reason, if you can’t see beyond green, then enjoy your hellscape, I won’t be here for it.

Which is certainly not a useful attitude. And it is not an entirely accurate one: progress may be inadequate, but that’s not to say it is non-existent. The future is yet to be written — we should not, like the reactionaries, embrace a dark nihilism about it, even though that is psychologically much easier than grappling with the frustrations involved.

I wrote an op-ed in 2023 for the Los Angeles Times about one of the real difficulties with applying the “clock” visual metaphor to climate change. This was in the context of the more famous Doomsday Clock, which was created as a metaphor for nuclear war risks in the late 1940s. I think the clock metaphor works pretty well for nuclear war, which is a disaster that, if it happens, will probably unfold relatively quickly, and whose risk can wander backwards and forwards depending on the political winds. Climate change, however, works somewhat differently:

Climate change is a different kind of risk altogether. There won’t be some single abrupt event that ends the world. It’s what scholars call a “slow disaster,” something that will unfold over decades, even centuries. It’ll just be a world that gets harder to live in, with devastating local disasters, worsening weather extremes and growing systemic problems. But there will be no single Earth-killing moment. The symbol of this kind of threat isn’t a clock — it’s one of those ever-proliferating graphs that shows the temperature going upwards into new highs.

I’m not all that sure that anyone will be able to say that the Climate Clock’s countdown will trigger much action. I’d be happy to be wrong, though. Wouldn’t it be nice, if they could shut it down before it got too close to zero? But that seems… unlikely. I wonder, to what degree, the Climate Clock’s creators have planned to do when it approaches zero. I guess we’ll see.

Bowie’s song assumes that the reaction to the newsman announcing a five year lifespan for Earth is mostly chaotic and sad. There is one section, where the verse switches to talking about “you” in the second person, which hints at another possibility:

I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour
Drinking milkshakes cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine
Don’t think you knew you were in this song

This happy, blissful, beautiful person doesn’t realize they’re in an apocalypse, they don’t get that they’re in a song about the end of the world. Is the milkshake-drinker someone who is ignorant, a denialist, or just someone who isn’t trying to focus on the daily dread of having a gigantic timer looming above their head? What kind of figure are they, really, and what should our attitude be towards them?

Are we in this song? And if we are, do we know it?

“By virtually every yardstick you care to use,” a U.S. Army official told Congress in 1983, “Germany probably has the greatest imposed defense burden of any nation.” With 62 million people, it is equal in population to the United States west of the Mississippi. Yet it is no larger than the state of Oregon. Stationed on West German soil are more than 725,000 foreign soldiers (including their family members) and 495,000 West German military personnel. If the United States had the same proportion, it would have a standing military of about 3.4 million, or five times what it currently has stationed in the fifty states.

There are over 4,000 individual military facilities in West Germany (Oregon, by comparison, has thirty-four) and the U.S. military maintains well over 1,000 of these. In this densely populated and highly developed country, NATO military forces have free rights to maneuver on both public and private land. The United States conducts about 5,000 military exercises a year at 226 training areas. Eighty of these are considered "major" maneuvers.

West Germany is the military center of Europe, the most heavily armed and densely nuclearized region in the world. The most discussed war scenario is for war in Europe. Over 2,700 NATO and 3,500 Soviet nuclear delivery vehicles and 9,000 warheads are deployed in Europe or facing Europe. Additional weapons in the Soviet Union and the United States are ready to “reinforce” the theater. In the surrounding seas, naval forces have still more warheads, bringing the region’s total to about 17,000 or one-third of the world’s arsenals. […]

The nuclear infrastructure in Europe is so extensive that even the most limited nuclear exchanges would involve hundreds of targets. As many as 1,000 of these potential targets are located in West Germany and East Germany alone.1

No surprise, then, that the German youth in particular took a rather dim view on what this would mean to their collective longevity. While the salience of nuclear warfare in the 1980s was high even in the United States, one has to imagine it was much higher in Germany.

Themes related to nuclear weapons in US-produced media in the early 1980s tended to be very “on the nose,” in the sense that there were many high-profile attempts to directly deal with nuclear weapons and nuclear war as “issues.” The Day After and WarGames were about as “direct” as you can get, with the latter only using then-hypothetical AIs and teenage hijinks as a way to “break” that “directness” a bit. Undoubtedly there were similar kinds of things produced in West Germany, but I find it interesting that the concerns about nuclear holocaust were great enough that the seem to “bleed” into other media in more subtle ways, including media that was then taken up in the United States without many Americans apparently realizing what it was about.

Two West German pop songs jump out to me when I think about this kind of phenomena. The first was a school “slow dance” staple in the United States, even when I was in school about a decade later: “Forever Young” by Alphaville (1984), whose members originated in the West Germany city of Münster.

Its nuclear themes are blink-and-you-miss them, and mixed in with some more gnomic verses (apparently the band’s English was not great), but the song’s meaning is fairly clear when you pay attention to what’s being said:2

Let's dance in style, let’s dance for a while
Heaven can wait, we’re only watching the skies
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst
Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?

