The Doomsday Clock, of course, is the famous design emblem that has been affixed to the masthead of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947. Since 1949, the first time its time was changed, it has served as a way to indicate how close to “midnight” — annihilation — the clock changers believe we might be. It has never made pretensions of being a scientific instrument, it has always acknowledged itself as primarily a way for Bulletin experts (or its editor-in-chief, pre-1973) to signal to a broader world what they thought the global risk trend was. One can think about it how one wants, but it has undeniably been a potent cultural artifact since the 1940s.1

So what would the opposite of the Doomsday Clock be? I don’t know why my brain popped that into my consciousness, but it has been interesting to roll around in my thoughts.

One possibility: if the Doomsday Clock is a measure of how close one is to annihilation, would the opposite be something that measured how close one was to salvation? To utopia? To disarmament? A generally good time? This would be some kind of Anti-Doomsday Clock. Which might be just the same as flipping the meaning of the clock upside-down, and not that interesting.

Another approach would be to focus on the “Clock” side of things. A Doomsday Barometer? Thermometer? Telescope? Seismograph? Microscope? Some of these seem like they would be effectively the same as the Doomsday Clock, just a different visual metaphor. Some of them make little sense metaphorically, or require an imaginative stretch. A Doomsday Microscope, to allow you to see the eschatological implications of the very small things? A Doomsday Telescope, to see annihilation coming from far, far away?

Of course, a Doomsday Graph is all too clear: the hockey-stick curve of global temperature — which looks more like a scythe than a hockey stick every year — is one version of what that could look like. A line that could, in theory, go down. But probably won’t, not in your lifetime.

Another place my mind goes is to think about avoiding a sense of measurement and countdown altogether. Perhaps an anti-Clock is really just an anti-Instrument, and the opposite of a Doomsday Clock is simply something that doesn’t try to measure anything, and is just a sign that read: doom. We have such things, of course: The End is Near, the signboard says, in the numerous classic New Yorker cartoons poking fun at sidewalk Jeremiahs. The real sidewalk Jeremiahs usually have a real goal, unlike the cartoon ones: the end is near, you can do nothing about it, so (insert whatever their religion tells you to do here).

A slicker version of the doom sign is the Extinction Symbol, which was was created in 2011 by a London artist who goes by the nom de guerre of ESP. It is simple enough: a stylized hourglass within a circle, along the same simple graphical lines of the peace symbol (which, you may be aware, is composed of the semaphore for N and D overlapped — for nuclear disarmament).

There is a website dedicated to it, that is currently down, but one can view its various iterations on the Wayback Machine. Here is how the oldest version on there, from 2012, describes its meaning:

The symbol above represents extinction. The circle signifies the planet, while the hourglass inside serves as a warning that time is rapidly running out for many species. The world is currently undergoing a mass extinction event, and this symbol is intended to help raise awareness of the urgent need for change in order to address this crisis. Estimates are that somewhere between 30,000 and 140,000 species are becoming extinct every year in what scientists have named the Holocene, or Sixth Mass Extinction. This ongoing process of destruction is being caused by the impact of human activity. Within the next few decades approximately 50% of all species that now exist will have become extinct. Such a catastrophic loss of biodiversity is highly likely to cause widespread ecosystem collapse and consequently render the planet uninhabitable for humans.

The use of an hourglass is what brought the Doomsday Clock to mind: an hourglass is a timekeeping device, of a somewhat different sort than the mechanical clock used in Doomsday Clock imagery. To “reset the clock” for the Doomsday Clock implies some intervention, because time always marches forward, but we are all familiar with setting mechanical clocks to specific times. But hourglasses don’t get reset to earlier times; they are simply restarted once they run out.

Thus I think the hourglass carries with it a much more obvious sense of finality to it. That, and the weight of tradition, is probably why hourglasses are far more heavily represented as symbols of memento mori — “remember death” — in artwork, on gravestones, and anywhere else that people might want to reminded that life is a finite thing.

The Extinction Symbol isn’t a clock, even if it invokes time. It isn’t saying how close we are. The people who made and use it treat it like a warning: they believe there is yet time to change the outcomes. Because it is not just about human extinction, but the extinction that humans cause. All things turn to dust, eventually, but we don’t have to be so directly responsible for it.

I find extinction fascinating. Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a lovely essay on the anatomist Georges Cuvier and his work cementing the concept of “extinction” into the scientific vocabulary for the New Yorker way back in 2013. When I teach about the history of biology, I love to ruminate on the fact that the very concept of extinction is so relatively recent, and was radical. To be able to say, with definition, that there was both a long, lost world of the long-dead (like dinosaurs), and that it was possible, in our modern time, to see such things occurring (as the case of the dodo clearly indicated).

To then extend it to the possibility of human extinction is quite radical yet, and indeed, there are many people who find one way or another to avoid accepting that such a thing is quite literally inevitable, one way or another, at one time or another. It is, essentially, a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Don’t get mad at me, I don’t make the rules.

A photograph of an activist’s use of the Extinction Symbol, shown above, includes the text: HOPE DIES, ACTION BEGINS. It is a rather bold idea. Both the Doomsday Clock and the Extinction Symbol are seeking action — but only the latter wants you to first abandon all hope. That may feel contradictory, but I can see the argument, I think: when talking about the climate, in particular, one needs to move beyond denial and bargaining, and into some kind of acceptance, before one can tackle it realistically. (“What if we just stopped pretending?,” Jonathan Franzen asked in 2019, to the revulsion of most people trying to do climate change messaging.)

I’m not sure any of the above are really the opposite of a Doomsday Clock, which might make as little sense as asking what the opposite of a clock is in general. If you have your own ideas, feel free to let me know.

The spring of 1950 is an interesting moment for thinking about US capabilities just at the end of the American nuclear monopoly. The Soviets had tested their first atomic bomb the previous fall. The Korean War had not yet started — that would happen in late June. As I write about in my most recent book (obligatory plug), the Korean War was an important turning point for American nuclear policy, and the start of the serious arms build-up that we tend to associate with the Cold War. While the Joint Chiefs of Staff had begun to take the possibility of war with the Soviets more seriously after the Berlin Crisis of 1948, President Truman himself was still opposed to re-militarizing and hesitant regarding anything like that looked like either conventional or atomic expansion. So this is before the US was actually on a true “Cold War” footing, even though the US Air Force was already beating that drum very loudly, at least internally.

We can get an unusually good glimpse of how the Strategic Air Command (SAC) viewed OFFTACKLE, because many of the presentations for a Commanders’ Conference at Ramey Air Force Base in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, from late April 1950 have been declassified. They make for interesting reading in and of themselves, particularly for their ideological content — the head of SAC intelligence, Maj. Geneal Charles Cabell, for example, was adamant that the Soviet Union was planning world conquest via direct military hostilities against the United States, a position he realized was deeply at-odds with how the CIA’s view that the Soviets would use subtle and sneakier tactics (subversion, playing allies against each other, etc.). Cabell urged the other SAC commanders to accept that they were not truly in peacetime: “we are at war right now and … an all-out national effort designed to maintain permanent military and political superiority over the Soviet Union is required.”1

The war plan at this time was known as “OFFTACKLE” (sometimes rendered with a space in the middle). It was a “Joint Outline Emergency War Plan” commissioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in November 1949, and meant to replace their existing war plan, known formally as JCS 1844/32. There were a succession of “plans” from 1946 through the 1950s with “colorful” codenames of this sort: PINCHER, BROILER, BUSHWACKER, GRABBER, SIZZLE, and so on.2 Unlike some of these, OFFTACKLE was a realistic “war plan,” as opposed to, say, early studies of what nuclear war might look like that were used for planning arsenal sizes, and were thus unrealistic when it came to actual US capabilities. (OFFTACKLE would itself, a few months later, be renamed SHAKEDOWN.)

As Maj. General S.E. Anderson emphasized in his presentation of it at the conference, OFFTACKLE was the first war plan developed with the fact that the Soviets also had atomic bombs in mind. It planned for a two year war, based on the imagined capabilities of the US and the USSR starting in December 1949. It would proceed in several phases. The first would start with “D-day,” the beginning of the war, and continue for the first three months. This would be based around securing major US launching points for Soviet attacks: above-all, the preservation of the United Kingdom, but also Japan (particularly Okinawa), and the oil-producing states of the Middle East.

To do this would require a fast and massive movement of US forces, because the deployed forces in places like the UK were considered inadequate to the task. By the third day of the war, the SAC forces, a bit over 500 bombers largely based in the continental United States, would be shuffled around to the UK and Eielson base in Alaska. Only 256 of these were “A-carriers” — nuclear capable.3

The first atomic strikes would not take place until the sixth day of the war, when medium bombers (B-29s and B-50s) would attack targets in the Soviet Union from bases in the United Kingdom, and heavy bombers (B-36) would attack from either Alaska, Canada (Goose Bay), or the Middle East (via South Dakota).4

Over the course of four hours, 26 “target areas” would be bombed by the UK bombers, who would then withdraw to bases in the UK and the Middle East. Six targets would also be hit by B-36s from the North American bases. A second strike was tentatively imagined to take place no more than three days later. If the UK bases “remain tenable,” then over the next 30 days, a total of 123 “industrial centers” would be bombed. By comparison, a previous plan, TROJAN targeted 70. Note that the US stockpile at this point was about 300 atomic bombs, with an average yield of about 30 kilotons.5 One report from February 1950 that I have says that the full plan at that moment was to drop 17,610 tons of high explosives on Soviet targets as well as 292 atomic bombs, 72 of which were set aside for “re-attack” of targets presumably not destroyed by the first wave.6

A later presentation at the same conference by Brig. General John B. Montgomery, SAC director of operations, displayed the above map of the 123 targets. It noted that adequate intelligence only existed for 60 of the targets, and that the other 63 would require pre-strike reconnaissance before they could be successfully attacked. The targets ranged across the whole of the Soviet Union, although most were concentrated in its western parts, and some where in Warsaw Pact nations.7

The second phase of OFFTACKLE would take place between the 3rd and 18th months of the war. During the period, the US and Europe would be recovering from whatever the initial Soviet atomic attack against them was, to continue efforts at defending against further Soviet attacks, to continue a “very greatly reduced” strategic air campaign against the USSR, and to maintain control of key assets like the UK and the Middle East. Very interestingly, securing Spain against invasion was also listed — it is clear that they believed that the Soviets would effectively occupy all of the rest of Western Europe up until the point. If the UK fell, SAC would move their forces to North Africa.

The third phase, from the 18th through the 36 months of the war, would involve the Allied forces pushing the Soviet forces out of Western Europe. After 24 months, they would have also created a “build up” of strategic air units for another major attack phase. The SAC presenters have very little to say about this and the previous phase, because this wasn’t their part of the war — they were the bombers. But this was clearly envisioned as a major effort that would require a significant conventional effort as well.

During a “fourth and final phase,” from 36 months until the end of the war, would involve “re-entry in force into Europe, defeat of the USSR, and the establishing of control over the defeated enemy.” There is an understandable vagueness to this stage of planning, given the unknowns and how much is dependent on how things worked out in the previous phases. And, as noted, this part plainly this would not be SAC’s job. There were, as another presentation emphasized, also many “soft spots,” places where there were need for improvements if an optimistic outcome was to be assured.

What we have here is a war still measured in months and years, not hours and days. It is World War II on nuclear steroids: an initial period of heavy bombing, but one assumed to be taking place while a massive Soviet army is invading Western Europe. Like World War II, logistics was key: you can’t fight if you’re not close-enough to do so. Holding territory, rebuilding infrastructure in real-time, continuing to put pressure on the enemy — these kinds of issues, ones which seem relatively quaint compared to the imagination of nuclear war that would dominate in a decade, still hold sway in an era where most of the weapons are being delivered by relatively short-ranged bombers, where the number of atomic bombs available is still relatively limited (to the thousands and thousands it would soon become), and where a Soviet attack on the USA is assumed to be something the US could recover from in a few months.

