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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I had initially planned for the LSE trip to be a day trip — train over in the morning, train back in the evening — which is tiresome but doable (the London–Paris train is about 3 hours or so). But I realized somewhat late in the planning that the return trip left a bit too early for that to work with the time of my talk, and so I decided, at the last minute, to stay the night and come back in the morning.

But where to stay? London is expensive, especially at the last minute, and I was not doing this as a holiday. When I looked online, I saw that there were some very cheap options in central London: “capsule” or “coffin” hotels, of the Japanese style. I thought, hey, let’s give it a try! For £34, it might be one night of bad sleep, but to be honest probably any option was going to be that (I don’t sleep that well in hotels, either), so I might as well see how it is. And the location was good; hard to beat that price for any bed in Piccadilly Circus, which was not far from where I would need to be for my train.

This place calls the little rooms “cocoons,” which is a better name than capsule or coffin, but they are still little coffins. I’ve read about these kinds of things and always wondered how they’d be in practice. There’s something very appealing to me about a little private space and a low price — I don’t mind a somewhat spartan existence for these kinds of overnight stays.

This one also leveraged modern technology in useful ways: there are multiple floors, and access to each floor is only allowed by a key card. Once on the floor, there are multiple rooms (“dorms”) with maybe a dozen or so capsules in them, and the key card again is necessary to get into your “dorm.” The actual cocoon does not have any kind of outside lock on it — you can bring or rent a padlock if you are going to leave stuff in it for the day — but you can lock it from the inside. There is a large (co-ed) shared wash/shower/bathroom area for each floor. There are CCTV cameras (it’s the UK, after all) in all common areas.

The cocoons are not that large. About the length of a couch. I am definitively average American male height and I could fit in the bed, but even I found it a bit cramped. Anyone taller than average is not going be able to stretch out all the way.

There is no storage space at all; there are a couple of hooks that you can attach a backpack or duffle bag to, but you’re basically just sharing the bed space with your luggage, clothes, shoes, etc. There is a light and a somewhat noisy fan, an electrical outlet, and a USB charging port.

The head clearance is pretty low, so you have to think about how you are maneuvering. You can sit up a bit. Definitely not for the claustrophobic (I am not). The walls are not thick so you can hear people talking or coughing; people were mostly pretty quiet, though. The noisy fan helps a bit as it acts like a white noise machine.

The biggest difficulties of the setup were that the bed was not quite firm enough for me, and that tends to make my legs ache a bit after awhile, and there aren’t a lot of options for repositioning them in such a small space. More importantly, the pod is pretty warm — the little fan can’t possibly deal with the ventilation of a (living) human being in a coffin, much less 20 of them stacked next to and on top of each other. It wasn’t a deal-breaker, but it wasn’t great.

All together, I would say that it was not a great night’s sleep — but again, I don’t sleep all that well in hotel beds anyway, so that is often the outcome for me. I wasn’t the worst. It wasn’t as enjoyable as the fantasy of it. Would I do it again? I don’t know — maybe in a real pinch. Better than sleeping on a street bench, I guess.

I think perhaps the real comparison would be between this and a “normal” hostel. I haven’t slept in one of those, although I’ve at times considered it for trips like this. What has kept me away from them is the shared dorm experience — I want my privacy, I don’t want to worry about other people snoring or partying or talking or thieving. And that is really the “problem” (real or perceived) that the cocoon is trying to solve: it is a shared dorm experience, but with some privacy. The problem is that the privacy comes at the expense of comfort, both in terms of reduced space and the lack of adequate ventilation. And you still are at the mercy of the others with you regarding noise, although in my case the others were pretty respectful (and perhaps everyone being locked up in their little cocoons reduces the will to socialize, or perhaps it is just self-selecting… who knows).

Could it have been better? Sure — if the cocoons were just a little longer, you could imagine them holding luggage a bit better and not feeling quite so cramped. If they were each a little taller and with some more engineering attention given to airflow and ventilation, you could imagine the warmth issue not mattering so much. Or so it seems to me.

The night was very quiet, though, so that is something. In the morning everyone basically got up and emerged at about the same time — probably by necessity, as anyone getting up produces a good deal of thunking of heads into pod ceilings. I washed up and checked out and wandered off to find some breakfast.

After that, I had a few hours to kill before my train, so I went for a walk and ended up in Regent’s Park, which was nice. I was amused by the presence of not one, but two statues along the theme of “ugly babies attacking birds.” While walking down the path, this amusing little Egyptian goose walked down past me, with great determination, like he had somewhere to be and had no time to talk. Perhaps he was worried about the advertised ugly babies getting him. Perhaps he was late for a very important date. I also saw a massive mute swan flying around the park at high speed, which was impressive, but I failed to get a good photograph of it in flight, alas.

I don’t have any novel thoughts on the news of the day, particularly the US and Israeli attacks on Iran. What will they bode, in the short or longer term? What kind of war is this? I don’t have any clever insights, just inquiet — “worried” in French, one of those little words that somehow works even better in English than in French. Every week is some kind of new fresh horror, danger, and spiraling uncertainty, with people at the helm who you wouldn’t trust to watch your dog (much less your children).

I do appreciate that being abroad allows me some sense of distance, some slightly removed sense of culpability, but it is not as much as one might desire. At least the weather has been nice here, I suppose — people are already speaking of springtime, something my experiences of living on the US east coast have caused me to be superstitious of, but it would be nice if it were true. Last week, there were days that were 60ºF / 16ºC here — truly warm! So I am grateful for that, at least.

Last week, I watched the made-for-TV nuke thriller By Dawn’s Early Light (1990), which I found to be amusing but not that great. I am aware that many people like it (there is little that such a statement cannot be said for), particularly people who saw it when they were young. Look, I liked Robot Jox (1989) when I was a kid, and I can still like it today, but that doesn’t make it, you know, great cinema. I wrote up some thoughts about it for Doomsday Machines while I was on my Eurostar train back to Paris on Friday, taking one of more of silly quotes in the film for the post title:

If you want to watch the entire thing easily, it is currently on YouTube, because apparently even HBO doesn’t really care about its copyright status these days:

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If I were to speculate (and it wasn’t just a placebo effect), it feels like the experience of going to a formal class, sitting there with other students and an instructor, and being “on the spot” for being called on (I even had to go up to the chalkboard at one point, to conjugate the verb écouter, “to listen”), has caused some kind of switch to be thrown in my brain. I have read that a slight addition of stress improves language acquisition, which is why whenever one spends much time in any foreign country one starts to notice all sorts of language patterns even in languages you don’t speak at all (when I was in Japan, it “clicked” at one point that the character names of each of the cities we were in were on every license plate). And of course the context of education matters a lot, as every teacher knows.

