Alex Wellerstein    Understanding how much fissile material enriched uranium and separated plutonium was produced, and at what time, by the Manhattan Project is one of those seemingly-obscure technical questions that comes with a lot of important historical implications. It is what determined the scheduling of the...

Alex Wellerstein    I realized I haven’t updated things here for a long while, and that it would be worth consolidating a few overdue news updates. First and foremost, if you want to read things from me on a more regular basis, you should be reading Doomsday Machines, which is another blog of mine, and is much more [&]

Alex Wellerstein    I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does, instead of sleeping), and one particular slide jumped out at me: It’s a little graphic advertising the different kinds of modeling software that...

Alex Wellerstein    I have been busy this summer (and spring, and the winter before that& and the fall before that& and the summer before that&), but one of the things I’ve been busy with has finally launched: Doomsday Machines, a new blog dedicated to exploring the post-apocalyptic imagination from several different...

Alex Wellerstein    The city of Kyoto was the only great city of Japan to be spared serious bombing during World War II, despite being among the top targets preferred for the atomic bomb, thanks to the unprecedented and extraordinary efforts by the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, to protect it. I have written at...

Alex Wellerstein    When I learned several months ago that Daniel Ellsberg had pancreatic cancer, and was opting not to treat it, I was not quite sure what I ought to do. I consider it a great honor that I got to spend several days with Ellsberg, a few years back, and was periodically in touch with him [&]

Alex Wellerstein    One of the sleeper news items of last week was that the Department of Energy officially vacated the Atomic Energy Commission decision that stripped J. Robert Oppenheimer of his security clearance in 1954. It did come as a surprise to me. I knew that there was a campaign to overturn Oppenheimer’s...

Alex Wellerstein    This is second post of a two part series on this topic. Click here for part one. Did the Japanese offer to surrender before the atomic bombs were dropped in August 1945? In my first post earlier this week, I gave what we might call the standard diplomatic history answer: no, they didn’t. There were...

Alex Wellerstein    This is part one of a series of two posts on this topic. Click here for part two. One of the most common invocations made in the service of the atomic bombs weren’t necessary argument is that the Japanese offered to surrender well before Hiroshima, and that this was ignored by the United States...

Alex Wellerstein    In early February 2022, as readers will have seen, I celebrated the tenth anniversary of the NUKEMAP. Privately, I had been reflecting personally on how the usage stats had been lower since the end of the Trump presidency. My feelings about the NUKEMAP usage stats are always a bit conflicted, since...