There was no discussion of casualties from what I can see. This is hardly surprising, but seems worth noting. This is a vision for how SAC saw its job in the event of a nuclear war at the time. It was not something that would be easily to implement. At this time, the US military had access to exactly zero fully-assembled nuclear weapons — their nuclear cores were still being kept by the US Atomic Energy Commission. Assembling the weapons had gotten a bit easier since the early days of the atomic arsenal, but there were still a limited number of trained teams who were capable of doing it, and a limited number of both weapons and atomic-capable aircraft. SAC was planning to use only six “assembly teams” available to put the weapons together for OFFTACKLE.

The atomic bomb was definitely a central part of this war plan, as can be seen, but it’s an ugly, gritty-looking war. There is no sense that the atomic bomb would be decisive in and of itself. There is no delusion that the Soviets would be totally destroyed by the initial atomic assault, nor that they would immediately sue for peace. In this period both Soviet and American planners agreed that atomic bomb alone “would not win the war,” as David Holloway puts it.8

One can readily see why even the SAC commanders had little enthusiasm for this kind of war, little belief that this was something one would want to voluntarily get into. I mention this because a frequent question online is: why did the USA not use its atomic bombs to preemptively destroy the Soviet Union? Aside from the political and moral aspects to the question (nothing could be further from Truman’s intentions at that time), a strategic answer is that doing so would hardly be a walk in the park, and an ultimate victory, defined as a total elimination of the Soviet Union, was hardly assured. OFFTACKLE was one of the more optimistic plans they had considered at the time, and it’s not all that optimistic, as the commanders themselves recognized.

How did the Air Force commanders receive this information? We have limited sources to answer this, but one is interesting. Immediately after the conference on OFFTACKLE, General George C. Kenney, who had until 1948 been the head of SAC, wrote a letter to General Hoyt Vandenberg about it. He was blunt in his assessment:

It was quite evident to all the conferees that Plan “Offtackle” was decidedly unrealistic. The one conclusion that almost everyone seemed to reach was that if we waited until Russia hit us, Europe, very probably includ[ing] the United Kingdom, would be lost to us. To repeat the Normandy Beach operation is something that is almost inconceivable. The problem of gaining air superiority over the beachhead two or three years after the shooting war started and after Russia had organized her defenses against such an invasion, the overcoming of the submarine menace in order to embark the huge number of troops and supplies for such a landing, and all the other complications in the face of atomic weapons or even conventional air operations, would seem to rule this type of warfare into the realm of impracticability.

He then went on to criticize nearly every aspect of the plan. He did not think that the US would be able to hold an inch of Western Europe, and that it would take “years” to gain adequate bases in the Middle East. He continued:

I believe that any plan looking toward July 1, 1952 as the probable D-day of a third World War should visualize that we will have no holdings on the other side of the Atlantic. Our primary move will be made by the Strategic Air Command against targets in Russia itself. If our air defense is good enough to prevent the Russian A-bomb attacks from knocking us out of the war and the attacks of our Strategic Air Command are powerful enough to bring Russia to terms, we will win. If not, we will either lose the war or get into a long-drawn-out contest that we certainly will not win and which will probably result in a stalemate with both sides exhausted and civilization as we now know it a thing of the past.

Which is both depressingly realistic as much as it is dire: World War III, Kenney is saying, needs to be predicated on the “wargasm,” on the total and utter destruction of the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, and no nonsense about holding territory and playing at a World War II redux. More than that, he felt that the assumption that the US would not initiate a nuclear war would have to be banished: “We have got to do something about the conception that we must wait until Russia hits us before we can start shooting. … By all previous definitions, we are now in a state of war with Russia. Whether we call it a cold war or apply any other term, we are not winning. … It would not be a preventative war, because we are already at war.”9

Nuclear films are both reflections of the zeitgeist in which they are made and shapers of it. They feed off of both popular and expert anxieties, while also helping to solidify the terms on which these anxieties are engaged. While some themes are apparently universal (how many ways there are to blunder into nuclear war), some feel very much of their particular time and place.

In creating this list, I was cognizant that there are dozens of films that incorporate some sort of “nuclear” elements into their plots. Narrowing it down to 13 required implementing arbitrary criteria. Ultimately, I decided that any film on my best-of list needed to be explicitly engaged with nuclear themes in a serious and sustained way. (And so no films in which nukes are merely “MacGuffins” that could be swapped out with other “dangerous objects” would be included. Nor would there by any films which could only be allegorically understood to be about nuclear issues—no “the-dragons-are-nukes,” unless actual nukes also play a role in the plot). I focused on films about nuclear weapons, not nuclear power, with one important exception. I arbitrarily limited the scope to fiction, not documentaries (but if I were including documentaries, Errol Morris’ 2003 The Fog of War would be first in line). I also excluded all television and streaming series (sorry, HBO’s 2019 Chernobyl).

And, finally, any film on the list would have to be a “good film,” one that I felt I could recommend people watch without reservation or qualification. The was the trickiest and most subjective criterion, particularly for a historian, because there are many films that I think are profoundly interesting as artifacts, or have historical importance, but are not, in fact, great films. For example, while MGM’s The Beginning or the End (1947) is historically fascinating—it was made in collaboration with Manhattan Project officials—it is actually quite a tedious watch, in my opinion.

This list has a strong Anglophone bias, and with a few notable exceptions approaches the topic from largely American points of view. This is a reflection of its author’s limitations and relative accessibility for an American. Undoubtedly lists could (and should) be created from different cultural and national perspectives. The list is presented chronologically and can be thought of as an unfolding of the nuclear perspective from the early nuclear age to the present.

Godzilla

1954, Toho. Directed by Ishirō Honda. Released in the USA as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, in 1956.

Inspired in part by the 1954 Castle Bravo fallout disaster, which killed a Japanese fisherman and led to a boycott on tuna in Japan, Godzilla (Gojira in the Japanese original) is a more complicated film than just “radioactive monster attacks Tokyo.” Godzilla, the monster, is less of a metaphor for the atomic bomb itself than a representation of Japan’s submerged psychological reckoning with the horrors experienced by its civilians in World War II. Such discussions were officially suppressed during the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), but, like the monster, emerged as a consequence of US nuclear testing in the Pacific. The sequences with the rubber monster costume have probably aged the worst, but the films of how the people reconcile themselves with their destruction and their duty still hold up extremely well.

On the Beach

United Artists, 1959. Directed by Stanley Kramer.

The premise of On the Beach, adapted from the 1957 novel by the British author Nevil Shute, is that a future global nuclear war using cobalt bombs has both eradicated most of human civilization and created a massive, deadly cloud of fallout that is gradually circulating the globe, killing all in its path. Those in the southern hemisphere are momentarily safe, but the cloud is coming. An American submarine crew pursues one last-ditch hope to discover a path to survival, but it turns out to be spurious. All must make peace, in their own way, with the fact that the Earth will soon be dead. Although the underlying premise is technically dubious, the psychological resonances made it one of the most potent nuclear-themed films of the 1950s, and highly representative of a strain of fatalism that surrounds nuclear war.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

1964, Columbia Pictures. Directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy about the risk of unauthorized and accidental nuclear war fundamentally altered the lexicon with which we talk about nuclear weapons, and the performances of Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and Slim Pickens created durable cultural archetypes. While loosely adapted from Peter George’s 1958 novel Red Alert, Kubrick’s own sensibilities both about nuclear war and how to talk about it run through it. The themes of unauthorized nuclear use, mutual assured destruction, and the dangers of automation are all deadly serious, but wrapping it all in a farce makes it a work of genius and helps it stand the test of time. When Daniel Ellsberg, then still at RAND and having just completed a classified study into the command and control problems central to the plot, saw the film in theatres, he was amazed — it was, he wrote later, “essentially, a documentary.”

Fail Safe

1964, Columbia. Directed by Sidney Lumet.

Fail Safe might be remembered as the film of mid-1960s nuclear anxiety had it not come out the same year as Dr. Strangelove and overlapped so significantly with its themes — so significantly that Kubrick sued it for copyright infringement and caused it to be released after his own film. Lumet’s film, a fairly faithful adaptation of Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s 1962 novel of the same name, plays the subject of accidental nuclear war and lack of control straight. Although rendered a box office flop by its circumstances, and while certainly the lesser of the two films, its management of tension has led to its retrospective status as a critical success.

The China Syndrome

1979, Columbia Pictures. Directed by James Bridges.

The sole film specifically about nuclear power on this list, The China Syndrome is a taut thriller that was elevated into something even more by its historical moment. The film, starring Michael Douglas, Jane Fonda, and Jack Lemmon, is about the threat of a meltdown at a nuclear power plant in Southern California. The threat wasn’t the reactor, per se, it was the corner-cutting and coverup perpetuated by a power utility more concerned with profits than safety. The film would work on its own merits, but the fact that the film premiered less than two weeks before the Three Mile Island accident catapulted it to the position of prophecy—for better and for worse.

Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen)

1983, Kyodo Eiga. Directed by Mori Masaki.

Barefoot Gen, first a manga (Japanese comic book) published in 1976, is a fictionalized version of writer and illustrator Keiji Nakazawa’s experiences of being a six-year-old boy growing up in Hiroshima before, during, and after the atomic bombing. It is powerful, rich, and moving. Much of the story is a preamble obscure to most Westerners: what life was like in the city before the attack, with its food shortages and political repression. The “cute” manga style fits the worldview of the child protagonists, increases the dread for what the viewer knows is coming, and contrasts starkly with the nothing-held-back depictions of the aftermath. The anime (cartoon movie) version was released in 1983, and is an exceptional adaptation of the form, content, and message of the original.

The Day After

1983, ABC. Directed by Nicholas Meyer.

This classic made-for-television movie about the run-up to nuclear war and its immediate aftermath aired on ABC in November 1983 and was seen by nearly 100 million people—over 40 percent of the entire US population. Coming at one of the highest points of Cold War nuclear anxiety in the United States and Western Europe, the film attempted to show what nuclear war would look like from the point of view of average Americans. Even though it was substantially toned down from what it could have been (see Threads), it was still disturbing enough that ABC advertised hotlines with psychological counselors. President Reagan watched The Day After at Camp David, and wrote in his diary as ringing an endorsement as one could imagine: “powerfully done,” “very effective,” and “left me greatly depressed.” The film is sometimes cited as a factor in Reagan’s willingness to initiate talks with the Soviet Union and initiate “the golden era of arms control.”

Testament

Paramount, 1983. Directed by Lynne Littman.

Among the crowded field of “the day after nuclear war” films of the early 1980s, Testament stands out for its relative quiet, reasonableness, and lack of sensationalism. The fictional suburb of San Francisco where it is set is well outside the blast radii, but the tight-knit community is devastated nonetheless: Family members who worked in the city never came home, people turned hostile and anxious in the face of rationing and looting, and nuclear fallout begins to take a slow but steady toll on the young, the elderly, and eventually all those in between. There is no chaotic descent into anarchy, no hordes of motorcycle gangs, no “lone survivor” fantasies. It plays out in living rooms, bedrooms, churches, queues for food and gasoline, and the memories of the deceased. The focus on the domestic aftermath of cities that “survived” the immediate spasm of war, but still suffer its consequences in the weeks and months to come, distinguishes Testament from nearly every other American nuclear war film.

WarGames

1983, MGM. Directed by John Badham.

WarGames is simultaneously a very ridiculous film and a very intelligent one. A teenage computer hacker infiltrates a government mainframe that, unbeknownst to him, is actually an advanced supercomputer at NORAD run by a highly capable-but-flawed artificial intelligence. And when he engages the computer’s AI in a game of “Global Thermonuclear War” on a lark, he is similarly unaware that the AI lacks the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction (and the generals aren’t so good at it, either). Ultimately he, his plucky love interest, and an exiled scientist have to travel to Cheyenne Mountain to help the machine understand that with nuclear war, “the only winning move is not to play.”

