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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “to do” list is more or less:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheryl made another point that was on my mind:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Aside from the content of The Fog of War, which is probing and provocative, I also delight in talking to students about The Interrotron, the unique camera setup that Morris used for the latter film to impressive effect at capturing his conversations with Robert McNamara in a shockingly intimate fashion. The Interrotron is a system of two cameras and two teleprompters looped together so that the interviewer and interviewee can make constant eye-contact. It leads to a very different experience for the interviewee, as well as capturing that sense of eye-contact in the final filmed product. I have always thought it is was a painfully, agonizingly clever and simple solution to a major deficit in most interviews.

All of which is to say that being reviewed by Morris is quite a thing for me by itself, as he is an artist I have long admired, and whose work has been formative in my own thinking about the possibilities of documentaries, and epistemologically-informed history. (Morris also was a graduate student of Thomas Kuhn’s, many years ago, and they had a spectacular falling out, which Morris has written about, so there is a history/philosophy of science connection there, as well.)

Morris’ review of the book is, as one colleague of mine put it, “as good as a review can be.” My colleague continued: “Morris gets you, Alex.” I find it difficult to read reviews of my own work (even positive ones), much less send them to others, but I do feel seen in this review, as Morris very much understands the kinds of epistemological sensibilities I have regarding the writing of a history like this, and believes (rightly or wrongly!) that I accomplished my goal with it. Says Morris: “It’s a truly great book, perhaps a masterpiece, that gets us as close as we can to understanding what went through Harry S. Truman’s head when he presided over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Ah, who could ask for more in a reader!?

You can read his review here, if you are inclined, and if the paywall is getting in your way (and you are still interested), I will post a PDF copy below, just for you.

Last week I was in London again, this time for a workshop at the Science Museum that was dedicated to the questions of preserving JET, the Joint European Torus, a fusion research facility located in the United Kingdom that has served out its life and is in the process of being decommissioned. It was an interesting discussion.

My main contribution was a) giving a talk about the classification aspects of “peaceful” nuclear fusion over the years (both magnetic, like JET, and inertial confinement), much of which was derived from my first book, and b) an attempt, at the end, to encourage the “there’s no money for anything anymore” Brits that they should try to think a bit bigger than just “can we saw off a piece of the machine and put it in a museum and put the data in an archive somewhere,” all of which is good and fine but really seems like the bare minimum. I know there’s no money for anything, etc., but one might as well try to start by thinking bigger. But these are the moments in which I feel the most American in European contexts, when I don’t start with the assumption that there can’t be any money found for anything…

It was just a day-trip this time (no coffin hotel), and because of Eurostar shenanigans I had to get there a few hours earlier than I had intended, so I went for a walk in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens (which are both near the Science Museum), which was very nice.

A sign there told me that in the daytime, one could frequently see tawny or small owls in trees near their favorite holes, and that sounded quite fun to me, so I kept an eye out. Every time I saw a bird in a tree, though, it always turned out to be a pigeon or, improbably, a duck. I felt a little like the sign was, as the Brits say, “taking the piss…”

The weather has been lovely in Paris — basically springtime. I really did not expect the winter to be so short and relatively easy here. I guess I expected that because we are so far north — Paris has the same latitude as Newfoundland — that it would be more like Boston than New York. But it has been easier than even New York, I think. It is 60ºF / 16ºC today, and sunny. There’s lots to complain about the world right now, but the weather here isn’t one of them…

For Doomsday Machines this week, I returned to a document that I wrote about for Restricted Data some years back: the earliest formal American study I have seen, from August-September 1945, of what a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union might look like. It’s not a “war plan,” per se, but it gives insights into what the military thinking behind an atomic “war plan” of that period would look like:

I hemmed and hawed a bit about whether I should “re-use” a document or not, and decided that given the different scope of Doomsday Machines from Restricted Data, I could probably make an argument for it, and that I was looking at it again with “fresh” eyes, ones that have now looked at many more “war plans” (or at least, “war planning documents”) than I had at the time. I also have much better microfilm scans than I did at the time, so that’s something. For many readers, I suspect the truly terrifying and depressing thing about this document is not its contents, but the fact that the last time I wrote about it was 2012, which was 14 years ago… yikes!!!

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