iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Does the fact that I know it is a bad idea mean I haven't made concept art? Of course not

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The more people you know personally who have won in either category, the better this cartoon is, I think. One likes to believe that knowing such people increases one's own meager odds, and it must, in objective terms. But that final degree of separation, it's a doozy, watch your step.

Cartoon from S. Gross, the New Yorker, of a little silly jester, making the silliest goofy jester facial expression, dancing before a king and queen in medieval times. In the crowd of onlookers is a disgruntled wizard, who speaks the cartoon's caption: "What riles me is that he got a genius grant and I didn't."

040 4

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

also, look at this absolutely hellish CAPTCHA. I began to wonder if I was actually a robot

1250 25

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

As part of a system that was used to legally verify my identity online, a site asked me a series of "knowledge-based questions" — what is my SSN, birth date, former addresses, where I went to school, etc. — and then, this one... note that I already had to provide my DOB...

"Knowledge-Based Question. Using your date of birth, please select your astrological sun sign of the zodiac from the following choices."

2244 24

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This message brought to you by trying to deal with the website for VitalChek, a major website for ordering copies of vital records. WHAT DO YOU WANT VITALCHECK? JUST TELL ME. Or learn how to use Regex correctly, my god. Also, it checks server-side, so I can't even reverse engineer it. WHY

1100 10

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I'm sure there are multiple reasons (lots of military facilities there, and the US military likes places with lots of land and not that many people) but yeah, that's where the US put its Minuteman ICBM silos.

140 4

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

A 1969 letter to Kissinger asserted that BMEWS issued 40-50 "false reports"/"false alarms" per year, which is basically once a week! nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/defaul...

2206 20

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I had never heard of the system before — it sounds like it was patched together with duct tape. "Converted SAGE [anti-bomber] air defense radars" — yikes. Sounds like it had just become fully operational after years of work, and was just about ready to be phased out.

050 5

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I believe this is the explanation, and it's fasssscinating

4260 26

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

He's a cute lil' bugger, ain't he... I don't know if there are any US nukes that have cute lil' faces? "Mr. President, we cannot allow a kawaii gap!!!"

2112 11

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Source is from the @nsarchive.bsky.social : nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/defaul...

Report cover sheet:
FINAL REPORT
ARMS CONTROL IMPLICATIONS OF STRATEGIC OFFENSIVE WEAPON SYSTEMS(U)
VOLUME IV T
echnological Feasibility of Launch-On-Warning and Flyout Under Attack (U)
JUNE 1971
ACDA/ST-196

PREPARED BY AEROSPACE SYSTEMS ANALYSIS, MCDONNELL DOUGLAS ASTRONAUTICS COMPANY

PREPARED FOR The U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

1473 47

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This diagram is amazing. I've never seen something broken down quite this detailed in an official report. It shows exactly how long it would take to get bombers and missiles off the ground after a launch was detected. The question mark for delay for "PRESIDENT" is fascinating! More in the alt text.

Figure: "National Command-Warning to Response Cycle."
Shows the detection time as splitting into two pathways: NORAD notifies the SAC bomber bases who scramble their bombers. This takes about 7.7 minutes after the launch is detected. The National Military Command Center (NMCC) alerts the President, who then spends an unknown amount of time deliberating about what to do next (a delay time represented by a question mark). A launch order then goes to the Commanders in Chiefs of the various forces, which really becomes a message to SAC (who launches ICBMs and sends orders to bombers) and the SSBN Fleet Communications. Of all of this pathway, only the ICBM launch is described, and takes about 18 minutes until "MISSILE SAFE." "MISSILE SAFE," the text explains, is when the Minuteman IIIs have finished their third-stage of their rockets, when it is 60 nmi downrange from the launch point and at an altitude of 110 nmi, and are no longer as vulnerable to incoming attack or passing through radioactive clouds or other things like that. The text says that actually they are still somewhat vulnerable, but just much less so than previous.

From the text explaining the diagram, which I have highlighted in a few places:

**In the missile-command loop, major uncertainty in the time required to complete the chain arises from the impossibility of predicting the reaction time of the NCA [the President and his advisors]. It is not really even possible to assign upper and lower bounds to this interval. Even if the NCA is assembled and a response plan is already selected, some time would be required to assimilate the nature of the attack. On the other hand, if the attack is a complete surprise and Washington, D.C. is attacked early in the exchange, just assembling the NCA, or what is left of it, may consume hours.** Because any assessment of this time interval necessarily must be extremely scenario dependent, this study adopted the approach of determining how much time could be allotted to this process given the probable attack parameters and the known time delays.