Threads

BBC, 1984. Directed by Mick Jackson.

Widely regarded as the darkest and most dismal of the “day after” genre, Threads was a made-for-television BBC creation that attempted to give a raw, unflinching view of what global nuclear war in the 1980s would look like from the perspective of the city of Sheffield. The world that Threads presents is not great: Aside from the horrific level of death and destruction caused by a megaton-range detonation itself, there follows a complete breakdown in social order. Jumping a decade into the future shows the nation deeply depopulated by the effects of fallout, disruption, and nuclear winter, with the just-hanging-on survivors barely capable of speaking English. Deliberately bleak, it’s a movie that people like to say they’ve seen, but nobody enjoys watching.

When the Wind Blows

Recorded Releasing, 1986. Directed by Jimmy T. Murakami.

This distinctly British animated film, adapted from a 1982 graphic novel of the same name by Raymond Briggs, follows an aging couple living in rural Sussex before, during, and after a nuclear war. Stereotypically British stiff upper lips, enhanced by blundering ignorance, keeps them in largely non-complaining good humor even as the world collapses around them. The unusual mixture of hand-animated and stop-motion animation, with a title song by David Bowie and a score by Roger Waters, adds to the study of contrasts in this dark parody, which ends with the couple inadvertently and cheerfully getting into their own body bags.

Oppenheimer

2023, Universal. Directed by Christopher Nolan.

There have been several attempts to represent the complicated life of J. Robert Oppenheimer on film. Nolan’s is the most stylized and artistic, and it’s based on the best source material (Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus). Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a drawn, anxious, stricken, and deeply flawed figure. His life is depicted less as a hagiography than a cautionary tale, a parable about the extreme possibilities and limitations of human ambition, agency, and control. It deftly uses concerns about accidental atmospheric ignition as a way to depict Oppenheimer’s gnawing dread that his invention had possibly doomed human civilization.

A House of Dynamite

2025, Netflix. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

This recent nuclear thriller depicts the 20 minutes between the detection of an unattributed missile launch heading towards the United States, and its arrival at its target. Director Kathryn Bigelow shows this same interval of time three times, from multiple perspectives. While there is much that one could argue with regarding the particulars of the film’s scenario, the film very astutely highlights the constraints put on deliberation, fact-finding, and decision-making by the short flight time of a ballistic missile and the inadequacy of defensive systems, political and military organizations, and any individual president to cope with those realities.

Honorable mentions

There are many other films one might want to include in such a list. Those that did not make the cut, but came close to it for me, included the suppressed British nuclear aftermath pseudo-documentary The War Game (1966); the ruminative Soviet post-apocalyptic Dead Man’s Letters [Pisma myortvogo cheloveka] (1986); the impending nuclear attack cult-classic Miracle Mile (1988); the Japanese Hiroshima family retrospective Black Rain [Kuroi ame] (1989); the late-Cold War Tom Clancy submarine defection thriller The Hunt for Red October (1990); the Cuban Missile Crisis dramatization Thirteen Days (2000); and the post-Cold War Tom Clancy nuclear terrorism thriller The Sum of All Fears (2002).

Did I miss one that you think is vital? (I’m sure I did!) Or at least an honorable mention? Let me know in the comments!

The setup: Harry Baldwin (Milland), his wife Ann (Jean Hagen), son Rick (Frankie Avalon), and daughter Karen (Mary Mitchel) have left their Los Angeles home early one morning, camper in tow, to go on fishing trip into the wilderness. While on the road and some ways out of the city, they see a fantastic flash of light in the distance. They tune in to an emergency broadcasting station, and learn that it may have been a nuclear detonation.1 They then see a mushroom cloud rising over Los Angeles. Later, a radio report makes it clear that it wasn’t the only victim: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Paris, and Rome are all destroyed as well, and retaliation against an unnamed enemy was also occurring.

For the rest of the film, the (nuclear) family, dominated by the patriarchal Harry, go about the business of “survival.” Harry is essentially convinced, from the first moment, that the world is about to fall apart, and that this will pit all against all. He approaches this in a hard and often condescending fashion, lecturing all who will listen about what the new facts of life are going to be. And he of course sees confirmation in this everywhere he looks, as panic, disorder, and violence start to bubble up almost immediately. Harry’s ethos for most of the film is quite simple: if it’s all against all, then he wants his family to survive, and he’s willing to do anything make that happen. Trust is a luxury he can’t afford.

Ann, by comparison, is the voice of compassion and hope. She’s the one who frets about how her mother, in Los Angeles, is doing. She’s the one who desperately wants to avoid causing more harm in the world. She’s the one who worries that her teenage son, Rick, is all-to-eagerly embracing Harry’s dog-eat-dog mindset, and is likely to become a murderer before all of this is over. Harry has no time for this, and gives her numerous lectures about the new ethos, in a frustrated, smug, and condescending tone of voice:

Ann: Are you trying to scare me? You’re wasting your time, I’m already scared.

Harry: Look, sweetheart: two-and-two doesn’t make four anymore. At the moment it adds up to exactly nothing. For the next few weeks, survival is going to have to be on an individual basis.

A: What do you want to do, write off the rest of the world?

H: When civilization gets civilized again, I’ll re-join.

A: It’s still here.

Harry is portrayed as wanting the best for his family, but he also frequently crosses lines towards that end. Early on, he turns what was intended as an honest transaction (buying supplies from a hardware store) into a robbery when the store owner wants to do the state-mandated background check before selling Harry guns. Harry sees this as madness and, of course, inconvenient, and he even fools himself into thinking that he’s not robbing the man:

Proprietor: This isn’t enough.

Harry: Is this? [gestures with a handgun that he has just swiped and loaded]

P: Well, just about.

H: Give me a receipt for the cash.

P: This isn’t a hold up?

H: No.

P: Then what about the balance?

H: I’ll owe it to you. Write the receipt.

The proprietor and Harry get into a fist fight, which sends the gun flying. Harry cries out for help, and Rick rushes in, grabs the handgun, and jabs it into the ribs of the proprietor. Harry grabs even more guns as he leaves.

H: I owe you $200. I’ll pay you when I can.

P: In my book, you’re just a thug.

H: [to Rick] If he makes one stupid move, shoot him. Come on. [to Ann, outside, harshly] Get in the car!

This is a world on the precipice: people are still paying for things with cash and checks, both of which require a functioning society to have any value. Politeness and social norms are being followed… until they suddenly aren’t. And although Harry seems to be in denial about the fact that he is robbing the man (“I’ll pay you when I can” is a hollow promise if you believe you are about to go into hiding from a coming civilizational collapse), Ann is not.

Back in the car, Ann looks at her husband in horror while they drive.

A: I can’t get over it. All these years, I thought I knew you, but you turn out to be a stranger. Robbing and mauling people like some kind of a cheap hoodlum.

H: We’re fighting for our lives, Ann. Every footpath will be crawling with men saying, ‘no matter what, I’m going to live,’ and that’s what I’m saying, too.

A: Intelligent people don’t just turn their backs on the rest of the world.

H: Under these conditions, intelligent people will be the first to try.

Ann points out that he just enlisted his teenage son in armed robbery, eliciting nothing but any angry snap from Harry, and then Rick chimes in: “We’re on our own, Ma, no rules, no regulations, and no laws.” Harry bristles at this, too: “Don’t write off the law; the law will come back. I just want us to be around when it does.”

The depiction of Harry is quite interesting and complex. He’s clearly coded as a villain in most of these scenes. He’s nasty to everyone, including the family who are meant to be the object of all of his sacrifices and actions. He looks increasingly wild as the film continues. But, the film implies as well, he’s not completely wrong: the society is rapidly falling apart, there are plenty of evil-doers and opportunists around, and his concerns about food, weapons, fallout, and insecurity are borne out again and again. That the actor playing Harry (Milland) is also the director is quite interesting, and one wonders what he thought about it (unfortunately, Milland does not mention the film at all in his autobiography).

The Baldwin family continue on their way, committing other various crimes (in the name of survival) as they go. They run into three men who menace them with threats of violence and hep-cat lingo (“We’re the new highway patrol… someone dropped a bomb, dad, crazy kick…”), but Rick gets the jump on them with a shotgun and they are run off.

Later, the family get into a classic post-apocalyptic traffic jam of others joining the exodus (in amazing period cars). When they find it difficult to rejoin the traffic after having left it for a while, Harry creates a sociopathic “stop sign” by spraying gasoline across the road and lighting up a wall of flame. It stops the traffic, all right, but not before setting at least one car completely ablaze — which doesn’t seem to bother Harry much.

Ultimately they end up deep in the woods, living in a literal cave (to avoid fallout). If this film were made today, one would imagine that this would be seen as pretty bleak living, an outward manifestation of Harry’s internal psychological state. Instead, it is portrayed as superficially idyllic living (and, in general, none of the family’s actors ever look like they are “roughing it” — they’re all pretty clean and kept, and one must imagine that Rick brought a generous supply of pomade to keep his hair looking as well-coifed as it is).

They have access to a radio, so they have some information about the outside world. General war has broken out between the United States and the unnamed enemy, and the United Nations has declared that it is now “Year Zero.” Harry wants to eschew all contact with other people until order has reasserted itself, to Ann’s frustration. “I love you, Harry,” she tells him at one point, “but not more than a future without hope.”

Eventually, the three hoodlums from before resurface. Two of them come across Karen, the daughter, and rape her before Ann can chase them off with a rifle. Harry and Rick track two of them back to a farmhouse and execute them in cold blood. They also discover that the trio had been keeping a teenage girl, Marilyn, as a sex slave in the house, having murdered her parents. Marilyn agrees to come back with the Baldwins after some hesitation.

That night, Harry talks with Ann, sharing self-doubts that he has hitherto kept to himself:

A: Harry, you can’t go on torturing yourself.

H: I killed two men.

A: I tried to kill them, too, but I missed, I just wasn’t a good-enough shot.

H: I looked for the worst in others and I found it in myself.

A: But you brought Marilyn here. That was kind, and good!

H: Even that was Rick’s idea.

Eventually, the radio announcer tells them that “relocation centers” have been established around the state for survivors, with the nearest one being 135 miles away. Ann and Rick are thrilled, but Karen’s experience has made her a newly hardened recruit to the Harry school of distrust:

Rick: People!

Ann: Civilization!

Karen: Some civilization.

A: What’s the matter, dear?

K: All our friends are probably dead. Our house… my school… everything’s… gone. Everything’s changed. Including me!

And she’s right — but of course, that kind of cynicism doesn’t get you anywhere. It doesn’t tell you what you ought to do next.

Harry decides against leaving; he feels they’re better off where they are, for now, and he fears the trip. He worries about “the wrong people.” Ann asks him how safe they are in their cave-forest setup, and Harry explains: “I have some measure of control here. Out there, none. Now leave me alone, please.” That night, after everyone else turns in, Harry sits outside in the dark, with his rifle. He looks stricken, and wordlessly puts his face in his hands.

The final act involves the third hoodlum coming across Marilyn and Rick chopping firewood. In the ensuing confrontation, Marilyn shoots the hoodlum, but not before he shoots Rick in the thigh. The family pile into the car and head to the closest town seeking a doctor for the unconscious Rick. While on the road, the radio tells them that the war is close to over: “Year Zero is drawing to a close.” Ann asks: “Does this mean that the war is over?” Harry replies: “For some people, yes. For us, not yet.”

They make their way through the ruins of a ransacked town (the only specifically post-apocalyptic set in the entire film), and use a phonebook to find a doctor’s house. We get some world-building lore from the doctor, who tells them to be on the lookout for “dope addicts” and notes that he has been without electricity for two weeks. He lacks the necessary supplies to save Rick’s life, and so sends them to the relocation facility, telling them that the Army has set up aide stations there.