Let us die young or let us live forever
We don’t have the power but we never say never
Sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip
The music’s for the sad men

Can you imagine when this race is won
Turn our golden faces into the sun
Praising our leaders, we're getting in tune
The music’s played by the, the mad man

Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever?
Forever, and ever
Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever?
Forever young

It’s an excellent, if at times awkwardly-worded, summation of a certain generational fatalism: the sense, which many Gen X Americans I know have attested to me, that they did not expect the world to avoid a total collapse in their lifetime, and thus they were unlikely to live to an old age. It makes for an interesting juxtaposition, in a way: teenagers slow-dancing and slow-groping to a song about how they might be incinerated. “Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?,” indeed.3

A better-written song from the same period, which achieved even greater heights of popularity, is Nena’s “99 Luftballoons” (1983), with an English version released as “99 Red Balloons” (1984).

Despite its lyrics being relatively direct, and its music video featuring copious explosions, my experience is that when I bring it up today, most Americans don’t seem to actually know what the song is about. The beginning of the English lyrics lay out the plot:

You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got
Set them free at the break of dawn
'Til one by one, they were gone
Back at base, bugs in the software
Flash the message, "Something's out there!"
Floating in the summer sky
Ninety-nine red balloons go by

Ninety-nine red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it's red alert!
There's something here from somewhere else!
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky
When ninety-nine red balloons go by

In other words, the protagonist in the song has released a large number of balloons, which the early-warning systems of the military installations so densely clustered in the band’s native West Berlin mistake for “something,” causing “the war machine” to “spring to life.” As the song continues, the militaries of the world scramble their forces (the “knight of the air,” with everyone believing themselves to be a masculine hero, a “Captain Kirk”), believing this to be “what we've waited for / This is it, boys, this is war.”

The German version is much the same as the English, but does change it slightly. Instead of “There's something here from somewhere else!”, the German has “Hielt man für Ufos aus dem All,” which translates to, “They thought they [the balloons] were UFOs from outer space.” A later verse explains that after the seeing the West blast the balloons out of the sky, their “neighbors” (the East Germans/Soviets) don’t understand and feel like they were under attack, leading to the full war.

Personally, I prefer the ambiguity of the English version. Making it about a fear of UFOs undercuts the narrative’s plausibility, and makes it more farcical. The English version allows for the interpretation that the balloons are interpreted as some kind of enemy attack, and makes the song a better warning about the dangers of a hair-trigger posture. The US and Soviet early warning systems did, famously, give false alarms, including by misinterpretation of benign objects: in 1960, a NORAD station in Greenland mistook the rising moon for dozens of incoming Soviet missiles, and in 1983 (unknown to Nena), a Soviet early-warning system interpreted the sun reflecting off of clouds in an unusual way as incoming ICBMs, to name two relatively-easy to corroborate cases.4

I’ve used “99 Red Balloons” when teaching about the Cold War nuclear threat and its popular salience — college students today, in my experience, tend to be only dimly aware of the song at all, and it definitely comes as a surprise for them to look at the lyrics closely. I’ve never used “Forever Young” in this context, because I hadn’t really given it a lot of attention myself until relatively recently, but I suspect the two paired up could produce interesting conversations about whether or not their own anxieties (which are numerous, although generally not related to nuclear war) “bleed out” into the art they produce and the media they consume.

The premise of the show is that history, especially the history of technology, can be thought of as a series of unusual “connections,” where something that happens in one place or time leads to something else happening in another place or time.

It’s a very fun premise for a show. The essence of its model of history — that everything is connected through time, that history moves in unexpected directions — is better than a lot of alternatives out there, even if it is incomplete in many ways. But I appreciate its willingness to try and cover a pretty wide spectrum of time and ideas. (My friend Latif Nasser did a riff on it in his own Netflix show, CONNECTED, in 2020. You can watch me sweating through the New Mexico heat in Episode 6, “Nukes.” And I just now realized that Burke has made something of an update to the series as recently as 2023.)

The first full episode of the series was called “The Trigger Effect,” and I was once assigned to watch this in a course on the history of technology when I was an undergraduate. I’ve since had many courses of students of my own watch it, because it’s pretty interesting. The basic premise is taken from a real event, one of the several times in which New York City suffered a catastrophic power loss in the 1970s. What happens, Burke asks, when the electricity goes out in a modern environment? And what happens when it doesn’t come back on again? And what would happen if it never came back on again? And what does this tell us about the nature of modern civilization and its dependency on technology?

Below is an edit I’ve made of the episode that is about 30 minutes long. I’ve trimmed out some bit at the beginning and end that is plugging the rest of the series, and a longish-interlude that I don’t think is necessary for my purposes here. It’s worth the watch. My commentary on it will follow, but you should watch it first.

So there is an obvious cut that I made which trims out his discussion about the origins of agriculture and “civilization” (from the Fertile Crescent to Ancient Egypt). His ultimate argument thus evolves a bit into the idea that if you pull the rug out on electricity in particular, you end up having to go very far “back” technologically to “restart” the whole process.

Whether that’s true or not in a strict sense is, of course, debatable. But it’s still a fun idea — that what we call “civilization” is maintained by a technological infrastructure that is vast, often invisible to us, but perhaps more brittle than we’d like to believe.