Whatever the cause, it has been very fun to experience first-hand. Even now when I continue with my Duolingo I notice that my brain is much more effortlessly translating the French sentences I am giving, seeing them as “wholes” rather than “collections of words to be individually deciphered.” And going over even basic review in the classroom setting seems to be “cementing” a lot of basic concepts that I already basically knew but perhaps had to think about too much (and was thus prone to overthinking).

The classes are also fun just in general. The instructor is great — she speaks continuously in French but is always at a level of vocabulary and grammar that is appropriate for the class level, and articulates very clearly, and does all of this with an atmosphere of good humor that makes one feel comfortable, even though one’s brain is constantly a little bit stressed by the language. It makes the two hour class (twice a week; there were more “intensive” courses on offer but I was afraid they would really constrain my schedule too much) go by very fast.

My other classmates are also interesting and I hope to get to know them better over time. We are all étrangers — “foreigners,” but also “strangers,” which is an interesting linguistic lack of distinction — as one would expect, all adults, but the age range varies (I was for the first class clearly the oldest one there, but in my last class they had reshuffled some people from other classes and a few other members joined who were at least my age if not a bit older), as do the backgrounds and walks of life.

During the introductions I took some notes of the nationalities: American (at least one other aside from myself), Australian, Egyptian, Filipino, German, Indian, Iranian, Japanese, Peruvian, Polish, Russian, Tibetan, and Ukrainian. Their proficiencies seem to vary, too — some seem more comfortable talking but don’t seem to know the grammar very well, some seem very good on grammar but bad on talking, etc. Many have taken French classes before; my pure-Duolingo approach seems unusual. So I feel I am neither the best nor the worst prepared for the class, which seems about where I ought to be.

It has also been interesting because I haven’t been a student for some time now! It has been about 20 years (!) since I did actual coursework as a student, in graduate school, and since then almost all of my time in the classroom has been as a teacher. I am a much better student now than I ever was before. Perhaps that’s about motivation to some degree, but it’s also because as a teacher one can’t help but see students self-sabotaging all the time and think about how that’s not the way to learn anything. And I also have given a lot more thought to how the brain learns things over the years, which perhaps helps.

So now that the tables are turned, I am absorbing every word, thinking about every response, taking notes on everything even if I know it (because the act of taking notes is an act of synthesis), and so on. And I am also appreciative of the work of the teacher, perhaps because I can see better what her “craft” is having been in that position myself, and am perhaps tailoring my own approach to the class as to what I would desire of a student in my own classes (my phone is away during class). And, in fact, on Wednesdays I go from teaching my own course at Sciences Po to being a student in my French course.

So all of that is quite good and makes me feel like taking the course was even a better decision than I thought it would be when I signed up. The Duolingo approach (which I am still doing, every day) has been very useful and gotten me surprisingly far, but most of my gains with Duolingo have been quite slow except for vocabulary and reading (I can read at about a B1 level, which is enough to read a newspaper and understand most of it), and I am just not sure that an app can get one’s brain wired around speaking and listening correctly (Duolingo has an “AI chat” talking feature and it is pretty terrible and I think not helpful at all; certainly it is nothing like having actual conversations with actual humans).

I think combining something like Duolingo with an in-person class might round-out the deficits inherent to a formal class as well — only a few days per week, not a lot of instant feedback on things like homework, limited ability to adapt to individual needs, etc. Anyway, we shall see!

Last week I saw notice that the ethnographic documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman had passed away. This was hardly a surprise — he was 96! — but as someone who has been watching his films for a few decades now, and often assigns them in classes and recommends them to colleagues, I heard of it with a somewhat heavy heart.

Wiseman’s documentaries for me have always been the “gold standard” for what contemporary ethnographic examination of “first world” society looks like. I believe the first Wiseman documentary I saw was Near Death, which I saw as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in a course on “the History of Death” (I always did seek out cheerful subjects), taught by Thomas Laqueur. In graduate school I saw Primate in a course on “Filming Science” taught by Peter Galison and Robb Moss. And independently of any course I have watched High School, Hospital, Meat, Essene (about a French monastery), Welfare, Boxing Gym, and probably some others that I am not recalling immediately.

These are not fun films to watch. They are studies. They require immense patience and concentration. Some of them are frankly shocking but not in a fun way. During Primate, one gets a truly intimate look at how primate study takes place in a scientific setting, and it is, well, not an easy thing if you are someone who cares about the mental and physical states of other animals, much less fairly intelligent ones. There is one scene in particular where, after carefully attending to a Rhesus monkey, the scientist in question neatly decapitates it and begins to remove its brain. It is done clinically and no doubt as a matter of complete routine, but one gets no notice that it is about it happen, and the viewer has already spent some time with this monkey.

But that is, of course, a window into how science is actually done in laboratories, and the very mundanity of that rendering of the living monkey into a monkey’s brain — the true object of study — says something profound about the scientific approach to the world. I say this without judgment of science for this; that is where its power of description comes from! But it is not how we like to talk about how science works, because it is in fact quite disturbing to see the living world rendered into data, coldly and clinically, and absent the narrative context that we usually wrap around this activity to make it more acceptable to the public.

That’s the value of an ethnographic approach, and that’s the value of Wiseman’s films. It is not so much that they “let you see things as they are” — Wiseman himself was clear that there was an editorial mind at work, that the films were necessarily incomplete and heavily manipulated records — but it does let you see things closer to how they operate in the mundane, day-to-day, on their own terms. It is a closer view, anyway, than these institutions typically present to the public, for good reason.

Anyway, in case you missed it, for Doomsday Machines last week I wrote up a discussion of Wiseman’s 1988 film, “Missile,” which is about the training of launch officers for Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles in the mid-1980s. The film, I emphasize, is tremendously boring, but tremendously important if you are someone interested in how these kinds of institutions function. I know of no other source that gives quite as good a view of what it means to be a nuclear launch officer:

A reader pointed out in the comments that the final simulated launch sequence in the film, with the two women (and from which I took the thumbnail above, which is an amazing subversion of the normal “nuclear keys” trope, if only for the fingernail and all that it signifies alone), is available on YouTube:

I find the analog 24-hours clocks they use in the silos — seen in the sequence and in the thumbnail above, and in a earlier portion of “Missile” the instructors emphasize how important it is for the officers to learn to tell time on them — a fascinating artifact in and of themselves. I have never really noticed them but apparently they are common in many “official” contexts, and George Orwell has the clocks “striking thirteen” in 1984 as a symbol of the militarization of his future society. Fascinating stuff.