Once the launch decision has been made at the NCA level, there are still three significant delays before the missiles can be considered safe. **The most important and the most surprising of the delays is the 11 minutes required by the launch control crew to receive, decode, authenticate and execute the launch command.** This time delay is not a minimum or even the average of all launch crews but rather it is an interval which has been established by Air Force doctrine to insure that no crew attempts to launch before all crews have completed their prelaunch functions.

---

The page goes on to explain that any Minuteman Launched Control Center (LCC) crew can cancel the order of any others, as a failsafe measure. This means that the launching of a squadron is thus "determined by the slowest crew" on purpose. It says also that a "common time reference" was established to avoid fratricide, and so it is total 11 minutes + 4 minutes of code processing = 15 minutes to launch.

1553 55

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Quite a remarkable map, table, and diagram from a 1971 report on launch-on-warning, showing the implications of Soviet submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) on detection, reaction, deliberation, and response time. All numbers are in SECONDS, which is what I find the most wild about it.

Map of the USA labeled "Soviet SLBM [Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile] Time of Flight to SAC [Strategic Air Command] Targets." Shows both "nominal" and "depressed" trajectories. Absolute best (north central USA) is between 580 and 850 seconds (9.6 – 14 min). Absolute worst (everywhere else) is between 320 and 650 seconds (5.3 – 10.8 min). The variations are based on where they assume the subs are launching from.

Table: "Early Warning System Performance." Shows four different systems (BMEWS, OTHF, SLBM Net, and a not-yet-operational in 1971 Boost-Phase Detection Satellite) that indicates the time of detection after launch (varies between 55 and 150 seconds; BMEWS cannot detect launches as it is only over-the-horizon radar), the time that the US command and control system would be alerted after launch (ranges from 85 seconds for the newest system to 900 seconds for BMEWs), the probably of detection of a single launch (BMEWS is 99%, SLBM Net is 50%, none of the others have probabilities), probably of detection for a mass launch (all around 100%), and their false alarm rate (BMEWS has 1 per 7 years, OTHF is 1 per 6 months, the others are unknown).

Diagram: "National Command-Warning to Response Cycle." Shows the consequences of a launch detection all the way through the US nuclear infrastructure, with "delay times" in seconds. Will be discussed in the next post in this thread.

1014345 143

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I found a few more entries in the ever-popular "babushkas buffing bombs" genre of photography... (*I recognize that not all are authentic babushkas, but the alliteration was too great for me to resist, I apologize)

mopping RDS-1, the first Soviet atomic bomb

polishing RDS-4, the first Soviet tactical nuclear weapon

more buffing of RDS-1, with attention paid t the distinctive eye-like radar altitude sensors that give it such a kawaii face

a non-babushka cleans behind RDS-1's ears

37016 70

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

So I find staying on top of e-mail IMPOSSIBLE. IMPOSSIBLE! How do you all manage it? How do you sort out the stuff you need to reply to or take action on in the future, and not lose it or forget about it? How do you keep e-mail from being 90% of your workday if that is not really your "job"?

8201 20

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I'm not Catholic, but it was still pretty cool to see the Pope outside my window yesterday

1431 43

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"Dr. Oppenheimer, what can you tell us about your choice of tie?"

2470 47

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

These "officially allowed" depictions are apparently codified in TCG-NAS-2 (1997)... I say "apparently" because when I FOIA'd it, they redacted basically the whole thing. 🤷

100 1

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I mean, sure, always interested in everything, although I would note that anything unclassified that comes out of that world generally has pretty strict standards about what can be drawn. Generally this kind of thing and no further.

310 3

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

*record scratch* "So you might be wondering how I got here..." (Roberto Valturio, De re militari, 1472. No, I have no idea what it is trying to show about war.)

4172 17

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Most of it is much better than the nuclear bomb part — I feel a little bad, since I am focusing on probably its weakest topic. Here's one of the spreads I was fascinated with as a child, and think about frequently when I look at a lock...

130 3

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

As a child, I was deeply puzzled by Macaulay's depiction of a hydrogen bomb. Apart from it being just incorrect in principle, it is only upon reflection — and finding the diagram that inspired it — that I discovered it is also *mislabeled.* Which makes me feel better about not understanding it...

2230 23

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

From a strange conspiratorial Indian book on Google Books about how nuclear weapons don't exist (sigh) — but I thought these fruit analogies were fairly amusing. (The rest of the text, which is just that painful mixture of terrible confusion and disturbing overconfidence, is less amusing.)