The question of how brittle is our modern technological civilization is the question of how much resilience there is — how adaptable is our system to sudden shocks, failures, collapses, and so on. It was impressive to me to see how much COVID revealed about how brittle our logistical systems were, for example; that market forces had created a system that was arguably a lot less resilient than it had been a few decades prior.

I get a lot of pleasure showing this to undergraduates. It’s provocative and always generates interesting discussions. I think the very of its time aspects of it make it easier for them to see it as something that can be engaged with and critiqued (as opposed to something with a more “modern” and “slick” aesthetic). Burke’s basic argument, that people living in technologically-based civilization subject themselves to a “technology trap” constantly — because our way of life is entirely dependent on the functioning of large, complex, and fallible technology systems — is often quite surprising, yet clearly true to some degree, to people who have not as of yet considered it.

One can take issue with some of his generalizations, like about what happens if the technology suddenly fails:

But what happens when the effects become widespread, irreversible, devastating? What happens when what little resources you have to help you cope… give up? Then what?

Well, in all the disaster scenarios you read, what happens is that without power, technologically-based civilization cracks up rapidly. Without enough auxiliary power, and most major cities don’t have it, organization is impossible. It’s every man for himself. Looting and arson follow. And in a city not prepared to be a fortress, supplies run out.

I think two words in above are doing a lot of rhetorical “work.” First is “disaster scenario,” by which I think he means something between “speculative predictions” and “speculative fiction” about how people would respond to this kind of disaster (whether we call them “predictions” or “fictions” is something to dwell on by itself). Because he’s not describing something that we have records of actually happening, and that’s because he has slipped in another condition to this scenario. And that’s hidden in the other word doing a lot of work here: “irreversible.”

The chief example he gives in the clip, the New York City blackout, was not irreversible. Obviously. The whole premise falls apart if you take that word out of his scenario. Which gets us back to the question of resilience, again. If the power comes back on in a few hours, it’s mostly an irritation. If it never comes on, that’s what feels like some kind of apocalypse and “reset.”

And it’s worth pointing out explicitly that basing any broader theory of technology and civilization around the specific conditions of New York City in the 1970s is… an interesting choice. We don’t have to dwell on it, but it’s clear that New York in the ‘70s was a pretty specific context, with aspects both good and terrible.1 One similarly can’t really base conclusions on what people might do in the aftermath of nuclear explosion entirely on the cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — those are very specific places, peoples, and times.

But putting that aside, the transition he makes from high-minded discussion of technological society to post-apocalyptic survival narrative is both smooth and effective:

So, sooner or later, exhausted and desperate, you may have to make the decision to give up and die. Or to make somebody else give up and die because they won’t accept you in their home voluntarily. And what, in your comfortable urban life, has ever prepared you for that decision?

Repositioning the narrative from the perspective of the viewer is a really great rhetorical move, here, especially in such a gripping (if well-worn) way. That he can then step back from this horror story and transition to a discussion about the development of agriculture in Mesopotamia is, well, kind of brilliant. It works.

What I like about this clip isn’t so much that I think it’s accurate. It rests on too many assumptions about human behavior, and too many arbitrary and potentially implausible assumptions about the “disaster scenario,” to make its point, for example. And its model of the relationship between technology and society doesn’t quite give society as much credit as it really deserves; the semi-catastrophic results after the New York City blackout were arguably much more the result of social conditions than technological ones.

But, the clip is still is wonderfully provocative, and a really fun example of tying together what might appear to be very different domains of thought, like ancient history and social reactions to infrastructure failures, in the service of encouraging deeper thought about what it means to live in a civilization such as our own. Students tend to want to argue about it, and that’s sort of the point of showing it, right? But even I enjoy arguing with myself about it.

This isn’t even close to a new phenomena. The earliest instance of this that I know about is from a New York city publication, PM Magazine, which published a “what would happen to New York?” image in its August 7, 1945 issue — a day after the Hiroshima bombing:2

The now-famous image of the damage of Hiroshima as seen from the air, with its damage annotated, was not released until August 8, 1945, as I have written about elsewhere.

This impulse, to mirror the attack on the other onto the self, is a fascinating one in its own right. On its face, it is an attempt grapple with the difficult issue of scale, as making intuitive sense of arbitrary diameters is hard for most of us without a visual aid, and using a relatively familiar landmark as the basis of the visualization aids all the more. (Thus, NUKEMAP.)

Dig a little deeper, and there’s something else clearly going on here: a projection of the self as hypothetical victim. There’s something simultaneously empathetic and narcissistic about that, at least in the case of the United States, especially so soon after Hiroshima, but even in general, as for many years the United States was the only nation capable of enacting such destruction onto anybody’s cities, and certainly the most capable nation of doing so for several decades to come.

Of all of the visualizations of “what would happen here?,” though, the ones I find most striking are the paintings that were created by the famed science fiction and space illustrator Chesley Bonestell for Collier’s magazine in August 1950 for the 5-year anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. The magazine, published one year after the first Soviet atomic bomb test had been announced by President Truman, ran a cover story with the evocative title: “Hiroshima, U.S.A.”