OK, that’s a lot for one week — I was feeling guilty about the lack of Lyndon photos last week, so I tried to make up for it this week! Next week I will be taking the Eurostar again, as I am giving a talk about the new book at the London School of Economics next Thursday. I am getting to be an old hand at this Eurostar thing…

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I don’t know France well-enough to generalize quite that far, but I thought it was an amusing idea, and one that felt like it had some merit. Obviously it will depend on who one considers to be “French” — Paris contains multitudes of different peoples and cultures, even some Americans! — but I appreciated that it seemed to bring something different to the table than the normal observation that the French “dress up” more than Americans do.

My cold from last week turned out to be very mild, which I was appreciative of. Just a bit of fatigue and decongestion, with no coughing or lung issues. So that is something positive. My least favorite thing about colds since COVID is that they almost all seem to go right into my lungs and attempt to become bronchitis, and that just adds weeks to the recovery. Whereas today, a week after my initial symptoms, I feel basically myself.

I tested into an A2-level French class run by the city of Paris last week, and that felt good. The teacher was impressed that I got as much garbled French as I have from basically Duolingo alone. I’m very keen on seeing how the class goes (it doesn’t start for real until this upcoming week), and I even more keen for the moment in 6 months or so when I can reflect back on how improved I will be. But one doesn’t get there in a day…

I recently re-watched The Thomas Crowne Affair (1999) on Netflix, because I’m a sucker for re-watching things that I remembered enjoying decades ago while I do the dishes — it’s less risky than trying out a new film or show, perhaps, and it’s time that I’m only paying half-attention anyway. And, yikes, the film did not age all that well.

It’s not so much that the acting or production is bad — it still has its charm as a heist film — but the entire idea of a billionaire Wall Street financier who is just bored with his life of private jets and corporate acquisitions, and so he becomes a lovable criminal scamp stealing priceless paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art just to prove he can… that feels a bit different in our current moment than it probably did in 1999. There are all of these gross overtones stuck between the twin notions of “only the rich appreciate art” and “art is just another plaything for the rich (or effete intellectuals).”

In the end, the titular financier is basically let off the hook because a) he’s charming, b) he’s rich, c) he returns the art that he stole, and d) did I mention he’s charming and rich? Blech.

The film acts like an art heist is an essentially victimless crime. There is no sense that he has stolen a work from the broader culture, nor the fact that the investigation diverted public and police resources that could have been better spent on other tasks. And he has a bunch of recruited, immigrant accomplices in the beginning who end up in jail — what happened to them? Does the fact that he’s willing to let a bunch of desperate men go to prison so he can have his fun make him a sociopath or just another rich asshole?

I’m overthinking this film, I am quite aware. But I couldn’t help but think about the Jeffrey Epstein Affair while watching The Thomas Crowne Affair. Would Thomas Crowne have begged Epstein for an invitation to the island, too?

I had been wanting to write about William Gibson’s Jackpot trilogy, and the notion of “the jackpot,” since starting Doomsday Machines, and I got around to it last week, ICYMI:

Gibson is one of the few authors that I believe I can say I’ve read every book of his. If you liked his Neuromancer then you should read The Peripheral — it’s his best stuff in a long time. I’m not saying that everything between Neuromancer and it are skippable (I enjoyed the entire Sprawl trilogy and the Bridge trilogy quite a lot… although I felt like the Blue Ant triology Was Not For Me), but The Peripheral is the first book of his I read for a while that scratched that particular itch. And as I note in the post, please, for the love of all that is good, skip the Amazon adaptation of it — it is bad and gets worse the longer it goes. Just a frustrating adaptation!

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I have read that people who move abroad suffer from more colds the first few years, on account of there being different germs, and I don’t know if that’s really true, as perhaps I was “due” for one anyway, but gee, I am tired of getting colds. Here’s hoping it is a mild one. (And thank goodness we have a massive stash of cold medicines imported from the U.S. of A., because as I have mentioned previously, the French don’t really believe in such things, for whatever reason, justified or not.)

The weather earlier last week was very nice here in Paris, while I got horrible reports of ice and snow and general unpleasantness from my friends in the eastern United States. The weather was so unseasonably nice last Monday that I felt almost embarrassed by it. Lyndon and I tried to take advantage of it, though, and went on some long walks.

I do most of my thinking on walks, and so this was useful for my other task: putting together that talk for Cambridge, which was a deep dive into what went wrong at the Castle Bravo thermonuclear test in 1954.

I like putting together talks and presentations, much more than I do actually writing articles. There’s something about the constraints of a talk that really let me focus in on the core of the argument and the evidence, whereas the relative lack of constraints in a written article make it very easy to get too bogged down in details, or to just keep writing and writing and writing.

I was happy with how the talk came together. The argument in the talk was that a) all of the “traditional” explanations for why Bravo was a fallout disaster turn out to be quite wrong and even deliberately misleading, b) there is an alternative “technical” explanation for why they misjudged the fallout potential (there were not one but two bad models of fallout that they used for safety planning purposes, and both of them gave identical wrong answers that encouraged them to think that fallout would not be a significant issue for Bravo), but c) the conditions for that “technical” explanation are ultimately due to a deeper contextual, organizational, sociological, and cultural factors involved in how fallout and test safety were regarded within the AEC and the US military at the time.

Which is a nice “Cold War history of science and technology” argument: a merging of the technical (weather forecasting and fallout modeling and so on) with the broader Cold War organizational context. I haven’t done a lot of historical work that relied on technical arguments for awhile now, so it felt nice to stretch that muscle a bit.

I felt like ultimately my talk was pitched right for the audience — historians of science of different career levels, but not nuclear historians — and, by some amazing feat, I managed to actually not go over my allotted time despite having way too many slides (50 slides for a 45 minute presentation is too many!).

And the comments from the audience were wonderful, prodding me into thinking of additional dimensions that I wanted to look into, and really making me feel like I ought to, you know, actually write this up as an academic article. So I have already begun to do that.

The trip there and back was fairly smooth. I am still amazed one can get on a train and, in a few hours, get off in another country. This was my second time using Eurostar, and it was far less of a hassle than it was when I took it closer to New Year’s — not nearly as busy. I then took a train from London to Cambridge. Easy peasy. I also got a haircut while I was up there, because while I am not afraid to get one in Paris, it does make it an easier experience to do it in my native language.

