Online, Americans Nuke Themselves

[Nevilledog]

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/62210e0ddc551a0020883980/online-americans-nuke-themselves/


Devoted Galaxy Brain readers might remember a post from my Substack days in which I interviewed Tom Neill, a Londoner who, while bored in lockdown, built a silly website tracking the container ship that was currently (and rather gloriously) wedged in the Suez Canal. I am generally fascinated by what it’s like when something a person builds is at the center of a viral storm (as Neill’s site was). That interview is still one of my favorite newsletters. Today, I’m continuing the series—though under far more serious circumstances.

The first time I used Nukemap was sometime in 2013, when I was living in New York City. I’m not certain how I stumbled on the site, but I know I spent at least an hour toying with it. Nukemap is a nuclear-effects calculator, which is to say, a website that shows you the various radii of destruction, if a nuclear bomb went off in the given location. You can customize the area of detonation, the size of the bomb, and other details. The site is somewhat of a cult classic, with over 220 million “detonations” logged since it came online in 2012. The results it shows are, as you can imagine, sobering—especially now.

Last week, after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin ordered his nuclear forces into a higher state of alert. It was the first time the Kremlin had done this since the Russian Federation was established in 1991. I’m not a nuclear expert at all, so I’m not going to speculate about what this means—you can read my colleague Tom Nichols on that—but the move has brought the notion of nuclear war back into the global conversation in a nontrivial way. As you might expect, Nukemap’s traffic has surged, and the site has, at some points, crashed.

I reached out to Nukemap’s creator, Alex Wellerstein, to talk about the site’s creation, how people have used it for the last decade, and what he’s seen change in the last week. Wellerstein is a historian of science and nuclear weapons and a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Seriousness of the subject matter aside, it’s one of my favorite interviews in a while. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

*snip*

[Socal31]

1. Obviously not enough have visited that site.

Nt

[Hekate]

2. KnR