Matt Novak has a great write-up of the issue and the story at Paleofuture and Smithsonian.com. But what I want to focus on here is the art work by Bonestell. The cover alone is pretty great, even though it covers fairly familiar ground: a nuclear weapon over Manhattan, almost immediately after exploding. Almost all photographs of nuclear mushroom clouds are within the first minute or so of the explosion, often the first few seconds — that’s when you see the dramatic fireball and blast wave.3

Bonestell’s painting gives a great sense of motion, though. It’s not just a cloud superimposed on a static skyline, and the angle he’s chosen is one that gives one a great sense of visual depth and scale. And, with all of his painting, there is an obvious attention to technical detail, in the sense that the scale is accurate for the type of atomic bombs that were under consideration. Though the US was fielding weapons with twice this yield already, and much larger weapons were right around the corner, most Civil Defense discussion was concerned with “nominal” atomic bombs of about 20 kilotons in yield, the same as used at Trinity, Nagasaki, the Operation Crossroads test, and the first Soviet test.

The image above, from the same magazine spread, shows the atomic attack imagined: two “nominal” atomic bombs being used against New York City. The first appears to have detonated somewhere near the Brooklyn/Queens border, while the second detonated in lower Manhattan, across from the Brooklyn Naval yard. In the above photograph, the one in Brooklyn/Queen has detonated perhaps a few minutes before the second one, as its cloud has already “mushroomed,” and appears to have started a few fires near Roosevelt Island and in midtown. The Manhattan bomb is detonating, relatively low, and exhibits what might be a condensation cloud. Its blast wave is palpably visible.

Bonestell’s commitment to realism is what sells the image. It’s dramatic, but not absurd. It doesn’t look like science fiction. It looks like what you’d imagine it might actually look like, were it to happen, if you could see it from an airplane a few thousand feet above the city.

But the real showcase image is the one above, a two-page spread showing the aftermath a few hours later. Here there are no mushroom clouds, as those stabilize and blow away within 20-30 minutes after the detonation. Instead we have the dark columns of smoke from the secondary fires, which have clearly been raging.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get a scan of this image that does it justice, carefully disassembling an original copy of the Collier’s issue and performing some Photoshop magic on it, to more or less good effect.4 Aside from the overall gestalt, the details are excellently rendered. Here’s lower Manhattan, near Battery Park:

The burning, the buildings, the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge, the sense of ongoing fires and horror — just wonderfully done. It’s not a landscape that has been sterilized and swept clean. It’s an ongoing event, a horror that persists, with a choking, gritty flavor to it. The landmarks are there, but they aren’t the focus of the attack, or the image.

Moving up to midtown, Bonestell works in the Empire State Building, though it’s almost a Where’s Waldo situation for it, among the carnage. South of it, one sees how the lower East Side has been reduced to unrecognizable rubble by the effects of the blast, and possible secondary fires which have already swept through it. This is, again, pretty realistic for the scenario contemplated.

And as someone who lives and works on the other side of the Hudson River, I think it’s interesting that he chose to show it, as well. The Jersey City and Hoboken docks appear to be on fire, and there is a burning cargo ship in the river itself. But by and large, one can see that the effects of the bombs are bounded: once you get beyond the waterfront, the direct physical damage decreases rapidly. I imagine that I can just about see my house from there, which is a little under a mile and a half from the waterfront, and we would be, in a totally comparative sense, “fine.”

Here’s a somewhat stylized version of what the NUKEMAP says this attack imagined by Bonestell would look like:5

The distances are about right, for the various effects — light damage from the second bomb possibly all the way into Jersey City and Hoboken, intense blast pressures and thermal effects near the points of detonation. NUKEMAP’s casualty model suggests that if this happened today, the total injured could be a bit over a million people, and the total dead would be around 256,000 people. For a point of reference, there would be nearly 3 million people within the areas designated by the “light” blast range radius, and the total population of New York City is about 8 million people, and the New York metro area is over 20 million people.

What make Bonestell’s paintings stand out for me, aside from their attention to both visual and technical detail, is that they excel at giving that sense of scale. One really gets a sense for exactly the level of horror this particular kind of attack might be, at least as much as a sense as one can get from the air. The text and other images in the full article try to fill out more of what that would look like on the ground, which is, of course, just as important for making sense of such an attack.

Again, for the weapons contemplated — not inappropriate for the moment at which this was written, when the Soviet arsenal was in its early days — one gets the sense that this attack would be a tremendous, horrific catastrophe, but still quite limited compared to the total destruction that is and was often imagined. Now, if one were to draw this scenario for a different period of time or attack, such as multiple, megaton-range weapons in the later Cold War, the picture would look pretty different. But for 1950, this is just about right.

There is a marked tendency in most media to overstate the effects of singular weapons. I understand the impulse. But my sense is that the net effect is a numbing sensation in the audience, that “unimaginable, uncomprehensible” sensation so often reported. Making the attack feel more grounded in a human scale, in a tangible reality, makes it more legible — and in that sense, a lot more horrific. The attack scenario in Collier’s isn’t an event in which New York City just winks out of existence, instantly. It gives the sense of a long, unfolding, ugly tragedy. Bonestell’s paintings capture that absolutely perfectly.

