This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

The Jetsons lied to us

I had meant to post this yesterday, but ended up running out of time. This is an attempt to round up most of the photos that exist of the mushroom and smoke clouds from Hiroshima, from above and below, and to give them some context and commentary. doomsdaymachines.net/p/the-clouds...

I had meant to post this yesterday, but ended up running out of time. This is an attempt to round up most of the photos that exist of the mushroom and smoke clouds from Hiroshima, from above and below, and to give them some context and commentary. doomsdaymachines.net/p/the-clouds...

Because people have been CLAMORING for it... here are my current model outputs for dimensions of craters dug by nuclear weapons at roughly optimized depths of burst. I've included the highest-yield US nuclear weapon currently deployed (B-83), and the 100 Mt Tsar Bomba. NYC for scale (sorry).

10/ All of this was totally foreseeable. Frankly, it’s why previous presidents weren’t so stupid to start a war like this. Trump has lost control of the war. His best course now is to cut his losses and end it. That’s the only way to prevent an even bigger disaster.

"I got my PhD by writing prompts instead of doing research, I'm winning" got some bad news, there still no jobs and now you also know nothing

The best part about using Moodle for assignments is that someday I will be dead and not have to use it (assuming there is no actual afterlife Hell, in which case, all bets are off). Anybody who complains about Canvas should have to go back to Moodle for a semester, to remember how bad thing can be.

In 2017, I collaborated with researcher at Princeton to develop an art exhibit simulating what nuclear war might look like in the present moment, called "PLAN A." For DOOMSDAY MACHINES this week, I have written up how we did it, as best as I can remember: doomsdaymachines.net/p/how-i-dest...

In 2017, I collaborated with researcher at Princeton to develop an art exhibit simulating what nuclear war might look like in the present moment, called "PLAN A." For DOOMSDAY MACHINES this week, I have written up how we did it, as best as I can remember: doomsdaymachines.net/p/how-i-dest...

I have a beginner's French class on the same day I teach my own class on nuclear technology and it is very humbling to go from talking authoritatively about gas centrifuges and high altitude EMP and etc. to being called out for not being able to pronounce the number 37 (trente-sept) correctly.

NUKEMAP has been experiencing "elevated" usage since the beginning of the Iran war (unsurprisingly). Not yet at the levels seen at the beginning of the Ukraine war in 2022, thankfully (see second image). Servers should hold up much better, though, than they did in 2022...

I remain fascinated by people who are 100% all-in on using LLMs at their jobs (and telling everyone that they're doing it) and who appear to have never paused to consider "what value am I personally adding in here, at this point, and why do I think my employers won't eventually figure this out"

March 8, 2026 - Tehran at sunrise today. But the sun is hidden behind a sky filled with smoke. After a night of intensive strikes on oil facilities, thick black clouds now hang over the city, turning morning into something that feels like night.

The "danger" signs in the Paris Metro are so wonderfully melodramatic, stylized, and lovingly rendered. They all feel like album covers, or T-shirts, for either Ska or New Wave bands.

This has huge, huge impacts on the financial viability/stability of many mid-sized universities, especially STEM institutions. These institutions rely on international students who pay full freight to balance the books.

This week, for DOOMSDAY MACHINES: A dive into the military imagination of full-scale nuclear war, drawn up while the embers of World War II were still warm… doomsdaymachines.net/p/it-is-obvi...

So there is a story about the "top 10 cities at risk during nuclear war" circulating in various tabloids/etc. with my name attached to it, and I will say that a) I never have (nor would) make such a list at all, and b) I never said any of the quotes attributed to me in the article.

super odd. Polymarket was hosting a bet on the possibility of a nuclear detonation in 2026 and it's now "archived" it. You can't view it anymore.

California vs. French bureaucracy, which is worse? A close match-up, but California Vital Records is making a real effort at taking the crown by telling me that they cannot give me a certified copy of my 2007 marriage certificate because it falls into a weird black hole of years they don't have.

Amazed to share that Errol Morris (!!!) wrote a really favorable review of my new book for Airmail.news — airmail.news/issues/2026-...

Can confirm that I get asked to participate in mythical book clubs constantly. Huge shout-out to the AI companies that decided that making bullshit generators easily available to the general public was a good way to try and make a buck.

These little drawings of proposed diagnostic experiments from Operation CASTLE (1954) fascinate me — the little "devices" (thermonuclear weapons), the palm trees, waves, the isometric views. I find "top secret art" pretty fascinating as an emergent visual genre in the 20th century...

Amazed to share that Errol Morris (!!!) wrote a really favorable review of my new book for Airmail.news — airmail.news/issues/2026-...

absolutely mesmerized by this AI slop YouTube ad where everyone's face changes a little bit in every scene

This week I watched HBO’s 1990 made-for-TV nuclear thriller “By Dawn’s Early Light” so that you don’t have to. You can make my sacrifice of 100 minutes of a finite life feel worthwhile by reading my DOOMSDAY MACHINES post about it: doomsdaymachines.net/p/cutting-th...