The family pile back into the car, driving into the night. They are run off the road by a vehicle, whose occupants demand Harry exits and disarms or they will fire upon them. Harry does so, fearful for his life, but it turns out to be an Army patrol, who tell them they are close to their salvation. “Thank god!,” Ann cries. As the family drives off to save risk, the two Army men look on and chat: “That’s five more.” “Five more what?” “Five more that are OK. They come from the hills. No radiation sickness.” “Yep. Five good ones.” The end.

Panic in Year Zero! is not a terrible film. It is definitely low-budget. The whole thing would have been easy to film on generic sets (some of them have a definitely “Western” look to them), with the sole exception of the single street in the looted town, and the cast is kept improbably small (I didn’t mention it, but along with the hoodlums being repeated characters, the hardware store owner turns out, completely coincidentally, to be the Baldwins’ neighbor while they are living in the forest). But the performances are decent-enough (with perhaps the exception of the hoodlums, who are ridiculous). It is actually a better film than its marketing posters from the time — which billed it as “AN ORGY OF LOOTING AND LUST” and really tried to capitalize on the rape aspect — make it out to be.

The actual post-nuclear world-building is pretty spare. There is only the slimmest discussion of things like fallout, and no context for the war is ever hinted at. This is less a film about nuclear war than it is about the appropriate lengths one can take for survival, a common theme in early 1960s fallout shelter-inspired morality tales. I appreciate, though, that their take on nuclear war is spread out over the first few weeks — that is an interval of time that is often skipped in nuclear war films, who usually focus on “the run up to war” (or near-war), “the day after” (the attack and its immediate aftermath), or “the far post-apocalyptic future.”

It is not a Survivalist/Prepper film, however. Even Harry’s individualism has its limits. He is only trying to get through a few weeks of uncertainty, and is iron-clad in his belief that eventually “the law” will return to power. He also hasn’t prepared for this outcome; he’s playing it by ear as it comes, but he doesn’t know any more about surviving nuclear war than anyone else. He is not truly a hyper-individualist; this is not a libertarian fantasy. None of this is surprising — that genre of “survival” would not become really a thing until the mid-1970s — but it is again a very different film than would have been probably made even a decade later, much less today.

It makes for an interesting comparison with John Christopher’s novel The Death of Grass (1956), which features a very similar sort of post-apocalyptic family road trip. In The Death of Grass, the protagonist becomes a harder man as a result of the world going to hell, but the novel externalizes the most extreme individualism onto another character, an antagonist (Pirrie) who is ultimately punished for his sins.

In Panic in Year Zero!, Harry has some self-doubts, but he’s largely let off the hook. His kids are the only ones who are really abused by the conditions of war. Even with them, it is implied that Rick’s injury will be healed, and while Karen’s rape is treated as an appropriately horrible event when it happens, it is also said quite explicitly that “she’ll get over it.” Even Marilyn, whose situation was much worse than Karen’s, transitions from traumatized, orphaned sex slave into a cleaned-up love interest for Rick in what appears to be a matter of a few days’ time and a shower.

Which is just to say that the film doesn’t appear to want us to think that the Baldwins have been too traumatized by their nuclear war experience. They’ve “changed,” as Karen put its, in more ways than one, but they ultimately find salvation and a happy ending. Which makes the film’s message about Harry a little tricky to parse. Was he right in his cynical, self-interested, and often even predatory approach to survival? Harry himself only expresses a sense of guilt after he shoots the hoodlums in cold blood; he expresses no regrets about his violent thievery or his “stop sign” of fire.

The message of the film, then, is an interesting one. It’s not the everyone-dies fatalism of On the Beach (1959), and it’s not the “welcome to hell” post-nuclear vision of later films like The Day After (1983) or Threads (1984). But it’s also not a Survivalist/Prepper film. It seems to exist in a liminal space that is still largely based in a Civil Defense-approach to nuclear war, but with nascent Survivalist influences. The view it gives of nuclear war is something along the lines of: it’ll be bad, but recovery is completely possible if everyone keeps their cool and allows the authorities to reestablish themselves, but the odds are that until that happens you’re on your own, so get ready to temporarily “bug out.”

I find it an interesting question to ask how Hollywood would likely do this film differently if it was made today. It is hard to imagine that “hurray, we are saved by the Army” would be the happy ending. I suspect the “costs” to Harry would be higher — one of the kids would be killed, for example, and Marilyn would find assimilating into the family more difficult. At the same time, I also suspect that modern audiences would want a somewhat more sympathetic protagonist than Harry. If Harry had expressed more reluctance to do the things he did, and more regret over some of the things he did (I still can’t get over the “stop sign” incident), he’d be a lot more relatable. Instead, he comes off as sociopathic.

I enjoyed the film more than I thought I would. It has a sort of “what if nuclear war happened to the Cleaver family?” quality to it, Millard’s Harry is both terrible and complex in just the right ways, and even its “happy” ending is tinged with some foreboding. It somehow manages to be neither anti-nuclear nor pro-nuclear. Even if its nuclear aftermath is relatively tame compared to the vision put out in Civil Defense literature from the time, it is still no walk in the park, and as Karen points out, “everything’s changed,” and nothing for the better.

No photographs from the ground were available until after the surrender documents were signed, in September 1945, and American soldiers, scientists, and journalists, were permitted to enter Japan. By October 1945, some photographs of Hiroshima from the ground were beginning to show up in American publications, like LIFE magazine, although they are interesting in retrospect because they are all relatively close-in, giving very little sense of the scale of the destruction. But the LIFE photos did feature people, including women and children, some of whom were quite visibly injured.

There appear to have been surprisingly few views of the damage at Hiroshima available to the American public until 1947, two years after the attack. At that point, one starts to see many versions of now-familiar photographs of the shell of the Hiroshima Industrial Promotion Building — now usually just called the “Atomic Bomb Dome” — in mainstream publications.

One also gets, in 1947, much more technical discussions of the damage at Hiroshima, and the declassification and release of official reports about the medical effects of the bomb. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey’s The Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Health and Medical Services in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, released in March 1947, contains both broad photographs of the damage, as well as photographs of victims that were taken as part of the general study that was made by the Occupation forces into the effects of the bombings.

As makes sense for a medical survey, the photographs of the victims are clinical and focused on identifying specific categories of injuries. The description of the injuries is clinical and usually concerned with the circumstances under which the injuries were attained, e.g.:

S.N., 37 years old, male. Was working in open at 5,500 feet from center of blast, wearing trousers but bare above waist. Blast came from right. Note area of protection over spine due to shielding by right side of back.

The photographs show wounds that had already healed and scarred. The text says that the Medical Division of the USSBS did not arrive to the cities until several months after the bombings, so the survivors are in much better shape than they would have been immediately after the attacks.

Most photographs of the damage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were taken weeks, if not months, after the actual bombings. It gives them a particularly sterile look: the streets have already been cleared, the corpses have already been buried or cremated. It helps feed the misconception that the atomic bombings, while perhaps horrible in terms of the raw number of human beings killed by them, were fast and “clean” killers, vaporizing victims and ending their torment quickly. While there certainly were many who undoubtedly died very quickly, there were also many who died painfully, who were trapped under rubble that then caught fire, and survivors who suffered grievous injuries.

There are written accounts that give a potent sense of this. John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which debuted as an entire issue of The New Yorker in August 1946 before it was published as a stand-alone book, was potent then and is still potent now. It has no illustrations or photographs: the writing allows one’s imagination to do the violence for it.

After crossing Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge, having run the whole way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he approached the center, that all the houses had been crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always stopped him. Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them.

There were, however, photographs of Hiroshima on the ground taken on the day of the bombing. A Japanese photojournalist, Yoshito Matsushige, was employed by the Chugoku Shimbun newspaper, and worked as an official reporter for the Japanese Army. He lived 1.6 mi (2.7 km) from the hypocenter, and was at home, reading the newspaper, on the morning the attack happened.1

He later recalled the attack:2

At first I saw something shining and sparkling — it was a kind of twinkling light, like you see from a sparkling electric live wire. The next instant there was this huge white flash, like a giant magnesium flashbulb. I couldn’t see anything anymore after that. Then I heard a blast and when the blast hit, my body jumped in the air about one meter and I was thrown against the wall. My wife cried, ”Bombing!” and ran to me. I grabbed her hand and we both got out of the house. We crossed the streetcar racks and went out into the field across the street. I thought the bomb had landed right on my house. […] Everywhere there was dust; it made a grayish darkness over everything. But I could feel the warmth of my wife’s hand, and it was this that made me realize she was alive and also that I was still alive.

Matsushige recalled that in that moment of chaos and darkness, he thought, “I am a newspaper photographer and a reporter for the army, so I have an obligation to make sure where the bomb dropped.” He returned to his house and found his camera in the rubble. “It was time to go to work.”

Matsushige walked through Hiroshima. He took exactly five black-and-white photographs of the city that day with his small Mamiya viewfinder camera. They look dramatically different from the more sanitized photographs, and three of them feature people in them, giving a far more accurate depiction of what the victims looked like, at least in the areas that he was at.

The first, reproduced above, was taken on the Miyuki bridge, and was have been taken about 2 hours after the bomb detonated. The building in the background is a police station, in front of which an ad hoc medical treatment center had been constructed. Officers were putting cooking oil on the burns of survivors. Most of the people were students from the Hiroshima Girl’s Commercial High School and a middle school, who had been mobilized to build firebreaks.

The students are more clearly visible in the second photograph, which moves us closer. It is hard, in black-and-white, to get a sense of their possible injuries. That they are dirty and distressed is, however, obvious. The scene is chaotic.

Matsushige later recalled that he hesitated before taking the photos:

Injured people were everywhere. Both sidewalks of the bridge were crowded with dead and suffering victims. When I saw them I realized I had to take a picture, and I tried to push the shutter, but I couldn’t. It was so terrible. These people were pathetic. I had to wait. Most of the people were students, children. […] I found it difficult to push the shutter. I was standing on the Miyuki-bashi Bridge for about twenty minutes before I could do it. Finally I thought, I am a professional cameraman so I have to take pictures. Then I managed to push the shutter.

Matsushige also recalled elsewhere that: “I felt that everyone was looking at me and thinking angrily, ‘He’s taking our picture and will bring us no help at all.’”

After the second photograph at the bridge, found he could take no more:

My viewfinder was fogged because of my tears. I understand why you ask me why I did not take more pictures, but in reality it was very difficult. When I set my camera at somebody who was asking for help I could not really push the shutter.

After this, Matsushige attempted to visit his office at the newspaper, with little success. Bodies were everywhere. Passing Hiroshima University, he saw the swimming pool was filled with the boiled corpses of people who had attempted to take refuge there while the city burned. Outside of his office, he saw a streetcar full of people posed almost as if they were on their morning commutes, but all burned, reddish-black corpses.

I put one foot up on the street car and looked into it. I put my finger on the shutter for one or two minutes, but I could not push it. I refrained from taking the picture. It was too terrible to take a picture of. This was the only scene I was going to take a picture of but did not.

Matsushige returned to his house. He photographed the barber shop attached to it, which was in shambles, and then snapped a photograph from inside of a destroyed fire station across the street. They feature no injured people, only his wife (in the background of the barbershop) and a passing man through the window.

Hours later, Matsushige returned to the Miyuki bridge, and took one more photograph, this time of a bandaged soldier-policeman writing on a table. The man was writing certificates for people injured by the bombing, which would entitle them to some bread.

Matsushige says that he took a few more pictures that evening, but they did not come out, and so he threw the negatives away, not aware that his would be the only close-in documentation that day.

Matsushige’s photographs were confiscated by the US Occupation forces, who attempted to keep tight control on any Japanese discussions about the atomic bombings (part of a bid to avoid anti-American, pro-Communist sentiment). They were not published until after the Occupation ended in 1952. His photographs were first published by a magazine, Asahi Gurafu, in August 1952, in a sold-out and reprinted issue dedicated to damage photographs that ultimately had a circulation of 700,000.