But the act of making an arsenal, once the “inventing” is done, is a lot of work by itself. The exponential curve in the US nuclear weapons stockpile over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s wasn’t the product of clever nuclear physicists, it was the product of industrial manufacturing. The US built literal factories for producing nuclear weapons and their components, spreading across the country. We often speak with awe at the size of the Manhattan Project, but it was only a fraction of the size of the Cold War nuclear infrastructure built in the 1950s.

One of these factories was the Pantex Plant, near Amarillo, Texas. Pantex was the hub of a vast nuclear infrastructure, the place where all of the pieces came together and the actual weapons were assembled. It was also where the weapons would be disassembled, when their time in the stockpile had come to an end. Depending on the weapon, this could be difficult work, as many later weapons, especially compact tactical nuclear weapons, were optimized for their mission, not for ease of disassembly.

Judging from the copious number of these photographs, it appears that there was a tradition at Pantex for various assembly/disassembly crews to take group photographs with their bombs. They are the height of mundanity, on the whole: normal looking people at work. But, because its Pantex, they are posed around their nuclear weapons. It’s as American as apple pie, in a way.

These photographs fascinate me. Most of them are from the 1980s, and the clothing, the hair, the dispositions — they all feel of the era. Each one has a somewhat different type of gender relationship being presented. The spaces they are in are themselves curious as well — the odd squares on the walls of the cavernous assembly/disassembly rooms.

If you removed the nukes, the photos would be pretty mundane. People at their job. And it was, in a way, just a job. I gave a talk at Sandia National Laboratories a few weeks ago and was struck by the mundanity of the lab space. At one point we passed by the building where the graphic designers worked — graphics designers with Q Clearances, so they could make classified brochures and Powerpoint presentations.

Most of the above photos come from a “history” page that Pantex has put online, celebrating its safety, its “women in the workforce,” and its “infrastructure for innovation.”1 And it’s, of course, easy to be cynical about such a thing. But there’s something to the fact that this kind of blue-collar work does seem to have had a more diverse workforce than the more high-profile weapons work. It’s literally blue-collar work, the kind that doesn’t get movies made about it, except when something goes terribly wrong.

There’s something funny whenever you treat nuclear weapons as anything other than symbols of mass destruction. The weapons are among the most potent symbols for destructive power that one can conceive of outside of fiction, but they’re also mundane technical objects, created and maintained and disassembled by human hands.

My students are often quite curious about how you take apart nuclear weapons. They assume, I think, that nuclear weapons are volatile — like you are taking apart a ticking time bomb. And there are sometimes tetchy aspects to it, like having to crack high explosives that are glued to a plutonium pit. I’ve taken to having a small discussion of it when I teach my courses on the history of nuclear weapons, on the mundanity of disassembly, because I think it highlights that important physicality of the weapons. They’re just things. Made by people. Made, it turns out, by quite ordinary people. The act of making nuclear weapons is, in some ways, just a job. But so also, it follows, would be the act of un-making them.

My sense is that you could create a rough taxonomy of “nuclear war video games”:

• Games that feature nuclear weapons as an overarching thematic element, or as a broad metaphor, such as Trinity (1986).

• Post-apocalyptic games that take place after a nuclear war, such as the Fallout series (1997-).

• Games that are general “war fighting” games that feature tactical nuclear weapons as part of their arsenal of weapons, such as Command and Conquer: Red Alert (1996) or Starcraft (1998).

• Games that are specifically about planning and fighting a strategic nuclear war.

There is overlap in the above, of course (tactical nuclear weapons feature in the later Fallout games), and edge cases. In the Sid Meier’s Civilization series, nuclear weapons are part of the “arsenal” of possibilities, but are considerably more “strategic” in their importance and effects than nukes are in most games of that sort, for example.1

The last category, games specifically about nuclear war-fighting, are particularly interesting to me. They bring up interesting questions about how we depict and think about nuclear war, culturally, and how the limitations of “gameplay” contort serious topics. There are deep links between the kind of “war gaming” that was/is by strategists at places like the Rand Corporation, and the kind of “war gaming” that first flourished as physical games and later led to several genres of computer games, as Jon Peterson explains in fascinating depth in his (fractally-dorky) book Playing at the World, a history of role playing games that draws the fascinating (and mutually-reinforcing) connections between those people who regarded “war gaming” as a tool for thinking about how to wage war and those who regarded it as a way to play an intellectually challenging and fun game.2

People have sometimes used the word “game” when talking about NUKEMAP, which I always find strange. There’s no goal, no end-state, no players, no score… where’s the game? It’s a simulation of sorts, and yes, of course, simulations and games are wonderfully fuzzy and often overlapping categories, but while I would not necessarily want to die on the hill of any particular definition of “game” (anymore than “art”), it strikes me that it certainly isn’t obvious that there are “game” elements to it. One can, of course, invent “games” wherever one pleases, but that usually involves adding those elements that are otherwise lacking in “non-games.” If authorial intent matters, I proclaim: NUKEMAP is not a game.

