The first photo of my new book, courtesy of my editor... "The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age" comes out in early December! Feel free to pre-order it today! www.harpercollins.com/products/the...

I'll be doing this tomorrow!

"All you have to do now is run the city..."

Loving this Reddit exchange about a bug in which Arthur's mouth doesn't move during a mission of Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC

The half-life of a relevant analogy: instances of the terms "atomic Pearl Harbor" and "nuclear Pearl Harbor" (combined) across the Google Books corpus using Google Ngrams. Unfortunately doing the same search for "nuclear 9/11" turns up too much OCR noise.

Raid Over Moscow (Access/U.S. Gold, 1984, C64/Spectrum) #2 for one week in March 1985 Follow-up to Beach-Head. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament protested against its insensitivity.

US not planning nuclear explosions at this time, energy secretary says reut.rs/3JHLqNs

While I was walking my dog earlier today an older Parisian woman waiting at a bus stop chased me down the street (!) to warn me that she had seen something on TV about people using bolt cutter to steal dogs, and that I should be careful. Thanks, I guess?

I saw House of Dynamite on Netflix! I thought it was pretty good. Better than I expected? (I have low expectations for nuclear films.) I want to think about it some more before I write something about it for Doomsday Machines. But if you haven't seen it, it's definitely worth watching.

Shielding Chart xkcd.com/3158/

I happened to notice that Humble Bundle has an amazing del on the graphic novels of Kieron Gillen. I don't know all of his work, but DIE was one of the best graphic novels I read in the last couple of years — it is highly recommended! www.humblebundle.com/books/roll-f...

I was going to write something more general about Curtis LeMay, but I fell into the rabbit hole that is his bizarre memoir, “Mission with LeMay,” and felt that this was more than enough for one DOOMSDAY MACHINES post… doomsdaymachines.net/p/i-have-sou...

Physics Paths xkcd.com/3155/

US Academia Be Like

I was going to write something more general about Curtis LeMay, but I fell into the rabbit hole that is his bizarre memoir, “Mission with LeMay,” and felt that this was more than enough for one DOOMSDAY MACHINES post… doomsdaymachines.net/p/i-have-sou...

I like all of these but I think mine might be (and only 3 words): DROP & RUN

oh Luxembourg. what have you done?

I updated my post with one more graph — converting those fissile material numbers to "weapon equivalents," including different possibilities for composite core weapons.

This took longer to put together than I thought it would, but I finally wrote up a long post on the inventories of highly-enriched uranium and separated plutonium produced during the Manhattan Project. I think I have the exact-ish numbers, finally... blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2025/10/10/m...

In Luxembourg for the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) annual meeting at the University of Luxembourg at Belval. Which used to be a steel mill? Huh.

My goal is to live long enough for conservatives to start arguing that Trump was actually a liberal Communist...

🥖🍷🇫🇷

Some schools will be starved of resources. Other schools will be offered bribes. The end goal is the same. To make the universities an extension of the Trump administration. Shame on any of these institutions willing to take the bribes.

Wild illustration choice in this slide from training materials for ICBM launch officers, ca. 2010

If any other president in all of history said the military should use American cities as a training ground he would be removed from office that same day. The hardest thing to tolerate in all this is how relatively silent elected democrats are. It’s ridiculous.

I will say if that whole military meeting had been an email it would have been a pretty weird email

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

OK, this is the strangest subreddit I've stumbled across for awhile. I get what it is about, but there's something very cyberpunk and surreal about it... www.reddit.com/r/TraceAnObj...

Here's a post I've wanted to write up for awhile, tracing the history of the idea of a "Doomsday Machine," from fact to fiction (or maybe it was always, to some degree, fiction): doomsdaymachines.net/p/inventing-...

mildly interesting: my long-running VS Code script finished running, but VS code itself broke. I can copy and paste the terminal text (and it is complete when I do that, whereas it is visually corrupted), but I cannot edit or manipulate anything else. how weird.

Here's a post I've wanted to write up for awhile, tracing the history of the idea of a "Doomsday Machine," from fact to fiction (or maybe it was always, to some degree, fiction): doomsdaymachines.net/p/inventing-...

I'm sorry, I've lost any & all patience for this level of fundamental unseriousness. Vast swathes of our universities are going to be dismantled. Real people are going to lose their jobs. Students won't have the same opportunities anymore. And these people are writing drivel like this. It's gross.

It feels like an insult to the notion of objective reality to invoke “experts” to weigh in on a numerical fact you can verify with a pocket calculator

It still amazes me how even with all of the processing power of modern computers, you can still run up into real walls when you increase the amount of effort a little bit on a lot of data...

For many years — until some kind of mandated clean-up removed all unauthorized postings — I kept a poster on my office door titled "Understanding nuclear weapons," from the webcomic Subnormality. Here's why I love it: doomsdaymachines.net/p/understand...

I've been thinking a lot about this comic lately, especially its take on "institutions." It goes both ways: the oppressive institutions are often more brittle than they look, but so also are the ones you rely on for safety, health, stability, job security, etc. www.viruscomix.com/page528.html

"We want to change the perception of journalists away from the elitist East Coast Democrat of yesteryear to the rabid logical fallacy machine of tomorrow. And at the Times, that dream isn’t too far in the future."

This technology is so clearly designed to profit off cheating and struggling students--its insidious. And yet universities keep announcing how they're allowing this company into its midst, to exploit and incapacitate our students even more

I was an exhibit a few weeks back on atomic age posters — some pro, some anti — at Poster House in NYC... some thoughts on nuclear posters that work: doomsdaymachines.net/p/critical-m...

The Atlantic and NYT lost their minds if there was so much as a trigger warning in classes. Now, professors and Deans are being fired for a class that discussed the existence of trans people and those same publications are quiet. It was never about free speech. www.texastribune.org/2025/09/08/t...

I received a pair of interesting documents last week from a FOIA request, wherein Los Alamos scientists in 1947 and 1949 tried to answer the question: “How many nukes would it take to make the atmosphere dangerously radioactive?” You can read the reports here: doomsdaymachines.net/p/irradiatin...

I received a pair of interesting documents last week from a FOIA request, wherein Los Alamos scientists in 1947 and 1949 tried to answer the question: “How many nukes would it take to make the atmosphere dangerously radioactive?” You can read the reports here: doomsdaymachines.net/p/irradiatin...

one of the most insufferable things the NYT does is run a story and then spend half of the page talking about itself and its reporters

What words can one have for this? I knew at least three of the people who lost their jobs last week — all them had been there for years and were important. I do not think the average American quite yet grasps the scope of the sabotage being enacted on US higher education. patch.com/new-jersey/h...

I had a dream last night that seamlessly transitioned into an ad for a VPN service. I think I may be watching too many YouTube video essays.

dubious dog is dubious

Last week I got two documents from the NNSA, via a FOIA request that I filed 2 years ago, involving early (1947 and 1949) estimates by scientists at Los Alamos (incl. Stevens alum Frederick Reines) trying to estimate how many nuclear bombs it would take to radioactively contaminate the planet.

We Have AI Now www.youtube.com/shorts/8-lgJ...

I have found some real head-scratching #nukesky deep lore. At some point between 1942 and 1944, the Manhattan Project plutonium chemists at the Chicago Met Lab were bored enough to invent an alchemical symbol for plutonium. They chose...this emoji 😐 wearing an eye patch? I want to know why.