I didn’t have as much time to write for Doomsday Machines as I would have liked, with all of the travel, but I did manage to put together a very brief post relating to an amusing image I stumbled across while doing my research into the Bravo paper. One in which the United States is being inundated with bananas or perhaps, as one friend suggested, Japanese eggplants:

This next week I am starting my new French class, teaching another week of my “Nuclear Technopolitics” course (see below for more on that), and presumably, recovering from a cold! Well, it could be worse — as the above image makes clear! Good luck to you all for the next week…

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I did an interview with Andrew Pace for H-Net’s Diplomatic History section of the New Books Network, about The Most Awful Responsibility, which is now online. You can listen to it at the link above, or on Spotify:

I’ve been pulling together materials for a talk that I’m giving next week at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, for their departmental colloquium series. I had initially thought I would give a talk about the book, but decided after looking at their normal roster that it might not be “history of science”-enough, and so went with another paper I have been meaning to write up for a couple years now and could use the push. It is about the Castle Bravo nuclear test accident of 1954. As always I have spent perhaps too much time on the cover slide, under the perhaps misguided belief that a good cover slide set the tone for the rest of the presentation:

Pretty fun, eh? That is a manipulated (partially inverted and a few other things) photo of the late-stage cloud from the Bravo accident, 30 minutes after detonation — a massive column with a huge, flattened mushroom head above it. Here’s the unedited version of it, for the curious.

The paper is about the fact that the main “causes” of the Castle Bravo accident that have been offered up since 1954 have largely been bunk: it wasn’t an accident because the wind direction changed from the forecast (it didn’t change by an amount that mattered), or because the yield was unexpectedly high (that didn’t help, but it wasn’t why it was an accident).

Rather, the actual “technical” cause of accident was that their planning was done under a very incorrect model of how fallout would work for multi-megaton explosions (“stratospheric trapping”). The basic idea was that since the cloud head was expected to rise well above the level of the tropopause and into the stratosphere, it would get “trapped” up there and not come down anytime soon. Here is how physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth, then a commissioner on the Atomic Energy Commission, explained it to the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in a classified session in February 1953:

This theory turned out to be, well, dramatically wrong, and a vast amount of radioactive fallout came down in the hours after the explosion, over a very wide and long area, contaminating inhabited atolls, the ships of US observers, and the Japanese fishing boat “Lucky Dragon #5.”

The talk is going to be about all of the above, plus how this wrong model got developed (and why their negligence in fallout monitoring for the 10 megaton Ivy Mike test led them to this wrong model in the first place), and, ultimately, about how the real “cause” of the accident wasn’t so much a bad theory as it was the creation of a certain kind of Cold War epistemic context in which a single bad theory was allowed to impact the health of thousands of people.

It’s a classic history of Cold War science argument, the main twist being that the event in question (the accident) is well-known, but turns out to have been historically poorly understood. I’m hoping to write it up and get it out the door sometime in the next few months, because I’m feeling the need to get a few more scholarly papers in the “pipeline” at the moment (you would think that writing an entire book would give one a reprieve from such pressures, but, alas, no).

I’m looking forward to the trip; I’ve never been to Cambridge (UK), before, and it’s still exciting to think one can just take a train to such exotic locales.

I began teaching at Sciences Po this week, my first time teaching outside of the United States. I’ll put a bit more of that down below, but it has been positive so far, although the little differences in expectations are amusing and somewhat interesting. We also saw Hamnet (2025), which we enjoyed a lot, and I will write about below, as well.

In case you missed it, for Doomsday Machines this week I posted a “self-assessment quiz” that the US Department of Defense’s Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (DCPA) created in 1973, so that you could assess your suitability as the manager of a public fallout shelter in the event of thermonuclear war. It’s a pretty strange document, and I included some other discussions from the overarching report it is from about the imagined life in said public shelters:

I’ve been working on a few new posts for Doomsday Machines; we’ll see which one gets finished by next week…!

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And yet he’s still quite active, and in good health. If the weather is decent-enough (it was in the 40ºFs here this week, not too hot, not to cold), he’ll happily walk for hours (and then sleep most of the day). For his birthday we went on a long walk along the Seine — he loves a good waterway.

He’ll even, sometimes, get worked up into a good run at a dog park with younger dogs. I try to make sure he doesn’t overdo himself in these cases, but it’s still nice to see him running around.

I know we can’t take any of this for granted. Age doesn’t work that way. Things go well until they don’t.

That’s part of the package one accepts if one gets a pet. (I’d say it is part of the package one accepts if one is born, but one doesn’t exactly consent to that, does one?) We’ve been fortunate that his health has been extremely good his entire life. We’ve tried to make sure he’s always fulfilled as he moves through the phases in his life and through the many places he’s been with us.

We don’t know Lyndon’s exact age. When we got him, he was a rescue from Mississippi, and they thought he was around 6 months old. Here are some Lyndon-as-puppy pictures from way back in the summer of 2013, when we were living in Washington, DC:

When we went to the shelter, “just to look” (that old lie one tells oneself), Lyndon seemed to glom onto us almost immediately. He was an odd little dog, some kind of hound mix, with a head that was a bit too big for his lean body, and a very serious demeanor. We were impressed from the start that he seemed to understand that he was not meant to use the bathroom indoors and seemed pretty capable of communicating that to us.

As a puppy, Lyndon was very active, and had a few months of being obsessed with chewing — toys, rawhides, whatever. And then suddenly, he lost interest in it, and never chewed again.

He’s always been an urban dog, always lived in apartments. He knows elevator etiquette and how to ignore other dogs and people. It’s hard to say which city he liked the most that we’ve lived in, but he seems to find Paris endlessly interesting. He loves novelty, and there’s a lot of that here. It’s also an extremely walkable city, which means that I feel pretty happy to walk in pretty much any random direction and see where it takes me, and that’s perfect for him.

Anyway, he’s a good pupper. Even at 13, he’s our little puppy.

ICYMI, for Doomsday Machines this week I interviewed Malcolm Craig, a UK historian who is also a designer of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), about the ways in which Cold War TTRPGs reflected different kinds of imaginations about the nuclear age:

I had a lot of fun talking with Malcolm about these games, how they work, and what they tell us about how people “play” at the end of the world. I have also managed, I think for the first time, to get the audio in a decent working state, so below you can find a link to the full interview if you want to listen to it. Malcolm makes references to visuals (books and box art and so on) and those are shown in the original post for the most part.

