Post archives
Filtering for posts categorized as ‘Meditations’
2023
June 2023
2022
December 2022
21
Meditations
February 2022
3
Meditations
NUKEMAP was released into the world a decade ago, believe it or not.
2021
November 2021
7
Meditations | News and Notes
Reflections on ten years of nuclear history blogging, where it has gotten me, and where I think I can still go with it.
April 2021
25
Meditations | News and Notes
Reflections on the life of John-Coster Mullen (1946-2021), the truck driver who sought nuclear history and secrets.
2020
July 2020
16
Meditations
If the first nuclear weapons test had been a flop, would the world be better or worse off?
June 2020
9
Meditations
As we approach the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings, we're going to see a lot of journalistic takes on them — many of them totally wrong.
2019
January 2019
13
Meditations
I’ve spent the last few days in Hawaii, talking to journalists, experts, and residents about the lessons of the 2018 ballistic missile alert false alarm.
2017
August 2017
7
Meditations
Dispatches on a Roundtable and a Workshop with historians and political scientists in Hiroshima, Japan, on the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombing.
2016
December 2016
23
Meditations
Yes, the president has the unilateral authority to order nuclear strike; yes, there is something we can do about that if that disturbs you.
November 2016
18
Meditations
Why asking whether there are checks on the US President's ability to order a nuclear attack gets the issue exactly backwards.
July 2016
15
Meditations
How the US came to have three major strategic nuclear platforms, and why it started calling them a "triad."
May 2016
27
Meditations
Some thoughts about the first sitting President to have visited Hiroshima.
April 2016
8
Meditations
Inventing the bomb was hard. Maintaining the bomb was harder.
March 2016
18
Meditations
If you could talk about secrecy with the former head of the CIA and the NSA, what would you say?
2015
December 2015
4
Meditations
What caused the atomic spies of Los Alamos to do what they did? Somewhere in the zone between ideology and ego, monsters live.
August 2015
21
Meditations
Seven decades later, how do we talk about the atomic bombs?
3
Meditations
Considering a few of the options that were on the table in 1945.
June 2015
12
Meditations
What remains of the Manhattan Project? A lot of documents. Some people. A few places. And a handful of artifacts.
May 2015
29
Meditations
Historians sometimes need a reminder that places and people, not just documents, make up the past.
January 2015
7
Meditations
Was a "Nazi nuclear bunker" recently discovered? Almost certainly not — but that hasn't stopped the story from being passed around.
2014
October 2014
17
Meditations
Can one empathize with the spies who never confess?
September 2014
22
Meditations
How many people would have died if an atomic bomb had been dropped on Tokyo in early 1945, instead of firebombs? And why does it matter?
August 2014
22
Meditations
The original target for the second atomic bomb was Kokura, not Nagasaki. Why was Kokura spared? Three theories are considered.
June 2014
27
Meditations
How important was Albert Einstein's work or personal intervention to the making of the atomic bomb? Not as important as most people think.
6
Meditations
Most of Feynman's stories about the bomb are about his hijinks. But what did he really do on the Manhattan Project, and what did he think about the bomb?
May 2014
16
Meditations
Leo Szilard conceived of the nuclear chain reaction 5 years before fission was discovered. What was he really thinking, and why didn't anyone listen?
February 2014
28
Meditations
What is the legacy of the Castle Bravo nuclear test? How do we assess the human costs of the arms race?
2013
December 2013
23
Meditations
By looking at the trends of yield-to-weight ratios, we can peel back the veil just a tiny bit on nuclear weapons design trends.
6
Meditations
What airburst physics tells us about nuclear targeting decisions, and why it took so long for the NUKEMAP to support arbitrary burst heights.
