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Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

Nuclear historian. Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology. Visiting researcher at Nuclear Knowledges program, Sciences Po (Paris). Author of THE MOST AWFUL RESPONSIBILITY (2025). Creator of NUKEMAP. Blogging at https://doomsdaymachines.net.

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Stephen Schwartz@atomicanalyst.bsky.social · 5h ago

Today in 1950, a B-29 ferrying an unarmed Mark-4 atomic bomb (without its plutonium capsule) to Guam for potential use in the Korean War crashed and burned attempting an emergency landing five minutes after takeoff from Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base, CA, killing 12 crew/passengers and injuring 8.

A color photograph of two silver-colored B-29 bombers in flight over dry, hilly terrain, one very large (in the foreground) and one much smaller in the background.
mburnamfink.bsky.social@mburnamfink.bsky.social · 4d ago

5 stars to @wellerstein.bsky.social fantastic book on Truman and the atomic bomb. I'm really glad it finally arrived on the top of my queue, in partnership with the Hiroshima accounts from my short story book group. www.burrowedbooks.com/book/the-mos...

The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age — Burrowed Books

A review of The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age by Alex Wellerstein.

burrowedbooks.com

Flint Dibble@flintdibble.bsky.social · 5d ago

Everyone's comparing Nolan's Odyssey to Homer, but I think there's much more richness The ancient Greeks adapted the Odyssey into ART While these images might appear static to us, I want to walk through how an ancient Greek saw art: AS DYNAMIC STORYTELLING like our films 1/13

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Katie Mack@astrokatie.com · 5d ago

If this is what happens to a scientific field as a whole when LLMs dominate the workflows of researchers, I can only imagine that the outlook is even worse for any individual researcher who is soldiering on without using them. 😞

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago

13. Hence our dismal conclusion: rather than finding that LLMs free us to do a better job of what we were doing before they came along, they shift scientific incentives (and the playing field of academic competition) in ways that compel us to do more and more, faster and faster, less and less well.

Alex Wellerstein@wellerstein.bsky.social · last wk.

Here are a bunch of 5B cylinders being manufactured in the USA. Apparently each can contain up to 25 kg (55 lbs) of HEU. This is roughly the number of cylinders you'd expect the Iranian HEU to be packed into, although they of course could use more if they wanted to spread it out.

5B UF6 cylinders manufactured for US domestic use by Oak Ridge Technologies LLC: https://ortechllc.com/fabrication-of-the-uf6-5b-cylinders/
Alex Wellerstein@wellerstein.bsky.social · 2w ago

Herman Kahn is fun to read but man, does he make some rather large assumptions about human psychology. Here's a passage from On Thermonuclear War (1960) on how he thinks people would react in New York City if lions started running loose, and what he thinks that tells us about strategic bombing...

"Both the French and the British air power experts talked often and convincingly of the 'knock out blow'' in which the side with the superior air force would win the war in a few days or weeks. We know now that the capability for strategic bombing as it existed then had been exaggerated, but it took three or four years of war to show this convincingly. The British had learned during World War I that a small bombing attack could come close to paralyzing a city. They assumed that in some sense a linear relationship must hold between the size of the attack and the disorganization produced; that if the size of the attack was increased by a factor of a hundred or so, the resulting havoc, destruction, and disorganization would also be increased by a hundred or so. Well, it is not like that. To give a homely example, if we put one lion on the streets of New York City, one might find every other mother paralyzed with fright. She just would not allow her children out on the streets. However, even if one increased the number of lions by five or ten and kept them on the streets permanently, people would soon learn that lions do not eat ...""...very much and that the average pedestrian's life expectancy would not be greatly decreased if they ignored the danger. After all, five or ten lions might kill about as many people each year as would be killed by automobiles in New York City and injure far fewer people. While presumably pedestrians would take precautions—it is, after all, an extraordinarily unpleasant way to die—they probably would not desert the city. If for some reason they could not hunt these lions down, they would just learn to live with them, bizarre as the situation might seem to us. If one made it fifty lions, however, large numbers might well begin to leave. The lions probably would then be a good deal more dangerous than automobiles (though not as dangerous as heart trouble). While one can and should make distinctions between the impact of 1, 10, and 100 lions, 10 lions will cause less than ten times as much trouble as 1 lion, but 100 may make the city unacceptable for business or residence for a large portion of the inhabitants."
Alex Wellerstein@wellerstein.bsky.social · 3w ago

I saw The Odyssey. I don't quite get all the critical praise. The editing is awful. I timed it (yes, I am that petty) and on average there is a cut every 5 seconds. I cannot understand how Nolan would create these beautiful and tricky scenes to film and then just cut away from them every 5 seconds.

Alex Wellerstein@wellerstein.bsky.social · 3w ago

A highly unusual way to visualize the Trinity test: graph from Julian Mack, "JULY 16th [1945] NUCLEAR EXPLOSION: SPACE-TIME RELATIONSHIPS" (April 2, 1946). This is, as Mack puts it, "a compilation of almost all the data" obtained on Trinity test variables, on log scales.

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Alex Wellerstein@wellerstein.bsky.social · 3w ago

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asked me to write about 13 films that I thought were essential to understanding the nuclear age… and so I did! And now I am ready for everyone to tell me how wrong I am to have missed their favorite film, which is understandable. thebulletin.org/premium/2026...

Thirteen films that are essential to understanding the nuclear age

A chronological list of the best nuclear Doomsday films shows how the nuclear perspective unfolded from the earliest days to the present.

thebulletin.org