Next week I am begin teaching a class at Sciences Po on “Nuclear Technopolitics.” I wasn’t sure if it would actually happen, as the Sciences Po system told me as late as early last week that I had no enrolled students, and I was prepared to accept that. But I checked on Friday and, in fact, the class is now full, which is either a blessing or a curse. We’ll see! But you can look forward to regular updates here about what I’ve been teaching. As for what I’ll be posting to Doomsday Machines next week, I’m not 100% sure, but I’ve got a couple things in the hopper…

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What the bodes, I don’t know. Will there be a point of turning around in the near future? Occasionally news articles come out suggesting this — that the unpopularity of these policies is hitting such a critical point that even Trump’s supporters are uncomfortable with them, and the people who have been “on the fence” about Trump are being forced to concede that the warnings about him have been largely shown to be true. I know there are people who put a lot of hope on the midterm elections being such a possible turning point. Well, that would be wonderful.

Personally, I have been trained by experience to not to be too optimistic: people saying they disagree with Trump is not the same thing as saying they’d vote for his opposition (or even refrain from voting), I have little faith in the (heavily gerrymandered) electorate, and I also have very little faith that the Democratic opposition, what there is of it, would be willing to actually take any bold steps against Trump even if they did come into power.

This isn’t an argument for fatalism or non-voting or depression or anything like that. One has to fight the good fight. I don’t claim to be an expert on US domestic politics, either, or to have any special insights. But it is what I think about it, if I’m honest about it. I would, as always, love to be proven wrong! But we’re in the bad place right now: paramilitary agents have been literally murdering people in the streets, have been promised absolute immunity for any crimes they commit, and, as if that isn’t enough by itself, the US president is demanding that his European allies allow him to capture territory on the most spurious of pretexts.

I have always tried to be pretty realistic about Trump’s abilities to embrace terrible ideas, but I really didn’t have “threatening war with NATO” on my bingo card. (I did have “shooting American citizens in the street” on my bingo card, however.)

Well, enough on that. In “book news” this week, my new book received a very friendly review in The Wall Street Journal last week. That was heartening. I also did a very fun interview with my friend Ankit Panda for the War on the Rocks podcast about the book (which is only available to their subscribers). And I did a few other interviews/podcasts which have not yet come out.

It’s been fun to talk about the book in the podcasts, although I feel like I am confronted with the same problem each time, which is: a) how do you explain the argument of the book in a way that people would find even a little persuasive in a very short amount of time, b) how do I signal to people that if they don’t find my brief discussion of it persuasive — which I understand!!! — that they should read the book, because that’s where the evidence is, and c) the book really covers three separate periods/arguments (WWII, postwar, Korean war) and how does one adequately gesture towards each of these (if one does at all)? Even when a podcast runs an hour or so, it feels hard to really fit that all in, but if an interview is only 15-20 minutes or so, it feels somewhat absurd. But that’s the nature of these things, I suppose.

In other, non-book, non-depressing news, a friend of mine was in town and we went to the Le Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Museum of Hunting and Nature), which is accurately described online as “quirky.” It’s about half taxidermy and guns, half art inspired by taxidermy and nature. It had some shades of the The Museum of Jurassic Technology, but more emphasis on nature than high-technology. Above is a short video of one of their, er, exhibits — in a room full of “big game” heads, one them a ferocious wild boar, occasionally comes to life, animatronic-style, and growls loudly and menacingly. Huh. Well.

We had a nice time, but we do like strange things, and I do like nature (even if it has been dead and stuffed, which is probably not as good as being alive, but I don’t actually want to be that close to a polar bear or a wild boar). I enjoyed learning the French words for different kinds of animals. The art was, well, something different.

For Doomsday Machines, I did write up a lengthy post about a very odd — but thought-provoking — “Survivalist”/”Prepper” novel from 1983, Pulling Through by Dean Ing. If you didn’t catch it, I recommend it — I was happy with how it came together:

What I enjoyed about writing it was not just that the book gave me a lot of fodder for critique (which was inevitable given the presence of, I don’t know, a flying car and a cheetah), but that the critique that came to me felt like more than just pointing out its absurdities. That is, it got me to think a lot about the essential problem with the novel, which is not that it was very silly in many ways (it was, but I can enjoy very silly books), but that there is, at its heart, a tension between being a “survival” story (which has specific narrative expectations, notably the need for the survival to be nearly impossible and barely won) and it being a piece of “Survivalist” literature (which has its own logical expectations, like being able to show that nuclear war is in fact generally survivable, if you’ve prepared correctly).

The book wants to be both, and ultimately that makes it self-contradictory: as I put it in the review, if you need a flying car to survive nuclear war (which the protagonist does, several times), then nuclear war isn’t all that survivable, is it?

Is it possible to balance both? I think so — one of my favorite bits of both “survival” and, in its way, “Survivalist” fiction is Max Brooks’ World War Z, which I have written about before. It is a “survival” story in that many of the individual stories are about narrow odds and clever actions; it is a “Survivalist” work in that its ultimate argument is that certain types of mindsets and approaches are more likely to succeed in dealing with global-scale catastrophes than others. It is, of course, a very different kind of book (and threat) that the one in Pulling Through, and its narrative choices are really different. I don’t think World War Z would have worked in this way if it had an “author-insert,” Gary Stu protagonist the same way Pulling Through did — and, indeed, that is the biggest flaw of the (extremely poor) cinematic adaptation of World War Z.

What do we have in store for next week on Doomsday Machines? I’m not 100% sure; I have a few things in the works, and we’ll see which of them comes to fruition.

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I had planned to get a post for Doomsday Machines out the door at the end of the last week, but I have to admit that the US news was just… too much. It’s not so much that I can’t get things done under such conditions, where everything seems to be going off the rails at once, although I sometimes struggle to find my focus. It’s that it’s hard to feel like writing something about “Survivalists” in the 1980s feels totally insubstantial, silly, and almost like I am willfully ignoring the world around me. Which is part of the difficulty of these “interesting times,” isn’t it? If you’re not talking about them, then what are you doing?

And of course, we can’t all talk about them all the time, and may not want to talk about them at all, at least publicly. It’s a no-win situation. It’s exactly what one would expect from this kind of chaos, though. I know that many have suggested that it’s the point of such chaos, but I don’t know if it’s really all that willful or not. It doesn’t matter either way.

I will have a post out next week, though, whatever else happens in the world. I have been writing up a discussion of one of the oddest “Survivalist” novels from the early 1980s, Dean Ing’s Pulling Through, which also happens to have the most amazing (not necessarily a positive term, here) post-apocalyptic cover art of all time. You might recognize it from some of the banner art for Doomsday Machines, because I’ve been enthralled with it since I first saw it. A man. A gun. A cheetah. A (flying!!!) race car. San Francisco. A mushroom cloud. It’s got everything. And more. So that’s for next week. Watch for it.