Nuclear War, a 1989 PC game from New World Publishing, definitely is a game. It has a distinctly late-Cold War aesthetic to it: mocking, sardonic, sarcastic, silly, satirical:

For your sake, dear reader, I played it… for about 5 minutes. I will not bore you with the details. The gameplay is not deep. You nuke and get nuked — mostly the latter. There are a few other gameplay elements, but they are pretty feeble. It is entirely forgettable. The cover is probably the most “interesting” aspect of it, read as a cultural artifact of 1989, and is what I would file under “Do Not Touch”:

A more recent game of the same “nuke or get nuked” style, and presumably much more one at that, is Introversion Software’s DEFCON (2006). Its stylized aesthetics are deliberately derived from the Big Board of the 1983 film WarGames:

The game can be played with multiple players over a network, or against AI opponents. The game starts with players deploying their assets: ICBMs/missile defenses, airfields (which can have defensive fighters or offensive bombers), radars (which reveal incoming attacks), submarines, and surface ships (carriers and destroyers). Each player controls a continent, more or less, which contains a number of cities. As time ticks on, the DEFCON level automatically lowers from 5 (no hostilities) to 1 (nuclear war). In the early phases, players can scout for enemy targets and even attack enemy planes and submarines without using nuclear weapons. Once DEFCON is set to 1, then things tend to go haywire.

The game’s “strategy” is tied up in the fact that each of the assets can be used in different modes, usually offensive or defensive in nature. So missile silos double as anti-missile defenses, but can only be in one mode at a time. Once a missile launches from a submarine or a silo, the launcher’s location is revealed, and can be targeted by offensive or defensive forces. The players can target their nuclear arsenals (from bombers or missiles) at the strategic forces of their opponents, or at their cities.

If nukes hit cities, the attack is announced in bold letters with a number killed. Large cities have enough population to take multiple hits. The megadeaths pile up. By default, players have a score that increases by 2 for every enemy kill, and goes down by 1 point for every unit of their own killed. So the winner is the one who kills the most and/or loses the least.

I played this game a bit when it first came out, almost 20 years ago. As a game, it is far more engaging than Nuclear War. There’s some real strategy to it in balancing those offensive/defensive impulses, and choosing which continent to start with, as their relative sizes (and locations of cities, which are always the same) are the main differences in their strategic situations (Europe, for example, is small and dense, and favors a “turtling,” defensive strategy; Africa, by contrast, is so large, and has its cities dispersed, and this makes it especially vulnerable and hard to defend).

To its credit, DEFCON is meant to be “fun,” but it doesn’t entirely make light of its subject matter, which is a big contrast with Nuclear War. Aside from its grim, dark aesthetic, the soundtrack consists of moody music and occasional sounds of human suffering (like a woman crying), obviously calculated to make for an unsettling experience. There are, you know, worse soundtrack choices they could have made.

So, a better game, if this kind of game is to your tastes. Is it a better simulation? I’m not sure. Apparently there have been long debates in the gaming community about the lack of “balance” in DEFCON, because of the aforementioned differences in geopolitical situations. Players are absolutely not on an equal footing; playing well as some countries is harder than playing others. In most online, competitive games, balance is considered to be of supreme importance, because it is how one measures the relative skill of players.

The accusation that DEFCON lacks balance is admittedly somewhat absurd if viewed from the perspective of its many “unreal” aspects: it is far, far more “balanced” than the real world is. Imagine some of the modifications that would be necessary to make DEFCON even slightly realistic when applied to the modern world:

• Only 9 countries would have nukes. Nearly 90% of them would be in the possession of two countries.

• Delivery vehicles (missiles, bombers, etc.) and capabilities would vary dramatically by country.

• The offensive/defensive balance would be tilted strongly towards offensive, with missile defenses in particular being very limited and unreliable.

While there is some ability to “mod” DEFCON, on a first perusal I don’t see any that have tried to make in more realistic in this sense. It would be a fun experiment to try — but it would certainly not make for a fun game. As I wrote in a review of Civilization VI some time back:

There are clear issues of “balance” associated with technologies like real-life nuclear weapons: they are, to use the jargon of gamers, “overpowered.” Real nuclear weapons make for poor gameplay. And for the record, history itself was not that fun of a game for most players, either.

Of course, DEFCON is arguably “just” meant to be understood as a “game,” with no expectations or presumptions to realism. I can accept that, to a point. I’m not a culture scold, and I recognize the factors that are at work in making games “games” (and not simulations) and also making them economically and/or culturally “successful.” I also get that the people who enjoy playing DEFCON are not necessarily implying that they would delight in actual nuclear war, nor imagining that it is a realistic portrayal of anything in the real world.

But I do raise a bit of an eyebrow, as I do with popular depictions of nuclear war in any media, because such things do form (and reflect) how our culture understands these weapons and their implications. What DEFCON taps into, and reinforces, is the same control fantasy about nuclear war that has been a dangerous through line of military planning and political posturing since 1945. And I suspect that it is hard to “remember” how unbalanced the reality of the situation actually is, both in terms of nations and in terms of offense and defense, while playing such games.3

The film WarGames ends with a justly famous quote from its game-loving, AI antagonist about thermonuclear war:

A STRANGE GAME.
THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS
NOT TO PLAY.