Two of Matsushige’s bridge photographs (the second and the third) were reproduced along with other post-attack photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the September 29, 1952 issue of LIFE magazine, and referenced out on the cover as “FIRST PICTURES — ATOM BLASTS THROUGH EYES OF VICTIMS.” This was juxtaposed incongruously on the cover with “TV’S BIGGEST, PRETTIEST NEW SHOW,” and photographs of chorus girls auditioning for a Jackie Gleason production.

The article in LIFE was titled, “WHEN THE ATOM BOMB STRUCK — UNCENSORED,” blamed “jittery US military censors” for the fact that it had been over seven years before photographs of the bombings of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) from “below” had been made available either inside or outside of Japan. It misleadingly claimed (based on a selective quotation) that the atomic bombs had given its victims a “quick death, with no suffering.” But it concluded by acknowledging that all of the Japanese speaking for the victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki acknowledged that “the long suppressed photographs, terrible as they are, still fall far short of the depicting the horror which only those who lived under the blast can know.”

How can something on the scale of Hiroshima, as experienced by the victims, be captured? The photographic record is too meager to do the job, and even it represents a version of the event filtered through the experience of the photographer, who was himself a victim, “an ordinary person” (as he put it), and who found himself faced with his own decisions to make about what images he could, and could not, attempt to capture. But Matsushige’s photographs do give our imaginations a bit of additional material with which to understand the bombing, however incomplete.

The game has two basic “modes” which can be played concurrently or individually. “Scavenge” is a top-down, 3D game in which you must collect supplies and family members before the bombs go off. One can choose either Ted (the father) or Dolores (the mother) as one’s main character. One may have a few seconds to look around the house before the warning timer starts, which is helpful as the location of objects and people in the house is random on each playthrough. Once the attack warning starts, the player has 60 seconds to grab as much stuff as one can and throw it down the hatch to an underground bunker. If you aren’t near the hatch when the 60 seconds are up, you die, game over.

This is a maddening sequence, as your character is slow and runs into things. Clearly this is deliberate; it is why it is hard. In the house are your three other family members (your spouse, your son Timmy, and your daughter Mary Jane), cans of soup, bottles of water, a radio, a suitcase, a fire axe, a gas mask, a first-aid kit, a rifle, a map, various games and books, and so on. You only have four “slots” to hold things at any one time, and objects (and people) can take up multiple slots (poor Mary Jane requires three slots). So you have to strategically decide which rooms to run to, what items to grab, and be as quickly as possible. The temptation to grab just one more item (and possibly not make it inside the shelter yourself) is high.

If one is playing the two modes concurrently, after “Scavenge” the game then transitions to “Survival” mode. This takes place inside the fallout shelter, and is a 2D, point-and-click, visual-novel sort of experience. Whatever and whomever one grabbed during “Scavenge” mode is now inside the shelter as well. (If one is playing only “Survival” mode, then it is stocked with some random distribution of items. On the easiest level of difficulty, some additional items might be in the shelter as well, even if you didn’t grab them.)

“Survival” mode has a fairly simple game loop. Every day, one must dole out food and/or water to the survivors. People can go for a few days without food or water (the game tells you if they are very hungry or thirsty). Every day there is usually some “decision” that needs to be taken. The most regular of these is that one can send a survivor out into the world to look for more supplies. One can choose the survivor (or decline to send someone out) and an item for them to take with them (e.g., a gas mask, which helps keep them from getting sick from fallout, or a map, which helps them locate better places to scavenge). Once someone leaves the shelter, you won’t know for a few days how it worked out — they might come back with supplies, or information, or a disease. Or they might just never come back.

Other “decisions” include reacting to specific random events. A person might show up and offer to exchange the contents of their bag (which you cannot inspect) for a can of food. Do you agree to the trade? You hear a phone ringing across the street. Do you send someone out to go answer it? You hear a series of knocks on the door. Do you open it? Timmy seems depressed. Do you talk to him?

You seem to be able to do about one “decision” per day, and then it transitions to the next day. The characters in the shelter have essentially static cartoon appearances, but when they get sick, or go insane, their portrait reflects this. The inside of the shelter also changes to reflect different items you have, the amount of food and water, and whether you’ve picked up an additional friends (like a cat or a dog).

Such is the game. This loop continues until some end state is reached, and there are many end states. The most common is a “bad” ending, where you and everyone in the shelter ends up dead from disease, starvation, or dehydration. Womp womp. There are a multitude of other “bad” endings as well, such as having your shelter being taken over by armed ruffians.

One can also get rescued by the army, which is one of the few unambiguously “good” endings. Less unambiguously “good” are some of the stranger endings, like being sent in a rocket into outer space by a mad scientist who contacted you because of your cat. Or being “saved” by the Soviet Union.

The game makes no pretense at realism. It is possible for Mary Jane to get bitten by a radioactive spider and turn into a purple-skinned mutant. There are doomsday cults, Mad Max-style raiders, cats with cloning devices, and much more. The only “realistic” aspect of the shelter experience is that a) leaving the shelter early has the highest threat of radioactivity, b) it lasts on the order of weeks (and not, say, decades or centuries), and c) it is pretty boring, both for the characters and (in my opinion) for the player.

To be even more realistic, it would be even more boring, and take much longer to play through than the 5 minutes or so each “run” requires. I once contemplated making a VR game/art piece, years ago, that would “truly” simulate a fallout shelter experience, in mind-numbing detail, with time passing at exactly one in-game minute per real-world minute. This would, of course, not be fun to play. It would be a sort of nuclear version of the (in)famous anti-game Desert Bus, which simulates the driving a bus for 8 hours along a desert highway in real-time. The fact that it would not be fun would be, of course, the point: even just one week in a small fallout shelter, with little to pass the time, sounds more like prison than salvation.

Of course, if the alternative were really death — something a game could never truly make one believe — then one could imagine doing it. But the only person who would find such an experience fun would be someone who got truly high on the idea of their own individual survival, and how superior that made them to everyone else. Such people, of course, probably exist.

The silliness of 60 Seconds! is, of course, meant to make staying in a shelter actually seem like something one might want to do. Even so, it is a game of endurance, and, presumably, optimization of choices. I can see how a certain kind of player (not myself, alas) would enjoy figuring out all of the ways to improve their odds and length of survival, or figuring out how to obtain all of the different endings.

As far as “shelter games” go — of which there are a few — 60 Seconds! is much more realistic than anything that is more in the Fallout genre (e.g., Fallout Shelter, which has some similarities but lots more silliness). That they incorporate mental health (however unrealistically), tedium, and illness into the game already makes it a good antidote to most “lone survivor” fantasy games. I don’t think many people who played 60 Seconds! would come away believing that a post-nuclear war scenario would be very fun, and that’s better than the alternative.

I had not really thought about this before, as even though I wrote a lot about the specific moral hazards that many people (including Henry Stimson and Harry Truman) felt about the destruction of cities during World War II in The Most Awful Responsibility, I had not really considered that moral response in outside of the context of the 20th century.

But the conversation brought to mind something I had taught several years ago in a course for freshman on “The End of the World”: the sections of Genesis, in the Old Testament, about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Most people know the general outlines of the story from Genesis 19: Sodom and Gomorrah were sinning, God was unhappy, and so he sent down some angels to check out Sodom. They found Lot, who took them in, and then the men of Sodom showed up and asked if they could have some non-consensual “fun” with the angels. Lot said no, the angels blinded the men, and then told Lot he and his family ought to head of out of town, because God was going to destroy it. Lot, his wife, and his two daughters left with the angels, who told them to not look back. God rained down destruction on Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot’s wife looked back, and was turned into a pillar of salt. Lot and his daughters end up settling in a cave and then they, er, decide that they ought to get pregnant by him, and so they get him drunk and, er, make it happen. The end.

Now, I am not at all, and have never been, a religious person. I am also not a scholar of either the Bible or ancient history. I am reading this text as a person who is very firmly rooted in the 21st-century, with no more deeper understanding of the issues of ancient context, ancient narrative, or translational differences than being able to proclaim my awareness that expertise in such areas clearly exists but I do not have it.

My sense is that most of the time when Sodom and Gomorrah are mentioned in a modern context, the discussion is focused on the why of it: what exactly was the “sin” that was occurring that was so offensive that they warranted total annihilation, and what kind of moral argument is can be derived from that? The text itself appears fairly vague on this point. Were the denizens of Sodom sinful because they attempted homosexuality, or was it because they attempted rape? Is this a story about sexuality, consent, or being bad hosts? And then these theological interpretations are mapped onto various modern political positions in fairly obvious ways. I don’t have a dog in that fight, in the sense that I do not base my views on the morality either homosexuality or rape on any ancient texts, and I generally believe that trying to dictate public policy on the basis of ancient texts is a bad idea no matter how clear or ambiguous they are. Which is just to say, that aspect of the story isn’t what I want to talk about here.

The parts that I find most interesting about the story, and relevant to my conversation with Ward, are not the basic things from the summary above. They are rather the context of the episode, which shows up as a detour from the story of Abraham, the Hebrew patriarch.

In Genesis 18, Abraham has a conversation with three mysterious men, and, in the not-quite-clear logic of the text, with God. The conversation ends up being about whether Abraham’s wife, Sarah, will bear children. As the men leave Abraham, they look at Sodom. And then we have this (translation is the New International Version):

When the men got up to leave, they looked down toward Sodom, and Abraham walked along with them to see them on their way. Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.”

Then the Lord said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.”

Two things I want to highlight here. One is that God’s interest and concern with Sodom and Gomorrah is a response to “outcry” that has somehow reached God, and that God feels the need to send the angels as part of a fact-finding mission. This is not the omniscient, all-knowing, all-present God of the New Testament: this is a God who needs to get some boots on the ground to see if the complaints he’s receiving are valid.

The other is that God’s has this kind of internal dialogue where he’s wondering whether he should tell Abraham about his plans, and concludes, yeah, I should probably give him the head’s up about Sodom, since I think he’s my guy.1 This again adds to this very “human-like God” interaction, but more importantly, is structured about whether he should “hide” what he’s doing from Abraham. That is, it’s not, “should I tell him?” so much as it is “should I not tell him?”

Why would God want to hide his plans from Abraham? Presumably because God is not sure that Abraham is going to like what God is going to do. And, as it turns out, Abraham is pretty upset by the whole thing:

The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

The Lord said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

Abraham’s argument with God is fascinating. Will you really kill an entire city because some of its inhabitants are wicked? What about the righteous people within it? This is an ancient argument about discrimination, a core concept in many laws of war: don’t be indiscriminate with your violence, don’t sweep away the righteous and the wicked equally. Abraham pushes this point with an emotional appeal, as well: you’re God, surely you can see that this would be an injustice! Surely you, of all things, would not commit such an atrocity!

And… it works! God says, OK, if there are 50 righteous people in Sodom, I’ll call the whole thing off. (I still find it amusing that this whole thing is still tied to the fact-finding mission.) Now, one could question why God is doing this. Does he really buy the moral argument Abraham is making, or is he trying to just make Abraham happier, or is he trying to prove a broader point about how wicked Sodom is? Who can say? I would just note that one of the major irritations of Old Testament God is doubting him and defying him — Cf., Lot’s wife — so it is really quite gutsy of Abraham to try and claim some kind of moral high ground here.

If the above was the end of the interaction, that would be one thing. But this negotiation goes on and on, in a way that, to me, risks becoming comical:

Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five people?”

“If I find forty-five there,” he said, “I will not destroy it.”

Once again he spoke to him, “What if only forty are found there?”

He said, “For the sake of forty, I will not do it.”

Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak. What if only thirty can be found there?”

He answered, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.”

Abraham said, “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only twenty can be found there?”

He said, “For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it.”

Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?”

He answered, “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

When the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left, and Abraham returned home.

