Doomsday Machines

When most people imagine “nuclear war,” they imagine the push-button “wargasm” that only became possible for the United States to do by the mid-to-late 1950s, and some time later than that by the Soviet Union. From the mid-1940s through the early 1950s, howev...

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a special issue this month (July 2026) dedicated to Doomsday and the Movies. There are great articles about many specific movies. They asked me to

Panic in Year Zero! (1962) was an early and today fairly obscure entry into the genre of post-apocalyptic films. Directed by and starring the Welsh actor Ray Milland, it was a low-budget the post-apocalyptic road trip following the activities of a family in the aftermath of a thermonuclear attack on Los Angeles. While its message and aesthetic are often a bit dissona...

The first views of Hiroshima that were seen in the United States were from the air: the view from B-29 bombers of the mushroom cloud, and surveying the damage as a whole. This is the view of the person dropping the bomb, not the person being harmed by it.