Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

January 3, 2026 at 8:52 PM

Reposted by Alex Wellerstein

Mark Chadbourn

@chadbourn.bsky.social

French Foreign Ministry: “The removal of Maduro from power and the violation of sovereignty constitute a serious act of aggression against the dignity of the Venezuelan people and their right to determine their own future.

January 3, 2026 at 3:02 PM

Reposted by Alex Wellerstein

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

I stumbled across this first-hand account of a nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site from 1957 and couldn’t stop reading it. So I put it up on DOOMSDAY MACHINES. Something to ring in the New Year with, perhaps… doomsdaymachines.net/p/zero-time-...

"Zero time was speeding toward me like a car you cannot dodge"

A gripping first-hand account of a nuclear test from 1957

doomsdaymachines.net

January 1, 2026 at 4:54 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

I stumbled across this first-hand account of a nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site from 1957 and couldn’t stop reading it. So I put it up on DOOMSDAY MACHINES. Something to ring in the New Year with, perhaps… doomsdaymachines.net/p/zero-time-...

"Zero time was speeding toward me like a car you cannot dodge"

A gripping first-hand account of a nuclear test from 1957

doomsdaymachines.net

January 1, 2026 at 4:54 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

This human body mockup used for biomedical testing during Operation Plumbbob (1957) is... disturbing

January 1, 2026 at 4:15 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

Very interesting account from a young Russian woman who lived in Hiroshima at the time of the atomic bombing in 1945, about rumors that both Hiroshima and Kyoto were going to be spared bombing during the war. From an interview made in the immediate postwar by the USSBS.

"Q. Did the people in Hiroshima ever think that they would be bombed?
A. No, they didn't. We heard that there were rumors that Kyoto and Hiroshima would be left alongebecause Hiroshima was such a beautiful place. And they'd say if the Americans ever come here, they'd have Miyajima right next to Hiroshima, and Kyoto, so they thought, never mind, one or two B-29s wouldn't do any harm to it. That was the propaganda in our city anyway, but people from Tokyo, the burned out people would come and they'd say: "You better not play with fire," they'd say. My dad was always very cautious about it."

January 1, 2026 at 1:49 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

Another one for the Cold War "bad ideas" nuke file — a study on how effective it would be to put megaton-range nuclear weapons onto balloons and just sort of let them drift towards targets you wanted to irradiate. Some obvious downsides to this approach! Sandia labs, 1957. Citation in alt text.

$Excerpt from C.E. Buell and D.W. Stoddard, "Feasibility of Weapon Delivery by Free Balloons," Sandia Corporation Technical Memorandum 289-56-51, (January 1957): https://www.osti.gov/opennet/servlets/purl/16340119.pdf : CH III -- CAPABILITY OF BALLOONS AS A WEAPONS DELIVERY SYSTEM To get some indication of the capability of a free-balloon delivery system, consider the following problem. Suppose it is desired to cover with radioactive fallout a target with a north-south dimension of 150 miles and an east-west dimension similar to the downwind distance of the minimum dose rate of interest. These dimensions are typical of industrial areas such as the Donets Basin of European Russia. If the longitude errors of the burst point are small and the latitude errors have a standard deviation of 200 miles, the probability of covering a fraction, f, of the target with a radiation dose associated with 30 roentgens per hour at 1 hour after burst of one, two, or three 1-megaton weapons is given by Fig. 13. Recent tests indicate that a weapon weighing less than 2000 pounds may have a yield of 1 megaton. A large (~ 100-foot diameter) balloon may be able to carry such a weapon sufficient distances to attack enemy targets without endangering friendly territory. Figures 10 and 11 indicate that a latitude standard deviation of 200 miles is attainable. Longitude errors can be made small by using position-determining devices which release the weapon when the balloon reaches the longitude of the target. Figure 13 shows that there is a small probability of covering even a small fraction of the target when one weapon is used. However, use of more than one weapon increases this probability. Time does not permit extension of Fig. 13 to more than three weapons, but it appears that reasonably high probabilities of covering the target can be obtained by the use of a few more weapons. Also, smaller fractions of the target will receive greater radiation dosages and other damage effects.$

Document continued. Brackets show someone's hand annotations:

From the above example it appears that under certain conditions the free-balloon delivery system may compete with other systems requiring multiple weapons. Advantages of the free-balloon system are:

1. Simplicity of equipment
2. Low cost of equipment
3. Ease of saturating enemy defenses with cheap dummy balloons. [EFFECTIVE?]