The fact that Abraham haggles God down from sparing the city if 50 righteous people can be found down to 10 is amazing. I also love the detail of Abraham repeatedly being self-deprecating: I know I’m just a guy, a little worm, really, and you’re God, the amazing, but I just want to offer one more little suggestion…

Ten people! The moral reasoning on display here is quite interesting. We don’t know the total population of Sodom, so it is hard to derive what proportion of wicked people to righteous people warrants preservation or destruction, but by the end it surely cannot that high. There is also the explicit appeal to the idea that once you have defined some number of righteous, it is not clear that one can make a differentiation of moral “weight” for lesser numbers. That is the heart of the whole, “if you agree 50 is enough, why not 45?” part, and he gets him all the way down to 10 on that logic.2

Thus ends Genesis 18, and we transition to Genesis 19, which is the story (already recounted) of the angels visiting Sodom, Sodom’s destruction, and Lot and his daughters’ cave “incident.” An interesting aspect of this that I did not recount is the return to Abraham’s point of view near the end (post pillar of salt, pre-Lot and his daughters):

Early the next morning Abraham got up and returned to the place where he had stood before the Lord. He looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, toward all the land of the plain, and he saw dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace.

So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived.

The last section is the key part, for me: we seem to be being told that the reason that Lot and his family were spared at all is because of Abraham’s moral argument with God. So the argument was not entirely for nothing — Abraham couldn’t spare the cities, but a few lives were saved.3

So that is the ancient text itself, which makes an interesting argument against indiscriminate destruction of cities, one that even God seems to cosign, albeit only up to a point.

The text leaves much to the imagination. What does Abraham think when he gazes onto the destruction from Sodom? What is Lot’s wife thinking as she turns to look? How does Lot feel, to be an almost sole-survivor of a catastrophe, to know that his compatriots, and much of his family, were sentenced to such a harsh punishment? The text itself does not say. But that does not mean, if we are not afraid of sullying the original story, that we cannot think about it.

This is the task that Karel Čapek (1890-1938), the Czech author and playright who is most famous for coining the word robot in his 1920 play R.U.R., took on in his 1923 story, “Pseudo Lot, or Concerning Patriotism.” “Pseudo Lot” takes the text of Genesis 19 (the destruction of Sodom and its aftermath) and reworks it. Parts of the text, added in italics, are verbatim from the source material. But much of it is by Čapek, and instead imagines how Lot would feel about the destruction of his city, and about the opportunity held out for his own survival.4

And they said unto Lot, Hast thou here any besides? son-in-law, and thy sons, and thy daughters, and whatsoever thou hast in the city, bring them out of this place: For we will destroy this place, because the cry of them is waxen great before the face of the Lord; and the Lord hath sent us to destroy it.

Lot was taken aback when he heard this, and he said: “And why must I go from this place?” Whereupon they said to him: “Because the Lord does not wish to destroy the righteous.”

Lot was silent for a long while, but then he said: “I beseech you, sirs, give me leave to speak with my sons-in-law and daughters, that they may make ready for the journey.” They answered him: “Do so.”

And Lot went out, and he ran through the streets of the city and cried out to all the people: “Up, get you out of this place; for the Lord will destroy this city.” But he seemed to them as one that mocked them.

Lot returned home, but he did not lie down, but pondered all night long.

Čapek’s Lot is a deeper, agonized character than the one of Genesis. Lot is torn by the demand: he does not want to lose his town, no matter how wicked its inhabitants are. He cannot reconcile this request, even though he knows they are wicked. The next day, he refuses the command to leave:

And when the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot, saying: “Arise, take thy wife, and thy two daughters, which are here; lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city.”

“I will not go,” said Lot. “Forgive me, but I will not go. I have pondered this all night long. I cannot go, for I too am one of the people of Sodom.”

“You are righteous,” objected the angels, “but they are unrighteous, and the cry of their iniquities has angered the Lord. What are they to you?”

“I don’t know,” said Lot. “I have been thinking about this too, what they are to me. All my life I have complained about my countrymen, and I have judged them so harshly that it grieves me to recall it now: for they will perish. […]

And an angel spoke and said: “The Lord has commanded that the people of Sodom be destroyed.”

“His will be done,” said Lot quietly. “I pondered all night long, and I recalled so many things it made me weep. Have you ever heard how the people of Sodom sing? No, you don’t know them at all, or you wouldn’t have come like this. When the girls walk along the streets they swing their hips and a song hums through their lips and they laugh as they draw water into their pitchers. No water is more clear than that from the wells of Sodom, and no speech in any tongue sounds more beautiful. When a child speaks, I understand him as if he were my own, and when he plays, he plays the games I played when I was very small. And when I cried, my mother comforted me in the speech of Sodom. Lord,” cried Lot, “as if it were yesterday!”

Lot continues in this vein, appealing to the fact that there is good amongst wickedness, and that God’s demand of him is, ultimately, unreasonable and unjust:

“You will be destroyed with them,” said the angel, frowning.

“Perhaps, but first I’ll try to save them from destruction. I don’t know what I’ll do, but until the last moment I’ll think it my duty to help them. How could I possibly go? I am disobeying the Lord, and so He will not hear me. If He had given me three years’ time, or three days, or even three hours! What would three hours matter to Him? If yesterday He had commanded me: Go forth from their midst, for they are unrighteous — I would have said to Him: Be patient with me for just a little while, I’ll have a word with this one and that one; I have judged them instead of going out amongst them. But how can I leave now, when they are to be destroyed? For am I not partly to blame that things have gone so far with them? I don’t want to die, but neither could I bear for them to die. I will stay.”

“You cannot save Sodom.”

“I know I can’t: what could I possibly do? But I will try, although what, I don’t yet know; I only know that I must persist. Because all my life I judged them more harshly than anyone else, because I have borne with them the heaviest burden: their faults. Lord, I don’t know how to tell You what they are to me; I can only show it by staying with them.”

Čapek’s Lot is making a very different kind of appeal than the one undertaken by Abraham: not about saving the righteous, but about the fact that even the wicked deserve mercy, and that one owes something to one’s people, however imperfect they may be.

Ultimately, Čapek’s version makes a hard turn away from the source material: Lot refuses to flee.

“Sodom, Sodom, art thou not the most beautiful of cities? [says Lot] And if I were to see only one small window, curtained in striped linen, I would know it and say: this is a window of Sodom. […]

“Oh gates, gates of Sodom, where are they leading me and into what emptiness? Where shall I set my foot? For there is no ground beneath me: and I stand as if I stood not. Go, my daughters, and leave me; I can go no farther.”

And they brought him forth, and set him without the city; and they spake unto him, saying: Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed."

The sun was risen upon the earth when they said this.

Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.

Then Lot looked round and cried out and ran back towards the city.

“What are you doing, accursed one?” the angels called after him.

“I am going to help the people of Sodom,” answered Lot, and he went into the city.

Thus it ends. What does one make of this? It feels radical for Čapek to make a story that is, ultimately, a defense of Sodom, from the perspective of one of its members. Who defends Sodom? Well, in fact, Abraham does: it is not so radical to suggest that there is something unjust in God’s plans.5

For me, the interesting thing about destroying Sodom (and Gomorrah, who basically has no independent story) is not so much the question of the sin or wickedness, but the more fundamental questions about justice that get raised both in the text (Abraham’s haggling) and in works like Čapek’s. When is it just to destroy an entire city, to be indiscriminate with wrath? Even the God of the Old Testament, who no one would ever accuse of being “soft,” appears to have worried about such things, and to be vulnerable to arguments about the moral hazards involved.

These imagined scenarios, particularly when they get very granular in their attacking the problem of nuclear war survival, often feel surreal. Pretty much anything mundane looks absurd and inconsequential when put up against the specter of full-scale nuclear apocalypse. Still, I think there is some value, even to those of us who are not committed one way or the other to do the survivability of some Civil Defense planning, into “grounding” an understanding of what “nuclear apocalypse” means.

In 1963, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a prominent DC-area think tank, was contracted by the US Office of Civil Defense, Department of the Army, to conduct a detailed study of what would happen to a American single city in the event of a nuclear war. Several reports came out of this work over the course of 1965.

The city chosen was Houston, Texas, and the studies looked at the effects of a singular detonation, centered on the most populous area of the city. A variety of possible explosive yields, ranging from 100 kilotons up to 100 megatons, were looked at for comparative value, and the consequences for a number of sheltering scenarios were compared (e.g., no shelters, versus people having the time to move to dedicated shelters, versus people only being able to shelter nearby). The focus on a “local area approach,” the study authors explained, was “fruitful” in that it allowed for “insights into the effectiveness of shelter programs that would have been lost in the aggregations necessary for any evaluation at the national level.”1

One of the specific studies done as part of this work was on the economic impacts of a nuclear weapon detonating over Houston. The report on this was written up by William C. Truppner, an economist and career bureaucrat with decades of experience in different US government agencies, with an inauspicious title: “Nuclear Blast Effects on a Metropolitan Economy.”2 It specifically was meant to assess “weapon effects on economic resources and considers the post-attack relationships between surviving population and resources.”

How does one study such a thing rigorously? Truppner’s study focused in on three aspects of what is an insuperably large problem: “economic output, property values, and population characteristics including the experienced labor force.”

“Property values” seems like a pretty odd thing to worry about, post-apocalypse. This is the part that seems absurd on the face of it. And perhaps it is a bit absurd. But Truppner is clear that this is an artifact of available data: property values are the kind of mass statistical data that are relatively easy to obtain, and can be thus used as a rough proxy for calculating economic impact. The problems with the data are pretty clear: are assessed values and real values the same (no), what does one do about the fact that certain types of property are exempted from taxation and thus are not in the same datasets (extrapolate between them), and, more fundamentally, the fact that the idea of a “pre-war” property value having any meaningful correlation to a “post-war” property value, as if the “pre-war” and “post-war” market forces would be roughly equivalent. Still, Truppner seems to be arguing, you have to start somewhere.

In looking at property values, what the IDA researchers did was essentially superimpose a series of blast rings over the city of Houston and assume that within certain distances of ground zero, for the variation detonations explored, a certain percentage of property was destroyed. Understandably, the larger the bomb, the higher the percentage, although the relationship between destructive potential and weapons yield for nuclear weapons is not linear. At the lowest end (100 kilotons), some 90% of the property in Houston survives; at the highest end (100 megatons), less than 20% does.

Some interesting results come out of this. One is that the total population also declines proportionally with property value in an unsheltered scenario — because people are in those properties that are getting destroyed, obviously. For a 10 megaton scenario, only 10% of the population of Houston would survive such an attack. But if one assumes that people are able to take shelter, this changes: in the 10 megaton case, now 30% of the population would survive.

That is still already somewhat sobering: even in a likely idealistic sheltering situation, you are still going to lose 70% of your city’s population. Is the difference between 70% dead and 90% dead “worth it”? The Civil Defense planner will generally say yes, because from a numerical perspective, at least, there is a significant difference between the total survivors in that situation, and that puts one on a very different “post-war” footing.

But a somewhat surprising results comes out of this. For one, the amount of property destroyed does not change with sheltering plans, only the population. So that means that if the “value” of the city is considered as its property (and not its people!), then the total value per person after nuclear war goes down when more people survive:

These data suggest that if the entire population is given any kind of shelters, even fallout shelters, and the attack is upon the at-home population for upon the shelter posture was designed, they will emerge “poorer” on the average. If the population were at work and therefore unable to reach the shelters allocated for the resident population, there are postures which would have the effect of maintaining or increasing post-attack per capita wealth. But the stronger the shelters available, the poorer the survivors will be.

I hesitate only a little to point to this as evidence that economists are very strange, and perceive the world very strangely. The logic certainly makes sense. But it seems like entirely the wrong way to think about survival: we’d all be richer if fewer of us survive. The fallacy of this is somewhat evident: a lone survivor is hardly “wealthy” in a meaningful sense, even if he may make claim to all the world’s resources, because actual value comes out of societies, systems, pooled resources, etc., to say nothing of the fact that there are many ways to value things other than economically.

