Doomsday Machines

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Wasteland Wrap-up #34

5 days ago | doomsdaymachines.net | Alex Wellerstein

So I just realized that I’ve been titling these weekly “wrap-up” posts completely inconsistently — drifting between “Wasteland Wrap-up” to “Weekly Wrap-up” and even “Weekly Wrap-up Post.” How strange. At some point I will re-name the old ones more consistently. Funny how such things can happen without one really noticing…The weather has been occasionally quite nice the last week, and was over 80ºF yesterday. The dog of course is a big fan of such things, as he is not really built for cold weather.
Weekly Wrap-up Post #33

1 week ago | doomsdaymachines.net | Alex Wellerstein

Ellen was out of town last week, presenting a paper at the annual conference for the American Society for Environmental History, and so that meant, among other things, that Lyndon got a few days of sleeping on the bed. He is mostly good about not crowding me and taking up much more space than a small dog requires.
Nuclear families

2 weeks ago | doomsdaymachines.net | Alex Wellerstein

The US government began promoting home fallout shelters in the late 1950s, as part of their overall Civil Defense program. The target audience for home fallout shelters was the 90 million-or-so Americans who lived potentially downwind of the direct targets of a hypothetical, full-scale thermonuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Which was a lot of people.
Weekly Wrap-up Post #32

2 weeks ago | doomsdaymachines.net | Alex Wellerstein

Spring in New Jersey this year has been unusually volatile. One day it’ll be shorts and T-shirt weather… then it transitions to multi-layer coat weather… and then it rains for three days. Spring is always back-and-forth but the extremes feel stranger than usual here; even a single day can vary by enough temperature that a simple question like, “do I need a jacket?” is a tricky one. Especially if you walk to work, like I do.
Civil Defense and Preppers

2 weeks ago | doomsdaymachines.net | Alex Wellerstein

One of the important figures in modern post-apocalyptic imagery is that of the “Prepper” or “Survivalist”: someone who is planning to survive the collapse of civilization by means of taking action today. When I talk to people about Doomsday Machines, this is often the first place their mind goes. What is a Prepper? Where did the idea come from? When did this kind of behavior start? These are interesting questions for a historian, and I’ve been looking into the matter a bit.
Weekly Wrap-up Post #31

3 weeks ago | doomsdaymachines.net | Alex Wellerstein

The first week “post-book” has been enjoyable. It’s not so much that I have any more free time than I did before, but I don’t feel guilty in the way I did when I was behind on book work.
The first portable digital nuclear weapons effects computer

4 weeks ago | doomsdaymachines.net | Alex Wellerstein

In a previous post, I introduced the Weapons Effects Display System (WEDS), a computer system proposed by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in 1965. Its goal was to make it easy to calculate and visualize the effects of a nuclear detonation dynamically: basically a 1960s equivalent of NUKEMAP, well before the technology existed to make that an easy (or frankly practical) reality. The previous post discussed the motivations, planning, and difficulties for the project.
Weekly Wasteland Wrap-up #30

1 month ago | doomsdaymachines.net | Alex Wellerstein

I am emerging from my deadline cave after several weeks, because (triumphant music playing) the new. book. is. done! Finally. It’s amazing how the last push is always the hardest. Here is the cover, which I am reasonably happy with:It should be out later this year from HarperCollins.
Wasteland Wrap-up #29

2 months ago | doomsdaymachines.net | Alex Wellerstein

It’s been silent for a few weeks on here, just because I’ve been in the final-final-(actually-final).docx phase of finishing the new book on Truman. Now I’m just going over edits and finalizing citations. Almost there! Here are a few Lyndon photos to make up for it. Lyndon naps in my office while I teach, usually sitting in his normal “spot” on a couch.
Wasteland Wrap-up #28

2 months ago | doomsdaymachines.net | Alex Wellerstein

These last weeks have been extremely busy, with wrapping up the final-final-final aspects of the new book, teaching, and other duties. I don’t even have any new photos of Lyndon to share, but here’s a throwback to when he was just a little pupper, back in 2013, when we got him:As you can see, he was always pretty much himself. But he has mellowed a lot since then, of course.