"How much did Little Boy weigh? Everything about Little Boy is secret and mysterious. One of the project's great leaders, L. R. Groves, has told many thrilling stories about this bomb. But he was silent about how much Little Boy weighed. Some people think that two grapes' worth of uranium is enough for any nuclear reaction. Our letter writer does not think so. He thinks that Little Boy's uranium took only seven hundred grams in the reaction. That is not the weight of two grapes, that is the weight of one mango!"

4351 35

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I will even forgive Macaulay's confused ideas about how nuclear weapons work (which were not original to him, but are still inexcusably confused for 1988)

020 2

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

@theatlantic.com just a note that apparently my name is misspelled in a recent article www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...

4261 26

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Preview of the current state of (re)design for the NUKEMAP dropdown preset menus. The overall NUKEMAP aesthetic will be keeping more or less the same, but I am giving the underlying code a total overhaul, and trying to add more depth and options (without making it overwhelming, ideally).

A preset list of possible "nuclear targets" — all cities, in this case. Countries are shown with their national flags, as well as indicators of whether they have nuclear weapons (the radiation symbol, and the estimated number for capitals), and whether they are in mutual defense pacts with nuclear-states or organizations (e.g. NATO, SEATO, other mutual defense pacts).

Part of a list of historical and present-day nuclear weapons. The list now includes far more options, including more international ones, also again indicated by flags, as well as dates of deployment (if known). Items in yellow are either currently-deployed or meant to be representative of currently-deployed weapons.

Selecting a preset nuclear weapon will also present additional contextual information about the weapon (it can be collapsed easily) and photographs. The photographs can be enlarged by clicking on them, which also presents photo-specific captions.

2275 27

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Does anybody have a clue what it was, meteorologically? It evolved rather quickly over the course of 5 minutes or so, both moving and stretching while also apparently evaporating the cloud "backdrop" as it went. All photos taken from the same bench.

5221 22

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Impressive and somewhat ominous cloud formation that I just saw while walking the dog. As seen from the 14th arrondissement, Paris, facing to the east.

1483 48

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

also what in the actually incoherent nonsense is this

2171 17

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

"imagine how the actual Soviet Union would commemorate the largest nuclear weapon ever made" is a provocative design challenge and I can tell you the answer would not be either a genetic skull or generic skeleton watch.

1190 19

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

actual Soviet watches went so much harder than those

2161 16

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Janitors scrub the "Tsar Bomba" at the Sarov museum. To keep it from becoming a dirty bomb, I imagine.

1327035 270

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Their notability guidelines are very strange for journalists — they lump them in with artists. Under these guidelines almost no journalists would be "notable" (citation is not common in journalism, journalists do not create new theories, their work is rarely reviewed and exhibited).

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)#Creative_professionals:

Creative professionals
Shortcuts
WP:AUTHOR
WP:CREATIVE
WP:ARTIST
WP:NJOURNALIST
"WP:AUTHOR" redirects here. For the right to "own" an article, see Wikipedia:Ownership of content.
This guideline applies to authors, editors, journalists, filmmakers, photographers, artists, architects, and other creative professionals. Such a person is likely to be notable if:

The person is regarded as an important figure or is widely cited by peers or successors; or
The person is known for originating a significant new concept, theory, or technique; or
The person has created or played a major role in co-creating a significant or well-known work or collective body of work. In addition, such work must have been the primary subject of multiple independent periodical articles or reviews, or of an independent and notable work (for example, a book, film, or television series, but usually not a single episode of a television series); or
The person's work (or works) has: (a) become a significant monument, (b) been a substantial part of a significant exhibition, (c) won significant critical attention, or (d) been represented within the permanent collections of several notable galleries or museums.

1100 10

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

should be on the right part of the window

131 3

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

FWIW, Truman wanted lightning bolts coming out of the arrowheads to be a symbol for the atomic bomb, also. He was persuaded not to. Churchill told Truman "that the berries — or whatever they are — on the olive branch is the eagle's claw looked suspiciously like atom bombs."

2121 12

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

OK, NUKEMAP's casualty calculator has been restored. Hooray?

2485 48

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

hmm I ran it again and got weird results this name btw, NUKEMAP's casualty calculator is temporarily offline while I am upgrading the server that it runs on (one of those "you upgrade mysql and now you have to upgrade everything else" things). should have it back up by tomorrow at the latest.

1204 20

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I am a sucker for these dialect quiz things. This one is pretty good, although as someone from Northern California I am seething that they do not distinguish more between NorCal and SoCal dialects, much less central CA (where I grew up) from the coast. What do they think we are, the same state!?!?

Map of the USA from https://mydialect.us indicating that I pronounce English like someone from California, which is not inaccurate

6251 25

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The Manhattan District History has a lot of detail on the sites and chemistry and so on for how the uranium was processed. It is where I would look first. This is from Book 7, Vol 1, Feed Materials.