Disadvantages of the free-balloon system are:
1. Launching can only be done in good weather. [?]
2. Launch point must be upwind from the target. [AT SOME CRUISE ALTITUDE]
3. Balloons are easily spotted and shot down. [?]
4. Fast attacks are impossible.
5. The balloon could return to friendly territory during its flight. [PROBABILITY?]

Continued:

Free balloons are subject to failures from many causes such as unpredictable weather changes, resulting in icing conditions, thunderstorms, or winds blowing away from target area; structural failure of the balloon or associated equipment; and enemy countermeasures.
These failures can be reduced by good engineering design and improved meteorological prediction techniques. However, if the number of failures is not reduced enough, the number of weapons wasted will be so great that the system must be discarded as unfeasible.

Weapons delivered by free balloons should be designed to burst on the surface since fallout contamination is the principal damage agent. The delivery errors are so large that the probability of damage due to blast or thermal effects is extremely small.

$Figure 13 from the aforementioned text: "Fig. 13 -- Probability P of covering fraction f of a target 150 miles square with a radiation dose associated with 30 roentgens per hour at one hour after burst of one, two, or three 1-megaton weapons." For 3 weapons, the there is a 60% chance of 30 r/hr at H+1 covering 10% of a target. For 2 weapons, it drops to ~45%. For 1 weapon, it drops to ~25%. For larger fractions of target covered (e.g., 30%-40%) 3 weapons have a less than 10% chance of achieving that, and less than that is 0%.$

December 31, 2025 at 12:00 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

This is a nice addition to the "bad Cold War ideas" file — nukes that would detonate themselves at full yield "in the event the carrier and/or crew fell prey to the enemy defense." Never adopted as far as I know... from a Sandia study of nuclear safety issues, 1959.

Text from a report from 1959: The Automatic Bomb Arming System. Under serious DOD consideration is a requirement for an automatic device, sometimes called a "dead-man switch" (DMS), which would arm and/or fuze a nuclear bomb for full yield in the event the carrier and/or crew fell prey to the enemy defense. Methods of accomplishing this salvage feature have been under study within the AEC at Sandia Corporation. Safety implications must be carefully evaluated in connection with this capability; while maintaining adequate safety is not a major problem in the design of a DMS system to operate from medium to high delivery altitudes (e. g.. the Special Weapons Emergency Separation System, SWESS, designed by the Air Force Special Weapons Center), it is a paramount obstacle in the design of a DMS system for low-level bombing missions where such a short time in available for bomb arming that many existing bomb safety features would have to be deliberately or automatically by-passed.

December 30, 2025 at 12:58 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

If you ever think that a photograph of you is unflattering, keep in mind what the Washington Post used to illustrate John von Neumann's AEC appointment in 1955...

Washington Post, "Dr. John von Neumann is Approved for AEC," with von Neumann photographed with a bizarre facial expression.

December 28, 2025 at 9:04 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

Tis the season...? doomsdaymachines.net/p/christmas-...

Christmas at Ground Zero

Weird Al Yankovic's post-apocalyptic carol (1986)

doomsdaymachines.net

December 25, 2025 at 10:12 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

I don't think people who haven't published a book recently realize how much AI generated spam authors get trying to promise to promote the book. This one is particularly bad — promises it is def not AI but has every hallmark of AI (emojis, flattery) coupled with horrendous taste (terrible puns).

December 24, 2025 at 10:42 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

You know all those stories about programming from the late 1980s and early 1990s that are along the lines of, "we only had 2K of memory so we figured out how to do unholy programming magic to make the graphics fit?" That's what WebGL shader programming is like. It's both horrible and amazing.

December 23, 2025 at 11:13 PM

Reposted by Alex Wellerstein

Stephen Schwartz

@atomicanalyst.bsky.social

Coming on January 6 to American Experience on PBS: “Bombshell: The Fight to Control the A-Bomb’s Story,” about how the US news media worked with the government to manipulate the official narrative about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and how a few journalists refused to play along.

Bombshell: Trailer | American Experience | PBS

Watch a preview of Bombshell.

www.pbs.org

December 23, 2025 at 9:03 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

I've been thinking a lot about the redactions in the Epstein files. Some of them are pretty straightforward in their nature — obviously about privacy issues. But this is a very odd one — why redact the "acts" described?

Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 11d

uh

www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

Age: dec
DOB:
Additional Info: I am just wanting to reconnect with the original
detective that called me and I offered information about this.
How is Contact Known: He was orchestrating a deal, along with my uncle
where different men, and a few women and girls,
would come to a variety of boats and yachts and pay money to force me to
do with them when I was 13 and pregnant.
Type: Other
Address:
City:
Zip:
Witness Information
First Name: Donald
Middle Name:
Last Name: Trump
Age: 70
DOB:
Additional Info: Again, just trying to find out the NYPD detective on the
FBI sex trafficking task force that called me a couple of weeks ago and
spoke to me about some of these issues.
How is Contact Known: He participated regularly in paying money to force
me to with him and he was present when my uncle murdered
my newborn child and disposed of the body in Lake Michigan.
Type: Business
Address:
City: Washington DC
State: District of Columbia
Zip: 20500
Country: United States

December 23, 2025 at 7:50 PM

Reposted by Alex Wellerstein

Jeff VanderMeer

@jeffvandermeer.bsky.social

I'm currently working on a novel and at the end of an average day, I'm wiped out. The sheer amount of analysis, synthesis, making of connections, layering of prose, deepening of characterization, supplemental research... all the mental work is intense and exhilarating. Which is just to say, fuck AI.

December 23, 2025 at 1:40 PM

Reposted by Alex Wellerstein

andré carrington

@andrecarrington.bsky.social

via The New Yorker, Ellis Rosen cartoon

One panel comic with one person saying to another: Philip K Dick, Ray Bradbury. Like so many others in tech, I draw inspiration from completely misunderstanding those authors

December 23, 2025 at 5:31 AM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

I tried to send a very small (low-value, non-commercial) package to the USA last week, and it got bounced back. The guy at La Poste told me that at the moment they are sending NO packages to the US, because of the chaos caused by the removal of the de minimis rule. aide.laposte.fr/contenu/pour...

Pourquoi mon envoi vers les Etats-Unis m’est-il retourné ? - Aide en ligne Laposte.fr

Les États-Unis ont récemment adopté un décret qui modifie en profondeur les procédures douanières pour les marchandises envoyées vers les États-Unis et leurs territoires annexes (Porto Rico, Guam, Ile...

aide.laposte.fr

December 23, 2025 at 10:02 AM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

The other day I managed to port WSEG-10 to GLSL to run as a WebGL shader in Chrome... seems to work! These are 100 warheads rendered at high res (different zooms), only takes about 3 seconds... I still need to get the coordinate transformation working so you can overlay it on a map.

December 21, 2025 at 5:57 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

The most unrealistic thing about Batman Returns (1992) is that after the Penguin is caught on tape bragging about being a villain, his citizen supporters immediately turn on him and his backers abandon him... www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Yea...

I played this stinkin' city, like a harp from hell!

YouTube video by TC McCarthy

www.youtube.com

December 21, 2025 at 2:30 PM

Reposted by Alex Wellerstein

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

Happy Friday! Here’s a new post on DOOMSDAY MACHINES that is sure to raise your spirits, about the origins of the trope of whether the living "would envy the dead" after a nuclear war. doomsdaymachines.net/p/will-the-s...

Will the survivors envy the dead?

Tracing the origins of a popular trope about nuclear war

doomsdaymachines.net

December 19, 2025 at 5:59 PM

Reposted by Alex Wellerstein

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

@thebulletin.org

The Bulletin is excited to welcome @wellerstein.bsky.social as a new Senior Fellow!

Alex has written many pieces for the Bulletin over the years, including some of our most popular articles.
thebulletin.org/2025/12/alex...

Alex Wellerstein joins the Bulletin

The Bulletin is proud to welcome Alex Wellerstein as a new Senior Fellow. In this role, he will work with the Bulletin’s editorial team on historical

thebulletin.org

December 20, 2025 at 10:18 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

Oppenheimer makes a cameo in the Epstein files...

December 20, 2025 at 2:32 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

So I Googled ONE murderer's name today and now Google's algorithm is giving me serial killers as the first pick for any single letter I type in on my phone... seriously

December 19, 2025 at 10:23 PM

Alex Wellerstein

@wellerstein.bsky.social

Happy Friday! Here’s a new post on DOOMSDAY MACHINES that is sure to raise your spirits, about the origins of the trope of whether the living "would envy the dead" after a nuclear war. doomsdaymachines.net/p/will-the-s...

Will the survivors envy the dead?

Tracing the origins of a popular trope about nuclear war

doomsdaymachines.net

December 19, 2025 at 5:59 PM