This effect of “richer” and “poorer” survivors is also, understandably, correlated with the amount of damage that is done:

Post-attack physical property values, subjected to the sixteen hypothetical attacks (eight weapons, two targets each), varied from 94 percent of the pre-attack value for a 0.1-Mt weapon to 10 percent for a 100-Mt weapon. The same attacks on the unsheltered population of Houston result in 86 percent and 2 percent rate of survival, respectively. The survivors of larger attacks, in a limited sense, become richer. The higher the yield of a weapon, the greater the per capita “wealth” of the survivors....

I hesitate to call this perverse, both because that is not a very “historical” judgment, nor do I think the logic is wrong. But one does wonder how Truppner felt, writing that last sentence down.

Obviously Truppner was not calling for less people surviving, or for the economic benefits of being attacked by multi-megaton weapons. To the contrary, he sees in this data a new mandate: Civil Defense must do a better job to protect property:

It seems, then, that unsheltered people are more destructible than unsheltered property, but sheltered people are less destructible than unsheltered property. If one purpose of a shelter program is to maintain per capita property values within bounds, protection must be given to property as well as to people…

I need to start creating a list of deeply strange Cold War sentences, because that first one is really one for the hall-of-fame.

Truppner’s report goes deeper than this high-level generalization, looking at the specific industries affected within Houston, both in terms of infrastructure (e.g., what kinds of buildings and factories are destroyed) and workers (focusing on particular professions). For both of these, he that because industries and their workers are not uniformly distributed inside of Houston, there were places where surprisingly disproportionate results occurred, with some industries (and professions) having roughly the same proportion of survivors in “post-war” Houston as “pre-war” Houston, but others being either over- or under-represented. He describes this as a “distortion” of the economic situation, and underlined the consequence of it to highlight them:

Assuming that such a situation would be characteristic of every target city in a nuclear attack, it would appear that important tears in the national industrial fabric are obscured by analyses relying on nationwide aggregation. This finding has obvious implication for judgments based on estimates of post-attack economic output developed from statistics reflecting national totals.

When applied to the workforce, Truppner found that there were serious “distortions” in professions between the “pre-war” and “post-war” in unsheltered scenarios, and that they disappeared if you assumed sheltering was taking place. This part of the study gets into more of that impressive minutiae which also gives it that air of absurdity. Pre-war Houston had 1,603 barbers, which made up 3.57% of the labor force. Post-war (10 megaton detonation) Houston without shelters would only have 105 barbers, now only 3.04% of the labor force — a distortion of 0.53%! But with shelters, you’d have 398 barbers, and they would retain their share of 3.51% of the labor force. Phew.

It’s not just barbers — it’s taxi cab drivers, midwives, weavers, welders, asbestos and insulation workers, plumbers, opticians, electricians, stone masons, carpenters, glaziers, real estate brokers, underwriters, stenographers, cashiers, conductors, lawyers, judges, teachers, nurses, physicians, psychologists… you name it, they tried to catalog how many of them were in Houston before the war, and how many would be expected to survive with and without shelters.

I think this is actually quite wonderful. Would it not be amazing if NUKEMAP could do something like this? Does it not render the cost of nuclear war so much more tangible?

That is not how Tuppner sees it, of course. He instead frets that some industries would be over- and under-represented, and how this has “stark implications for the post-attack world,” notably that, for example, the surviving employees in the “food and kindred products, wholesale trade, and retail trade” sectors would outstrip those sectors’ capabilities post-war, and those workers would not have transferable skills. This is where the economist’s world view seems to go off the rails: that people who worked in “retail trade” might need to learn a new profession after a nuclear war is, well, probably not what most people would count as a pressing problem.

Truppner’s study is fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. There’s definitely value in this kind of “local area” approach to nuclear war: it makes the unimaginable seem tangible, graspable, and individual. Who can resist looking for one’s own profession on such lists? (Pre-war Houston would have had 154 Professors of Social Studies. After a 10 megaton blast, without sheltering only 10 would remain. With sheltering, 33.)

But at the same time, the framing of nuclear war in purely economic terms, and the perhaps perverse conclusions that arise from that, feels like it undercuts the ultimate message about survivability. Contemplating the number of surviving barbers in Houston under different nuclear war scenarios feels so disproportionately strange that it mocks the entire enterprise in a way that no parody possibly could.

Dick, or PKD as he is known to his fans, was a prolific author of strange science fiction. Many of his novels and stories were made into major Hollywood properties — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) became Blade Runner (1982), “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” became Total Recall (1990), and Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), and The Man in the High Castle (2015) are all based on Dick’s writings. All of these adaptations involved some fairly significant deviations from the source material, because the source material was never all that Hollywood-ready: narrative flow and accessibility were clearly not Dick’s priorities. Dick’s real strengths were creative concepts and, above all, strange vibes — dark, unsettling, paranoid themes, perhaps a reflection of Dick’s own well-documented struggles with mental illness and drug use (particularly amphetamines and, later, LSD).

Whatever the cause, Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney is a strange, fascinating take on nuclear apocalypse, unlike any others that I have ever read. He wrote the book quickly, along with four other books, in an amphetamine haze in 1963. The working titles were Earth's Diurnal Course and A Terran Odyssey — neither particularly good or descriptive — but his editor suggested they change it to the title it ultimately had in a bid to capitalize on the interest in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

The story is centered in the San Francisco Bay Area (where Dick grew up and lived), in two different time periods, which the narrative sometimes jumps between. The first is 1972, before the apocalypse; the second is in 1988, after it.

The 1981 of the book (which was, again, written in 1963) is one in which scientific progress has continued at a decent pace, but has come with consequences. The main one of which occurred a several years before (in 1972), and involved a nuclear test explosion that went wrong. The details are kept somewhat hazy, but the gist of it is made clear: after the test of “high-altitude bombs,” the “enormous masses of radioactive clouds had not drifted off but had been attracted by the Earth's gravitational field, and had returned to the atmosphere,” causing “terrible fallout.” The consequences of this are never quite explained but it is invoked as something that caused enough suffering that several characters refer to themselves as all having been part of “the Spirit of ‘72.”

The book contains several characters, many of which are quite interestingly developed, but there are two in particular that stand out as exceptional. These are Hoppy Harrington, and Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld.

Hoppy is a phocomelus; the context is (again) not explained in detail, but it is strongly implied that he was a thalidomide baby. He appears to be a teenager, with a prominent head and torso but “flipper-like” hands and feet. He has a rather sophisticated wheelchair that allows him to both move around and manipulate objects rather deftly, and in the beginning of the book we are shown that he is capable of being an excellent television and radio repairman despite his handicap.

Hoppy is also psychic, capable of telekinesis, clairvoyance, and other apparent powers. He attempts to keep these largely hidden in the pre-apocalyptic period, as he fears how he will be treated, but upon drinking alcohol he enters into a clairvoyant stupor. He and those who listen to him apparently understand the bleak world that Hoppy describes in this stupor as the afterlife, but he is really describing the post-apocalypse. Hoppy’s powers, which manifest even more prominently in the post-apocalypse, are a major part of the evolving story.

Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld (the titular “Dr. Bloodmoney”) is a nuclear physicist from Budapest who is employed by the University of California and the weapons laboratory at Livermore. He is almost universally loathed, and held responsible for the nuclear accident of 1972. Early in the narrative (pre-apocalypse), he goes to see Dr. Stockstill, a psychiatrist, under the pseudonym of “Jack Tree.” Their initial interaction is fascinating and worth reading in its entirety:

To his new patient, Doctor Stockstill said, “Cup of coffee? Or tea or Coke?” He read the little card which Miss Purcell had placed on his desk. “Mr. Tree,” he said aloud. “Any relation to the famous English literary family? Iris Tree, Max Beerbohm...”

In a heavily-accented voice Mr. Tree said, “That is not actually my name, you know.” He sounded irritable and impatient. “It occurred to me as I talked to your girl.”

Doctor Stockstill glanced questioningly at his patient.

“I am world-famous,” Mr. Tree said. “I’m surprised you don’t recognize me; you must be a recluse or worse.” He ran a hand shakily through his long black hair. “There are thousands, even millions of people in the world, who hate me and would like to destroy me. So naturally I have to take steps; I have to give you a made-up name.” He cleared his throat and smoked rapidly at his cigarette; he held the cigarette European style, the burning end within, almost touching his palm.

Oh my god, Doctor Stockstill thought. This man, I do recognize him. This is Bruno Bluthgeld, the physicist. And he is right; a lot of people both here and in the East would like to get their hands on him because of his miscalculation back in 1972. Because of the terrible fall-out from the high-altitude blast which wasn’t supposed to hurt anyone; Bluthgeld’s figures proved it in advance.

“Do you want me to know who you are?” Doctor Stockstill asked. “Or shall we accept you simply as ‘Mr. Tree’? It’s up to you; either way is satisfactory to me.”

“Let’s simply get on,” Mr. Tree grated.

“All right.” Doctor Stockstill made himself comfortable, scratched with his pen against the paper on his clipboard. “Go ahead.”

“Does an inability to board an ordinary bus — you know, with perhaps a dozen persons unfamiliar to you — signify anything?” Mr. Tree watched him intently.

“It might,” Stockstill said.

“I feel they’re staring at me.”

“For any particular reason?”

“Because,” Mr. Tree said, “of the disfiguration of my face.”

Without an overt motion, Doctor Stockstill managed to glance up and scrutinize his patient. He saw this middle-aged man, heavy-set, with black hair, the stubble of a beard dark against his unusually white skin. He saw circles of fatigue and tension beneath the man’s eyes, and the expression in the eyes, the despair. The physicist had bad skin and he needed a haircut, and his entire face was marred by the worry within him... but there was no “disfiguration.” Except for the strain visible there, it was an ordinary face; it would not have attracted notice in a group.

“Do you see the blotches?” Mr. Tree said hoarsely. He pointed at his cheeks, his jaw. “The ugly marks that set me apart from everybody?”

“No,” Stockstill said, taking a chance and speaking directly.

“There’re there,” Mr. Tree said. “They’re on the inside of the skin, of course. But people notice them anyhow and stare. I can’t ride on a bus or go into a restaurant or a theater; I can’t go to the San Francisco opera or the ballet or the symphony orchestra or even a nightclub to watch one of those folk singers; if I do succeed in getting inside I have to leave almost at once because of the staring. And the remarks.”

Bluthgeld eventually leaves in a huff, while Stockstill is convinced that the man is paranoid and probably schizophrenic. The nuclear war breaks out that same day, and Bluthgeld barely notices it, so lost he is within his own delusions and confusions. Bluthgeld is, to a degree, aware that he is ill, but his knowledge of this does not make it any easier for him to distinguish fantasy from reality.

Stockstill serves as our vehicle into the popular understanding of Bluthgeld:

It would be so easy, Stockstill realized, to find pathology here. So easy — and so tempting. A man this hated... I share their opinion, he said to himself, the they that Bluthgeld — or rather Tree — talks about. After all, I’m part of society, too, part of the civilization menaced by the grandiose, extravagant miscalculations of this man. It could have been — could someday be — my children blighted because this man had the arrogance to assume that he could not err.

But there was more to it than that. At the time, Stockstill had felt a twisted quality about the man; he had watched him being interviewed on TV, listened to him speak, read his fantastic anti-communist speeches — and come to the tentative conclusion that Bluthgeld had a profound hatred for people, deep and pervasive enough to make him want, on some unconscious level, to err, to make him want to jeopardize the lives of millions.

Bluthgeld continues in hiding after the apocalypse, but he is discovered. Post-apocalypse, he believes he has the ability to cause nuclear apocalypses with just his mind — which may in fact be true.