140 4

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

This is a mildly amusing almost-redaction: my theory here is that the censor mistook this table for partition of energy from a fission weapon, and not a fission reaction, and then realized their mistake. The former can be classified, the latter is basic physics.

0160 16

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

And here is wha the difference between those two lines looks like when graphed out to show what the increase in fallout gamma would be in the case described here. It's an interesting little curve — one can see how important the Np-239 and U-237 are, particularly between 10 and 120 hours.

My graph: "Percentage increase in gamma intensity using a U-238 tamper versus a U-235 tamper." At H+0 (detonation time), the U-238 fallout has 37% more gamma than the U-235 fallout. This then drops to about a 6% increase at 6 hours, and then rises to a peak of 72% increase at 100 hours. It then drops, and by 1,200 hours the U-238 fallout actually has a net decrease (-4%) versus U-235. It then rises again.

Again, note that the time scale is logarithmic (1,200 hours = 50 days), and that the raw exposure that this is being applied to is also decreasing exponentially, as will be elaborated upon...

1180 18

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

LABORIOUSLY transcribing some of the numbers allowed me to confirm that, yes, there is a difference between assuming most of your fissioning was from U-238 versus U-235, and yes, almost all of it is due to Np-239 and U-237. Here's what the dose rates of the two tampers looks like graphed out.

My graph: "External gamma radiation exposure rates from local fallout for two hypothetical 1 MT nuclear bursts, one whose output is primarily from U-235 fissioning, the other from U-238 fissioning." Phew!

The vertical axis is gamma exposure in MR/HR. The exact numbers of exposure are NOT important/meaningful here, but are only useful as relative values. The horizontal axis is hours after detonation.

Also included is the Wigner-Way (t^-1.2) rule for fission product decay, as a point of reference. Wigner-Way is considered a useful heuristic but it is known to diverge from weapon debris for a variety of practical reasons. Here it is clear that it underestimates exposure between 10 and 10,000 hours (1.1 years); after about that point it starts to overestimate it.

The main take-away from the graph here is that one can see that the U-238 tamper fissioning does indeed produce somewhat elevated gamma rates in fallout between 10 and 10,000 hours. More on that in a second...

1180 18

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

After casting about for awhile, I eventually found an official source (LLNL) that gave some "source terms" for hypothetical TN weapons that used both U-238 and U-235 tampers. It gave an inventory of gamma output in fallout at various times and the contributions of specific isotopes.

Harry Hicks, "Results of Calculations of External Gamma Radiation Exposure Rates from Local Fallout and the Related Radionuclide Compositions of Two Hypothetical 1-MT Nuclear Bursts," UCRL-53559 (December 1984): https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6103869

1180 18

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

How much do they matter? I found some sources, like the one below, which point out that in thermonuclear weapons with U-238 tampers, the contributions from Np-239 and U-237 are rather significant in the first month or so.

Graph: "Radioactivity from 1-Mt explosive with a fission-to-fusion ratio of 1.0." Note that both axes are logarithmic, which is useful for comparing relative contribution over time, but makes it much harder to see the raw contribution (e.g., while Np-239 is higher than fission products at H+100, both are two orders of magnitude reduced from H+1).

Ng and Tewes, "Radionuclide body burdens and hazards from ingestion of foodstuffs contaminated by fallout," in _Survival of Food Crops and Livestock in the Event of a Nuclear War_, AEC Symposium Series No. 24 (December 1971), 131-172, on 133-135

1230 23

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

(And to review, U-238 is not *fissile* and so cannot sustain a chain reaction. But it is *fissionable* from high-energy fusion neutrons. In a TN weapon with a U-238 tamper, the amount of U-238 fissioning can contribution well over 50% of the total yield.)

Lecture slide showing the neutron cross-sections (likelihood of a subatomic event occurring) for fission in U-235, U-238, and Pu-239. Both Pu-239 and U-235 are "fissile": they can fission from neutrons of basically any energy (although the probability changes with how much energy the neutron has), including neutrons released by the fission process itself. So they can sustain a chain reaction, releasing neutrons that have a good chance to induce more fission and so on. U-238 by comparison has a such a low chance of fissioning from fission-energy neutrons that it will not sustain a chain reaction, although it is possible some fissioning can take place. For high energy neutrons (+10 MeV), however, its chances of fissioning are only a bit worse than U-235. So in a thermonuclear weapon, which can generate neutrons of 10-14 MeV, a blanket of U-238 can add a huge amount of raw fissioning to the output of the weapon, even though it is not doing so as part of a fission chain reaction, because the thermonuclear neutrons are available in just huge numbers.

1280 28