The weather has (finally?) given us some snow here in Paris, although it melted in a couple of days and has started warming up a bit. So far my assessment as “basically the same weather as NYC, although maybe not quite as wet” has held up. Not a bad winter by any means. We’ve even had a few days here where I haven’t forced Lyndon to wear his jaunty little sweater, which he loathes, so he has been happy with that.

I had a couple of projects come to fruition last week. First, I have mentioned on here a project regarding nuclear fallout, and that came out, finally. This was a collaboration with the reporter Davis Winkie, funded by the Outrider Foundation, and the graphics team at USA Today (Ramon Padilla, Stephen Beard, Karina Zaiets and Carlie Procell), to model scenarios regarding a Russian nuclear attack against American ICBM bases in the midwest (the “nuclear sponge”). If you are in the USA you can view it here; if you are in Europe, their website basically breaks itself unless you use a VPN, for reasons that are unclear to me.

My role in this was to build the underlying software that implemented the fallout model (WSEG-10) and make it so that it could export visualizations, animations, etc. based on whatever parameters were input into it. I will eventually be releasing a version of this to the public (and on Github), so people can play with their own scenarios. None of this modeling is definitive or predictive; it is meant to be evocative. The upshot of my software is that it is very easy to use and it is very fast (at the sacrifice, perhaps, of some predictive fidelity). Anyway, I am happy with how it looks.

The other thing that came out is a documentary I was involved with several years ago, on PBS’s American Experience, called Bombshell:

I admit I haven’t had the time to watch the whole thing yet, and I am somewhat loathe to watch things I appear in (for a variety of reasons), but the basic approach is looking at the ways in which the “narrative” of the atomic bombs was consciously shaped by the people involved in using it, and how it was pushed back upon by various journalistic accounts, particularly with regard to radiation effects.

Anyway, I’m in it a lot, and a lot of the positions I give it in are similar to the ones I talk about in the new book, so if that is interesting to you… check it out! And it has been amusing to get e-mails from viewers of it over the last week that are along the lines of “what evidence to you have of X?” and I can say, I’ve actually written a book on it, with lots of citations, so you can check that out! A difficulty with doing a documentary is that you usually can’t give good evidence for controversial claims, but hey, it helps to have a book to point to, I guess.

So that’s last week, I think. I also gave a guest lecture (3 hours!) to graduate students at the École Polytechnique on Friday, which was fun. We went over NUKEMAP for part of it, and the rest was about the how-and-why of the making of the atomic bomb in World War II (and a little bit about the decision to use it, but it turns out that 3 hours is not quite enough time for me to do all of those things in one lecture).

Oh, and I recorded a podcast with Cheryl Rofer and Rob Farley for their blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money, about the new book. So that’s out there, too, if you want to listen to it. Until next week…

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And yet… somehow we have to talk about other things, as well? And do work? And watch films? This is the part that I think most representations of “crisis” in film, fiction, etc. get wrong. That you have to just keep on doing the daily work. You have to go to the market. You have deadlines. You have little things that feel rather insignificant but still need to get done. You require entertainment and diversion.

Because what can one do, anyway? Even if you’re someone who attends protests, there’s only so many of those. Even if you’re calling your Congresspeoples, there’s still a lot of time to fill. I’m not saying these things aren’t worthwhile. I’m just saying the obvious, which is that they feel inadequate to the task.

Well. I don’t have any answers about the world at large. I do, however, have some thoughts on Harry Truman and his role in early nuclear policy, because I wrote a book on that (what a smooth transition). And I gave a talk on it a few weeks ago at Sciences Po. The audio recording of the talk is available here on SoundCloud, or you can listen to it (or download it) below as an MP3 file:

I am not sure if there was a video recording or not — I will see. Because there are slides that went along with it, and it might not be obvious what I’m referring to without it.

If you do want to have the slides available while you listen, you can download them as a PDF here. Note that the gradients on the title slide didn’t quite export correctly (sigh), but anyway, it should be pretty straightforward other than that, although many of the slides are designed to be synced to audio.

I anticipate giving more talks about the book in the new year, so I’ll make sure at least one of those has the slides recorded with synced audio.

Oh, and in case you missed it, my post on Doomsday Machines this week was a relatively quick one (a bit of editing, but not much writing or research for me), but worth checking out if you haven’t already. While poking through some reports looking for information about something totally different, I stumbled across this rather amazing first-hand account of a nuclear test from the 1950s. I found it a totally gripping read, and felt like it was worth sharing:

Here’s a brief excerpt:

At H minus twenty minutes I heard a background voice over the loud-speaker say to someone near the microphone, “It’s hooked up now, Boy!” Then the loudspeaker spoke to us: “This is Dragnet. In one minute it will be H minus fifteen minutes, and so on, with a time tone every minute thereafter.”

Pete said, “This is the tape. The machine is committed.”

Two men were still asleep, at least ostensibly. Seasoned troops. Most of us were inclined to laugh at anything as time ran down. I gestured out toward the thing in the dark and said “Poof!” throwing my hands wide. Everyone laughed.

The time tones were coming every minute and with each one the tension went up a notch. At H minus eight minutes I stopped taking notes. I didn’t want to clutter up the subjectivity of the experience.

At H minus five minutes we turned around on the benches without waiting for the order to do so and covered our eyes. I removed my glasses and held them firmly by the temple piece in my right fist. I buried my eyes is my left elbow and pressed my left arm tight against my face with my right fist. It was dark and lonely in there. I began to tremble.

My stomach muscles knotted up. Then the tenseness spread to my chest muscles. I became irritated at myself and made a definite effort to relax, which relieved the muscular strain but did little to reduce my mind’s tension. I imagined running away, then thought of how trivial would be the increase in distance that I could add by running for the short remaining time, since a twelve mile distance already separated us from the device.

“H minus one minute.”

I pressed my arm tighter against my face.

“H minus thirty seconds.”

The awful, marching inexorability of the thing came over me. Zero time was speeding toward me like a car you cannot dodge.

“H minus twenty seconds. . . H-minus ten seconds. . . five, four, three. . . (I scrunched my eyes shut and pulled my arm in on them). . . two, one, zero.”