The question for me is, can any game about nuclear war that is built around a control fantasy actually cause the player to reach such a conclusion organically? I suspect the answer is no. This doesn’t mean that making a nuclear war game is itself impossibly fraught — yet another “better not to play” situation — but I do think that if one is trying to actually do something intellectually interesting in the arena of nuclear games, one has to take a different approach entirely.

When looking for early examples of true “post-apocalyptic” literature, one work that is often cited is a poem by Lord Byron (George Gordon) from 1816 titled “Darkness.” The poem, which depicts a world in which the “bright sun was extinguish’d,” is frequently cited as having been inspired by the “year without a summer.” As a result of the massive eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia in 1815, particulate matter in the upper atmosphere caused Europe (and elsewhere) to suffer a noticeable temperature drop and dimmed sunlight, a condition that inspired a number of artists to create dark, moody works.

I am not a Byron scholar (or much of a poetry reader at all), but a cursory glance at the biographical/analytical literature on Byron makes it clear that simply attributing this to Tambora and a lack of sunshine is probably incomplete, in the sense that a simple causality between Tambora and “Darkness” is probably missing a few steps. There were other rather “dark” things going on in Byron’s life that year.

Here is how Geoff Payne summarizes the period in his, Dark Imaginings: Ideology and Darkness in the Poetry of Lord Byron:

It is easy to comprehend the appeal of approaching “Darkness” through the framework of his biography. 1816 saw the very public collapse of Byron’s marriage and his behaviour in relation to the separation was minutely scrutinized and severely censured in the press. The year also saw the beginning of his European exile, a decision necessitated by his desire to escape from circulating rumors of incest and sodomy, as well as the severely compromising financial situation that called into question both his character and name. The resultant separation from friends and family (especially Augusta and his infant daughter Ada1) also tried him sorely, while the birth of a second daughter (Allegra, illegitimate with Claire Claremont) presented yet another set of challenges. Given the number of crises Byron faced it is not surprising that the year was memorable and required processing.2

Yikes. Whatever the multitude of causes, it’s a fascinating work. It is impressive to me to see how many standard tropes of the post-apocalyptic genre can be found in it, such as a rapid shift of values (what was once sacred become kindling), a brief period of peace followed by a war amongst survivors for any remaining resources, and, to my greatest surprise, a post-apocalyptic man’s best friend.

This version comes from the Poetry Foundation. I have added a few footnotes to call out aspects that particularly struck me.

“Darkness”
by Lord Byron (George Gordon), 1816

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;3
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,
And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twin'd themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,4
And he was faithful to a corse,5 and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies:6 they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,
And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend.7 The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.

It’s justly a classic set piece, and allows the characters (and the audience) to vividly see the scope of what they are up against, represented as lines and icons on a gigantic, looming map.

In a later interviewed, Adam explained how the Big Board was made and the practical problems that were involved in them:1

So I came up with these gigantic maps. The problem was how to create them. We drew them out on an imperial-sized drawing board and, because we had the technology for photographic enlargements, blew them up to this enormous size. The next problem I had… was how we were going to make these symbols of nuclear bombers approach Russia. I remember Stanley [Kubrick] and I driving to Pinewood where they had a very famous rear project man called Charlie Staffel who said he could do it with 16mm rear projectors. We calculated that we needed twenty-four projectors. As we were driving back Stanley said, “That’s going to be a disaster.” So we used actual light bulbs instead. […]

But I did make a mistake because I mounted the photo maps on plywood, built a light box behind it with hundred-watt bulbs, and then put perspex over the box: imagine a gigantic sheet of plywood, cut out in a little square which is then covered with perspex, and put the photograph on top. What I didn’t realize was that there was so much heat generated by all these bulbs — there were at least a thousand — that the photographic material was blistering away from the perspex. So we had to come up with various air-conditioning ventilation units to cool it down.

Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe came out the same year as Dr. Strangelove, and covers much the same ground (to the point of litigation), albeit played straight and with less style. It too featured a Big Board:

Unlike Strangelove’s rigid-but-stunning Big Board, the one in Fail Safe Big Board was a hand-drawn animation meant to simulate a computer screen. As Lumet later explained, its inclusion was a true necessity for the film:2

We could not get a picture of SAC [Strategic Air Command]. We could not get a picture of the interior of SAC, where those screens were. […] I needed footage of bombers, and this is footage that is available from rental houses. We couldn’t get anything from the government. Then we went to the rental houses, which had the stuff. And by that time, we couldn’t get anything from the rental houses, not a foot. The plane that you see in that movie is one shot that we boot-legged. The five planes that you see taking off are all the same plane. Not just that the government would not give us cooperation […], but that they cut off the rental houses is extraordinary. That in turn led us to this very simple, almost simplistic way of portraying the invasion of Russian airspace. That footage was done for us by two great animations, John and Faith Hubley. Hand animated! We were doing that because it was the simplest and least-expensive way to draw it, and make a little white cloud every time one of them [the cities] got hit.

And it’s true that Fail Safe’s Big Board was much more dynamic that Strangelove’s — ironically so, given how rigid the rest of the film feels by comparison.

