What is the role of organized religion after a nuclear war? The question conjures up visions from science fiction, like the technology-worshipping monks in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). But it was also the subject of several curious pamphlets produced by the ...

One of the tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction set long after the collapse of civilization is that of technological forgetting. The inspiration of western Europe during the “dark ages” after the fall of the Roman Empire is usually fairly obvious, sometimes quite explicit. Whether the idea of the “dark” or “middle” ages as a technological “decline” story is true or not (it’s co...

The mushroom cloud is an iconic symbol of the nuclear age, and photographs of the clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki are frequently used as a short-hand for gesturing at the terrible power unleashed at the end of World War II. The most familiar of these photographs are two taken from planes involved in the missions themselves. For Hiroshima, the American documentary record is...

What would an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia look like in the 21st century? Nobody really knows the answer to that: there is no one “template” for a nuclear war, there would be choices to be made on both sides, and much would depend on the specific scenario that was unfolding.

Building up a plausible “scenario” for such a war is hard. To do th...