What will next week bring, for Doomsday Machines or for the world? Well, we’ll see…! I’ve been reading a wonderfully terrible bit of Survivalist/Prepper fiction from the 1980s and might be able to write it up by next Friday, if the rest of the world doesn’t go to hell…

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I finished and published a new book. I visited (for both work and pleasure) Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Missouri, Cambridge (Massachusetts), and Chicago (again), among other places. Participated in a performance by the Kronos Quartet. Sold a house. Moved to France. I visited Luxembourg, flew back to New Jersey for a week for an event, and gave (two) talks at the Sorbonne, was on a panel at Cité internationale universitaire, and did a book launch at Sciences Po. And I did a bunch of podcasts and interviews relating to the book.

By my count, I published 19 “substantial” posts to Doomsday Machines (and one in-depth post to Restricted Data). That’s about once every three weeks on average, which is both a bit less than I intended and a bit more than I expected given the disruptions of preparing to move.

Each of the posts have so far received between 3.7k views (my most recent one, Christmas at Ground Zero) and over 7.5k views. Most of them are around 6k views. Which is pretty good, I think? (My most popular post on the blog, so far, is the one I did on The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”, in November 2024, with 64k views, but that one was almost predestined to go viral due to its subject matter.)

My two most popular posts of 2025 were: Civil Defense and Preppers, and Trinity Goes to Hollywood, both with over 7k views.

I don’t really have “personal favorites” but I was also really pleased with What if NUKEMAP had been made in the 1960s? and The first portable digital nuclear weapons effects computer, just because the tech is fascinating and to my knowledge had not been written about before.

In the new year, I would like to round how my “brief history of Preppers” series with a post on the rise of “Survivalism” in the 1970s, and then there will be one more post about the transition from Survivalists to Preppers the 1990s and early 2000s. I have a few more interviews scheduled — they take more preparation than one might think, and take longer to edit that one might think, but I really enjoyed my interview with Cheryl Rofer. I have a couple on my mind for the spring, if I can make the schedules align.

I’m hoping to write about some more nuclear fiction soon, as well; I have a lot of thoughts and notes, some on recent media (I’d like to write something on both Fallout and The Last of Us, as post-apocalyptic games turned into shows) and some less-recent media. I’d also like to write some more posts about the game, which is often on my mind but a lot of the work has been put on “pause” as a result of the move (and some difficulties getting students hired, sigh). I have a number of other things that are in states of partial completion, as always, that just need to be pushed out the door.

Paid subscribers also received 32 Weekly Wasteland Wrap-ups (including this one), which is a little less than my target of once per week, but the summer of 2025 in particular was an overly-busy one on my end (selling the aforementioned house, moving to the aforementioned France, etc.).

I am not going to try and count how many photos of Lyndon were posted (there is only so much time in this world) but my sense is that I post between 1-3 per wrap-up, so it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 or so. (For this year-in-review, you get a bonus photo! I want to give the people what they crave!)

Overall, it has been quite a big year for us, a big juncture in life. The preparation for moving was exhausting in every way, and so of course was the actual move, but it has been really quite wonderful once executed, in spite of the inherent uncertainty and the challenges involved. In most ways it has been easier than I expected, but I tried to go into it with realistic expectations…

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Early darkness aside, the winter so far has been very mild: one cold-snap, a little rain here and there, but generally in a range of temperatures that I consider to be acceptable, if one is willing to throw on a sweater now and then.

Last week, on Tuesday, I gave a talk at the Nuclear Knowledges group at Sciences Po about the new book, in which I went over its argument in some detail, and also had some excellent questions from a panel of professors and the audience. It was recorded, and there should eventually be a link to it online, which I will duly circulate on here once it is available. I was happy with how it went.

I also had another podcast come out, on Drafting the Past with Kate Carpenter. I really enjoyed this one, because it was less about the argument of the book and all that, and more about the work of researching and writing the book. It’s about the craft of doing this kind of historical work, and I really love talking about that.

For this book, I think it is especially important, because a number of very conscious decisions went into how I tried to “position” myself as the author (something that came up in my talk/panel last week as well), particularly with regards to invoking the subjective position of the historian. Rather than take up a lot of space here, I have written some thoughts on this below.

Separately, I am excited to announce that I have joined the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as a Senior Fellow:

What this means in practice is that I am going to be collaborating with the Bulletin on a number of really exciting projects in the next year or so, and writing some pieces for them more regularly. Some of these pieces, like the one I am working on right now, will be cross-posted to Doomsday Machines because of their topical overlap. More will be seen on this as we get into the new year!

Lastly, ICYMI, I wrote a post for Doomsday Machines on Friday about the trope of asserting, or asking, whether “the survivors will envy the dead?” after a nuclear war:

Because next week is a holiday, I am not planning on writing much, but who knows, we will see if the spirit moves me… anyway, I hope you have a good holiday season, whatever you practice or celebrate! Let’s not envy the dead just quite yet…

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If you are interested in seeing me talk about the book with two other historians, on Tuesday, December 16, 2025, at 12-2pm ET (18-20hr CET), I will be doing a hybrid talk/conversation as part of the Nuclear Knowledges seminar series, at the Center for International Research, Sciences Po, Paris, on December 16, 2025 at 12-2pm ET (18-20hr CET). The event is open to the public if you happen to be in Paris, but it will also be live-streamed on Zoom. Here is the event link, and here is the registration (“inscription” in French) link that you will need to use for the Zoom link.

Releasing a book is both exciting and anti-climactic. The actual day of release doesn’t do all that much for the author. You don’t get sales information in real-time, and even if you did, it’s not clear it would tell you all that much. At the same time, you’re also trying to gin up as much interest as possible. I even put a very embarrassed little ad on NUKEMAP for my book that deletes itself after a couple of seconds.

I’ve put up a first tranche of documents from the book — mostly covering the WWII period — on my website for it. I am planning to put up some more documents in the next week (and the next week after that, etc.). It takes more time than you’d think to select, touch-up, and write-up each document.

As I was doing it two weeks ago, I kept thinking, “I don’t really know how Bill Burr does this, this is so much work,” in reference to my friend and colleague Dr. William Burr of the National Security Archive at Georgetown University, who has for decades maintained wonderful “electronic briefing books” on a whole number of topics, including nuclear weapons.

Having just been thinking about him, it was shocking to hear on Friday that Bill Burr had passed away. Bill had been battling cancer for years, which I did not know about — he apparently didn’t like to talk to people about it, which I can respect, even if it makes this kind of news completely shocking to those who did not know.