In the previously cited interview with Adam, he explained that NORAD was the source of inspiration for Strangelove’s Big Board. The Command Center at NORAD, the agency tasked with detecting incoming Soviet attacks and coordinating defensive measures, was (unlike SAC’s) part of public knowledge. It was, for example, profiled in the March 1, 1963 issue of LIFE magazine:

There is also a (rare) photo of the Control Room in full color:3

The NORAD Big Board was clearly more information-dense than the one in Dr. Strangelove. The system powering it was called Iconorama, and was used in various defense-mapping settings from the late 1950s through the 1980s.4 A 1965 report described the Iconorama system, with explicit reference to the above photograph:5

This information [about an ongoing attack and defensive responses] is electronically displayed by a system known as Iconorama. The system permits almost instantaneous observation of the positions of aerospace and seaborne objects thousands of miles away and over any part of the continent covered by radar networks. Iconorama flashes surveillance information on a large, theater-like screen for easy observation.

On this screen is a map of North America, the surrounding oceans, Greenland, Iceland, parts of Siberia, and the Caribbean Islands. Symbols show the location and direction of travel of all aircraft of special interest to NORAD. These may be strategic friendly elements or a commercial or military aircraft that for one reason or another is classed as an unknown until positive identification is made. NORAD is interested in unidentified submarines, friendly aircraft carriers, Soviet fishing trawlers, and air activity over Cuba and Siberia. All this is presented on the main display with special coded symbols that provide a variety of information about the subject.

To the right of the main display is the weapon status board. This is associated with the main display, and information on the board is received, processed, and displayed automatically. The top part of this board, referred to as the "commander's box score," shows at a glance the number of hostile aircraft in the NORAD system, the number of unknowns, the weapons committed to these tracks, the kills made, and NORAD losses. Below is a listing of worldwide major military commands and their defense readiness conditions. The bottom part of the status board shows the number of weapons available to NORAD on 5-minute alert, including fighter-interceptors and surface-to-air missiles.

To the left of the main display is the BMEWS [Ballistic Missile Early Warning System] display. At the top is the threat summary panel providing, under conditions of attack, the number of missiles predicted to impact on North America and the time remaining before the first or next missile. The lower part of the BMEWS display is a map of Europe and Asia as seen looking over the North Pole from North America. On this map the launch areas for incoming ballistic missiles will show as ellipses. Corresponding ellipses appear simultaneously on the main display and show the predicted impact area. These three displays provide up-to-date information to the [NORAD Commander] and the battle staff at all times.

Another such system, which must have predated the NORAD command center shown above, was used in SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. SAGE was a massive computer system built for NORAD in the late 1950s by IBM, and was the first major attempt to use computers to connect a variety of different kinds of sensor data (e.g., from radars) to create a coherent picture of a possible bomber attack:6

The above photograph shows the SAGE command post at Hancock Field, New York. This was apparently taken during equipment installation, so I’m not sure the Big Board is even turned on, but even if it was, with this lighting and camera settings, you probably wouldn’t be able to see it anyway. But there is a photo of it in operation:

The computer visualization capability was impressive for the late 1950s, but clearly pales to what was possible only a few years later. The NORAD and SAGE photographs highlight an interesting aesthetic aspect — that the dark dimness, used to such impressive effect in Dr. Strangelove, was a reality of these early systems, likely because of the contrast limitations of early projection systems.

The report’s description of the “commander's box score” necessarily invokes the idea that this is some kind of game. Which, to a modern audience, necessarily invokes that other famous, cinematic Big Board, from the 1983 classic WarGames:

The stylized vectors are very iconic, and were actual computer-generated imagery, not hand-drawn fakes, being generated by HP 9845C desktop computers running BASIC, and then shot onto film, which was then projected into the scene. Effects supervisor Michael Fink described the process:7

In 1981, on WarGames with Colin [Cantwell, graphic supervisor], we printed out books of images (dot-matrix, still) representing the screen wall in the NORAD war room, showing the progression of the action through the scenes. Colin produced all the graphics for the film on HP 9845C computers, which also did the previsualizations books. This was a complex task. We had images on 12 screens covering five weeks of shooting, all working in sync with each other. […] We generated something like 50,000 feet of computer graphic-created negative[s] in 7 months or so, running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We printed nearly 130,000 feet of film for the process projectors that put the images on the screens. The screens were specially built from a custom material for the film. All cameras, projectors, computers, and video were synchronized by a custom system (everything was custom in 1982) which kept all the images on the right frame at the right time in the right scene. On top of that we had to create the worlds brightest 24 fps strobe system for the end sequence, which was controlled by another synchronized computer system. It was the first film to have real time 24fps computer graphic displays (as crude as they now seem).

In his classic 1997 book on Cold War computing, The Closed World, historian of technology Paul Edwards argued that the computer systems developed for NORAD encouraged a fantasy and ideology of total control and total knowledge, one that was pervasive throughout US government technoscientific efforts in the Cold War. He points out the many ways in which all three of the films mentioned both participate in that fantasy while pushing strongly against it.

Because ultimately, the fantasy of control was, and still is, a fantasy: what is shown on the screen is never all that is there, and even what is there is subject to forces and circumstances beyond control. And it’s one thing if that lack of control has very local and limited consequences; it’s another thing when you’re talking about nuclear war.