Monday's pod episode is on civil defence in North Carolina. Here's the state's portrayal of radiation casualties. I like how blunt the last box is: coffins and crosses. But in the top box, is there a wee man throwing his arms up in glee? "Yassss, no obvious effects!"

In spite of life’s best efforts I finally finished @wellerstein.bsky.social’s book. As kid growing in the Reagan era with movies like Threads I was fascinated by the concept of sole authority which is why a history of how we arrived at that policy interested me.

Cold War graphic design is really its own genre, one that defies parody. I just try to imagine the designer being handed this assignment: "It's a report on how many urban and forest fires will be caused by thermonuclear war... come up with something that is visually relevant, yet somehow tasteful."

love me some Cold War graphs taken out of context

This Thursday I will be giving a talk about my NEW BOOK on Truman and the bomb at the London School of Economics (LSE): www.lse.ac.uk/internationa...

The famed ethnographic filmmaker Frederick Wiseman died this week. For DOOMSDAY MACHINES, I wrote up some thoughts on his 1988 film “Missile,” which is an incredibly dull but fascinating film about how to train to be a Minuteman launch officer in the mid-1980s. doomsdaymachines.net/p/launching-...

The famed ethnographic filmmaker Frederick Wiseman died this week. For DOOMSDAY MACHINES, I wrote up some thoughts on his 1988 film “Missile,” which is an incredibly dull but fascinating film about how to train to be a Minuteman launch officer in the mid-1980s. doomsdaymachines.net/p/launching-...

Account from 2003 of a "new threat" that damaged an aerial refueling tanker at Pease ANGB: "The mishap occurred due to a completely unforeseen ingestion of a turkey into the number 2 engine of the aircraft upon landing... this was an exceptional event. The crew bears no culpability for the mishap."

Today in 1947, “The Beginning or the End”—a mediocre docudrama about the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Nagasaki is never mentioned)—premiered at the Loew’s Palace in Washington, DC. Despite MGM’s huge promotion, it received very mixed reviews and flopped at the box office.

Not including the Culture is quite an oversight however. It's probably the most coherent AI utopia (and most revealingly misunderstood by the technocracy) yet also the most inherently critical of exactly the power structures embracing AI now.

THREAD: My article in @lemonde.fr today is behind a pay wall. But I would like to share a few of the key points. I've been lecturing & writing on pieces of this for a few months. This is my most complete exposition, but I hope to turn it into a longer piece soon. 1/ www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/a...

For aficionados of nuclear history and nuclear policy, I highly recommend @wellerstein.bsky.social's compelling account of Truman's decisions at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. My reflections at the link. open.substack.com/pub/markwgoo...

R.I.P. Frederick Wiseman. He had quite a career! His fly-on-the-wall documentaries are amazing and important ethnographic examinations of different kinds of American institutions, from ICBM officer training to primate research labs to hospitals and discussions about the end of life.

Imagine if Microsoft spent like 1% of the money and talent and labor that it is currently burning on AI on making Powerpoint easier to use, look better, etc. (I say this as someone who just spent an hour trying to get two graphs to transition between themselves in a half-way decent way...)

I was trying to trace the origins of an obscure but briefly-influential but extremely wrong technical idea in the early 1950s relating to H-bombs and WOULDN'T YOU KNOW IT it seems like it was originated by... Edward Teller. I mean, really. This guy. THIS GUY. How does he do it. Amazing.

Having spent a few days looking for an ideal Javascript framework for my purposes, I have done the sane, obvious, and unfortunately totally predictable thing and concluded that I ought to just write my own.

I’ve been wanting to write about William Gibson’s “Jackpot” books, and the concept of "slow disasters" in general, for a while… and now I have, for DOOMSDAY MACHINES: doomsdaymachines.net/p/hitting-th...

you: AI-upscaled and colorized Truman isn't real, he can't hurt you me:

I’ve been wanting to write about William Gibson’s “Jackpot” books, and the concept of "slow disasters" in general, for a while… and now I have, for DOOMSDAY MACHINES: doomsdaymachines.net/p/hitting-th...

"Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?" — Stanisław Jerzy Lec

having your city noticed by the president is now a natural disaster on par with a hurricane or major flood

Taught about the "decision to use the atomic bomb" a bit today, and the thing the students were audibly the most surprised by was Nagasaki being written in, by hand, on the penultimate draft of the strike order, after Kyoto had been definitely removed from the list for the final time.

I do love the diagram genre of classified concepts explained with bad Word clipart. This is illustrating (vaguely) how they change the codes on US nuclear weapons without any one person having the knowledges necessary to set them off while doing so.