Bill was just a wonderful guy. I don’t remember when I first met him — it must have been around 2008 or 2009, when I first visited the National Security Archive as part of my dissertation research. Bill was always tremendously generous as a person and a scholar, always willing to share documents, give assistance/advice, and solicit views for inclusion in his briefing books. We collaborated on a number of things behind the scenes over the years regarding nuclear history, including having several meetings with representatives from the Marshall Islands about restoring databases that the Department of Energy took down relating to the testing there.

Bill’s persistence in unearthing new documents had a major impact on the type of nuclear history done over the last two decades. The fact that he always made these documents fully accessible and public was a core part of what made him unique as a scholar, and as a builder of scholarly resources. I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from Bill over the years. As a person, he was just lovely to be around. This tribute to Bill by James Graham Wilson gives such a better sense of this than I can express.

I looked in my e-mail and saw I had last been exchanging messages with him in September, which seems like just yesterday. Hearing he had died was just totally shocking to me, a real punch in the gut.

While looking for more information on Bill, I also stumbled across the fact that another nuclear person I knew had died last week: the physicist Kenneth W. Ford. Ken lived a very long and fulfilling life — he lived to be 99 and a half! — and wore a number of different professional hats. I knew him because of his work on Project Matterhorn-B at Princeton, which worked the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s (“B” was for “Bomb”) under the oversight of John A. Wheeler.

Ken came to me circa 2014 or so while he was working on a book, Building the H-bomb: A Personal History (2015). It is part memoir, part history book, part technical discussion. Most of its technical nature concerns the work that was done before the invention of the Teller-Ulam design for thermonuclear weapons; it has some of the best descriptions of the physics of the so-called Classical Super, and the mindset behind those physics, that I have seen. What Ken wanted me to help with was the fact that everything he was writing he knew had been declassified, or at least written about, at some point, and so he needed the footnotes that would show he was not releasing classified information. Which I helped him with.

He then submitted it to the Department of Energy, who disagreed that all of it should be published — not a total surprise, I would say, as their guidance then and now is that just because something is known does not mean someone who once had a security clearance should be saying it, as that “confirms” it. In the case of 75-year-old physics, particularly about a weapon that didn’t work, I think this is a little bit silly, but I’m not the one who once had a security clearance. Anyway, Ken published the entire thing anyway, and then used the attempt by the DOE to censor the book as a way to get more attention for the book, as I wrote about at the time. The DOE probably could have gotten Ken into trouble but I think they assumed that trying to prosecute octogenarians for publishing things that were decidedly in the open literature would be a bad case.

Ken stayed in touch over the years, and would occasionally write up technical answers to questions I had. Often they would convince me that I should try to avoid getting too technical on certain subjects, not because they were dangerous, but because I could feel I was wading into territory I did not really understand well-enough to write about! (Like “electron temperature.”)

Anyway, these are the thoughts that have occupied me the last few days — coming to terms with these losses. They are of a different character from one another, as Bill’s seems quite unexpected and Ken’s is just more bittersweet.

All of which feels like really bad framing for plugging the interview I did with the wonderful (and very much alive!!!) Cheryl Rofer for Doomsday Machines this week, on her +30 years working at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The interview touches on a number of topics, including the nature of the work at the lab while she was there, the issues with gender that she encountered there, and — a personal favorite of mine — Cheryl’s memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis as a teenager.

Cheryl is quite lovely, and when my wife and I would go to New Mexico, we would always want to make sure we had time to see Cheryl (and her cats!) in Santa Fe. So I have been wanting to interview her for the site for awhile, as she is a repository of just a vast amount of personal experiences about the lab — our interview really just scratches the surface.

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What book?, you may be asking, confused and out of the loop. The one I wrote about this week in Doomsday Machines last week:

It’s amazing how long it takes, by the way, to do the documents part of the website that I linked above. I have all of these sources as PDFs, and their citations, and so on. But getting the best version together, making sure it looks right, etc., is a big huge pain. And in some cases, like the rare interview with Leslie Groves from the 1960s, I ended up deciding that I needed to make a new version of the PDF from scratch, because the “working” version I had been using was not really fit for public consumption (as it was based on photos I took at the National Archives ages ago). I have tools for these things, some custom-made, but it still all takes so much… time.

It’s also not really work I enjoy doing, truth be told. Despite what some may think, I’m actually not really a fan of self-promotion. (It’s not that I don’t mind promotion, I would just much rather that other people promoted me.) It takes a lot out of me. It feels awkward and ridiculous.

And while I am proud of this book and stand by its conclusions, it is also making some pretty big claims and one never knows how such things will be received once it is out there in the world. So far the reception from people who have looked at it has been positive, but how many early readers are going to send e-mails saying “actually, this is lousy”? Sigh.

If one is going to put one’s work (and self, by extension) into the world, one must develop thick skin about these things, and I have, but still, the anticipation is always worse than the reality.

On Monday, I took part in a roundtable at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, which is a really interesting place. It is not a university, it is a campus where foreign students attending other universities in Paris can live — like a giant International House. It looks like a university when you are there, and I was marveling how it was the first “university” like place I’ve seen in Paris that looks like an American-style university campus. And then I learned that it was modeled on American university campuses, and some of the mystery was resolved!

The roundtable was on a serious subject — academic freedom in the world in comparative perspective, and I was there as someone who could talk both about the history of universities in broader perspective, and the United States in particular — but did have a somewhat humorous element to it. I had made it very clear when I agreed to do it, many weeks ago, that my French was not good and it would need to be in English. I was told this was fine. I got there on Monday and… the plan was to do it entirely in French! It was like an academic anxiety dream made real.

Well, I went up on the stage and just did my part in English. Was I nervous about the entire thing, dear reader? I mean, of course, a bit. But I thought, well, what’s the worst that can happen? Nobody even knows who you are! And, anyway, there’s no pretending you speak French, so it is what it is.

It was fine. The (very nice) law student asking the questions of the panel conveniently translated his questions for me into English. Everyone else spoke in French, but it was better than I would have guessed. My speaking French is still pretty basic, and if someone says something very short to me it is often easy for me to miss it, but if I am listening to someone explain something at length in well-articulated French, especially something I know something about (academia), I can understand most of it. It just requires a lot of concentration. All in all, it was a good experience, and did make me think, wow, my French is not good but it is getting better in a way that would be very unlikely if I was not actually immersed in it, but jeez, what a way to start an already busy and somewhat hectic week.

How will next week be, when the book actually becomes available for sale? Yikes, we’ll see. If you are thinking about buying my new book (!), I will just say that pre-ordering it, or ordering it the moment it is released, is very helpful, because it gives it some “momentum” in the stores, encourages reviews, etc. So consider it!

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