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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “to do” list is more or less:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheryl made another point that was on my mind:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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