One question I’ve been asked a lot by journalists is, how many people died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The reason they ask isn’t because they can’t use Google, it’s because if you start hunting around you’ll get lots of different answers to this question answers that vary by a factor of two or...

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the Trinity test. My thoughts on the world’s first nuclear explosion haven’t changed too much over the last five years, so you can read that if you want my anniversary take. The only thing that’s really changed in my thinking since then is that I’ve was able to...

As we approach the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even with everything else going on this year, we’re certainly going to see an up-tick in atomic bomb-related historical content in the news. As arbitrary as 5 10 year anniversaries are, they can be a useful...

It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything in my President and the Bomb series. You can read part I, II, and III if you are interested). It’s not that I’ve been inactive; much to the contrary, I’ve been researching this issue as one of my major research agendas, but most of that work has not &

When I created the NUKEMAP in 2012, the Google Maps API was amazing.1 It was the best thing in town for creating Javascript mapping mash-ups, cost literally nothing, had an active developer community that added new features on a regular basis, and actually seemed like it was interested in people...

It’s been forever since I’ve updated on here, and I wanted to let you know that not only have I not abandoned this blog project, I’m planning to do a lot more blogging in 2020. I ended up taking a mostly-hiatus from blogging this year both because I got totally overloaded with work in the spring &

Today is the one-year anniversary of the Hawaii false alarm, in which the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA) sent out a text alert to thousands of Americans in the Hawaiian islands that told them that a ballistic missile was incoming, that they should take shelter, and that THIS IS NOT A...

What would it take to turn the world into one big fusion reaction, wiping it clean of life and turning it into a barren rock? Asking for a friend. One might wonder whether that kind of question presented itself while I was reading the news these days, and one would be entirely correct. But the...

One of the several projects that has been keeping me busy for the past two years ( ) has finally come to fruition. I haven’t talked about it on here much, but I’ve been a co-curator at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum, in New York City, helping develop a new exhibit about the submarine &

Some time ago, I wrote a blog post about a hypothesis I had regarding President Truman and the decision to use the atomic bomb. My basic thesis then (and continues to be) is that there is good reason to think that Truman did not understand that Hiroshima was a city with a military base in &