In 1979, Dick wrote an introduction to Dr. Bloodmoney, which did not appear in print until 1985. In it, he discussed many of the characters as he re-examined the book years later. On Bluthgeld, he said simply:

So I do have to confess to an overly simple view of Dr. Bluthgeld: I hate him and I hate everything he stands for. He is the alien and the enemy. I cannot fathom his mind; I cannot understand his hates. It is not the Russians I fear; it is the Dr. Bluthgeld's, the Dr. Bloodmoney's in our own society that terrify me. I am sure that to the extent that they know me, or would know me, they hate me back and would do exactly to me what I would do to them.

It is an interesting and strong reaction. Bluthgeld is, I think quite overtly, a riff of Edward Teller, the virulently anti-Communist, Hungarian nuclear physicist who worked at Berkeley and Livermore, who was famously the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and who was a reviled (and famous) character in American political culture at the time Dick wrote his book. While one could identify other potential influences in the character, the references to Teller seem quite direct.

The title of the book as it was published of course invites comparisons to Dr. Strangelove. The stories could not be more different. Dr. Strangelove is a parody; Dr. Bloodmoney is definitely not. Dr. Strangelove is about how nuclear war starts; Dr. Bloodmoney does not concern itself with that at all. Dr. Strangelove is primarily about generals and presidents and other “high-level” politics; Dr. Bloodmoney is mostly about, well, not exactly “regular” people, but something more of that level. Dr. Strangelove is, for all of its parody, played “straight” in terms of its plausibility; Dr. Bloodmoney relies on psychic powers for its story.

The character of Dr. Strangelove, played by Peter Sellers, may be meant “insane” in a sense, but it is a “rational insanity”: Dr. Strangelove’s madness is the madness of following certain types of reasoning to irrational ends. He is not “mentally ill” in a clinical, pathological sense. (The one character from Dr. Strangelove, the film, who was arguably mentally ill in that sense was General Jack Ripper, who believed that the Communists were attempting to infiltrate his “precious bodily fluids.”)

Dr. Bluthgeld isn’t “crazy,” he’s mentally ill. He suffers from clinical delusions both grand and small. (That he happens to be correct that in Dick’s universe, he may have psychic capabilities to manifest his delusions, is immaterial to our comparative point, here.) Ultimately, Dick’s identification of Bluthgeld’s mindset with a profound misanthropy means that his character is doing something very different than Kubrick was doing with Dr. Strangelove, and it makes Dick’s argument quite a different one than Kubrick’s.

Dr. Strangelove ends with the nukes going off, and the elites rambling about fanciful post-apocalyptic fantasies. The nukes going off happens almost immediately in Dr. Bloodmoney, which is why it is the truly post-apocalyptic of the two. Dick addressed the “survival” aspect of the book in his later introduction:

In my opinion, this is an extremely hopeful novel. It does not posit the end of human civilization as a result of the next war. People are still around and they are still coping. Those who survive, anyhow, are fairly lucky in their new lives. What is interesting is the subtle change in the relative power status of the survivors. Take Hoppy Harrington, who has no arms or legs. Before the bomb hits, Hoppy is marginal in terms of power. He is fortunate if he can get any kind of job at all. But in the postwar world this is not the case. Hoppy is elevated by stealthy increments until, at last, he is a menace to a man not even on the planet’s surface [an astronaut circling the Earth]; Hoppy has become a demigod, and a complex one at that. He is not really evil but that his power is evil.

Which is what makes it all the more unfortunately that the title means that this book will forever have to be compared in some way to Dr. Strangelove, because it is really quite a different kind of story.

I have tried to call to mind what other books or stories it reminded me of. The closest I could come is Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), which is similarly post-apocalyptic, and deals with dark forces and supernatural powers. The Stand is quite different in many respects, to be sure, but in using the post-apocalypse not only as a vehicle for making commentary on the nature of contemporary society (which all post-apocalyptic stories do), but as a way to imbue what starts as a fairly “grounded” novel about a pandemic with supernatural themes, it has more in common with Dr. Bloodmoney than the latter does with, say, Fail-Safe or Red Alert or even The Day After.

Dr. Bloodmoney is not one of Dick’s best-known novels, and it is not a classic of either the post-apocalyptic genre or the nuclear war genres, by any means. But what is interesting to me about Dr. Bloodmoney is that even though it makes no real pretensions about modeling the world as it really is or could be — what with a psychic phocomelus, a psychic conjoined twin (I’m not going to get into that), and other fantastical elements — and is not narrowly focused on any particular “issue,” it still manages to be a commentary on the nuclear age. Not on its specifics, but a comment on what Dick seems to have felt was its darker id, a deep paranoia and misanthropy that lurked beneath its rational surface.

SAC had first established the “military requirement” for the weapon in December 1954, and then reasserted that “requirement” twice over the course of 1956. AEC commissioner Thomas Murray wrote a letter to President Eisenhower in July 1956 inquiring whether “the stockpiling of a weapon of this size is in the national interest,” questioning whether it was “necessary or useful for military purposes” and whether its use would “be consistent with the dictates of the moral law with regard to the moderate and discriminating use of force in warfare.”1 Eisenhower bumped the question to the National Security Council, who did not complete their study until August 1957.

In January 1957, Murray gave further testimony to the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy which criticized the plans for the stockpile, and the 60 megaton bomb proposal. Subsequently, in February 1957, the Deputy Chiefs of Staff met to discuss the 60 megaton bomb question — the Army opposed it, the Air Force and Navy supported it, but again, there is more to this story that I am glossing over. Morse wrote his own analysis of Murray’s position in a letter to Strauss a few days later.

Morse’s own position on the 60 megaton bomb question appears to have been complicated. He did not believe that Murray, “nor any other civilian,” was in a position to “properly or successfully challenge the mathematics or the military factors” which were necessary for making sense of whether a “military requirement” was valid or not.

But he did believe that he had the qualifications necessary to discuss such matters, as he had served for three and a half years as the head of Atomic Planning within General Lauris Norstad’s Air Operations Directorate in European Command. And so Morse’s memo was primarily about why he believes that the methods for the military requirements of nuclear weapons was “still in the ‘stone age’ of development,” and that he felt the AEC commissioners should be aware of this fact.2 His critique starts as an organizational one:

Two major handicaps restrict military atomic planning. First and most important is the inferiority complex still common to most senior officers. They tend to consider atomic weapons to beyond their understanding without extensive study for which they have neither interest nor time.

Atomic planning is therefore delegated to junior officers who have completed various “effects” courses. They frequently lack the maturity and judgment normally provided by guidance from their seniors. When these junior planners confront their seniors with effects terminology and apparent complex calculations, the senior officers are unable to exert normal guidance. Instead, they are prone to endorse the computations without close questioning and without understanding procedures or implications, and often in spite of personal misgivings. I have seen this reaction time and again in the European Theater.

So what we have here, in Morse’s description, is nuclear planning being done by fairly inexperienced officers who are then deferred to by senior officers because of a lack of confidence on the latter’s part in contesting technical analysis.

The second issue is one of national policy in general:

Another major handicap lies in our National Policy which establishes no specific war objectives from which the military can deduce any limitation on the destruction to be inflicted on the enemy. Consequently, no limitations are planned.

This is quite damning and a fascinating observation: if the war objectives do not provide any requirements for limitation of damage, then the planning will not contemplate such limitations.

Morse then continued, analyzing the difference between how the Army and the Air Force saw these issues. The Army, he argued, were focused on how to defeat “men” — tactical issues in battle. As men are “mobile and unpredictable,” they had a much harder time justifying any military requirements for the stockpile. (The Army might have opposed the 60 Mt bomb, but at that same time they were pushing for over 150,000 tactical nuclear weapons to be built for their own use.)

The Air planner, however, thought in terms of “facilities,” and had a very simple “arithmetic” for calculating their requirements, which Morse explained:

The “arithmetic” of the Air planner is important. He first studies each target in the dim light of four important guesses: his bombing error, his desired probability of success in achieving a selected degree of damage to selected elements of the target. (Single rather than multi-weapon attack on each target is the rule in order to conserve delivery forces.) As an example, the planner may estimate a 3000 foot CEP (explained below), and require a 50% probability of achieving 50% damage to concrete structures. After these selections of guesses the answer comes by “arithmetic”. The answer is highly sensitive to all initial selections.

All of the emphasis in the above is in the original, and meant to indicate what “variables” could be tweaked, with the exception of the last sentence, which is just emphasized.

Morse explains CEP (which in the original he first calls “DEP” in an apparent typo), a common measure of projectile or bombing accuracy:

CEP means “Circular Error Probable,” and is the radius of the circle within which 50% of the bombs dropped on a specific target may statistically be expected to fall. It is a measure of bombing accuracy and is established by average peacetime bombing performance. The degradation factors for war conditions are largely guesswork. SAC says 3000 feet in peace, 10,000 feet in war. 5 miles is the specified CEP for the ICBM. Arithmetic with this CEP and a 50% probability produces a requirement for 20 [megatons] to crater runways. Raising the probability to 90%, same CEP, calls for 110 MT. By such arithmetic the Air planner can establish “requirements” for 60 MT, 120 MT (as SAC now talks in briefings) or any other number without limit. For example, such arithmetic applied to the ICBM can justify 300 MT or higher. As one pushes probability toward certainty, required yield approaches infinity.

What a lovely explanation of the relationship between accuracy, certainty, and required yield. The last sentence is one for the ages regarding overkill: if certainty is required, then overkill is inevitable, if accuracy is fixed. This paragraph also hints at the idea that SAC did not even consider a 60 Mt bomb to be the end of its ambitions for that time.

Morse then notes that SAC’s goals of cratering runways meant that it was contemplating ground bursts. He noted (and underlined) that “fallout from such attacks has been largely ignored to date by all planners except SACEUR [Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who prohibits ground bursts.”

Morse further pointed out that at SAC’s planning process was focused on individual targets, not systems of targets. This also led to overkill:

The distinction between analysis by individual targets rather than by systems of targets is most important because by its very nature it insures no allowance for the cumulative effects of weapons upon targets or operations other than those which each individual weapon was intended to destroy. The destructive and disruptive nature of nuclear weapons, particular megaton weapons, is such that cumulative or ancilliary effects may often be as great or greater than primary damage. Yet in today’s nuclear weapon planning they are dismissed as “bonus” effects adding to the certainty of success. Radioactive fallout upon enemy and friend alike, as well as world-wide, are among those effects so lightly dismissed as “bonus”.

In other words, by focusing on individual targets, particularly hard ones, SAC was focusing on a tiny range of potential damage: the highest blast pressures obtainable, used for cratering airfields and the like. It thus ignored the fact that these multi-megaton weapons were also doing vast “lighter” damage to the same area, including to other targets in that “complex,” as well as creating fallout, fire, and other longer-range damages. The latter were all “bonus” compared to that desire for cratering the airfields. (And how many targets are we talking about? A list of potential targets used by the USAF for nuclear planning from 1956 was released a few years back, and included some 1,100 individual locations.)

Morse noted that this concludes here was not just his own view of things:

A current DOD [Department of Defense] study questioned this procedure, pointed out that “bonus” effects result in tremendous over-kill, and concluded that analysis by systems rather than by individual targets, using the same procedures and calculations, would show that kilotons rather than megatons are more than sufficient to achieve desired destruction. This study was rigorously suppressed and all copies destroyed. It lent support, however, to the growing doubt regarding the validity of current military requirements for nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

What suppressed study is he referring to? The late Bill Burr suggested it might have been a forerunner to Project Budapest, an Army-Navy study that critiqued Air Force nuclear planning that was completed in August 1957.

Morse continued by noting there were other areas of “guesswork” used to inflate requirements, like questions about how many bombers would actually reach their targets. The result of all of this, he concluded, was that:

…the planner for air attack with nuclear weapons can generate requirements for any number or yield of weapons which he desires. By his interpretation of intelligence he can select an almost infinite number of targets for destruction, and of characteristics justifying any yield he wishes. It is he who estimates losses and aborts before penetration of enemy defenses. He also estimates losses to the latter. And he makes allowances for destruction of his own weapons by initial enemy attacks. Weapon requirements are directly proportional to the choice of such factors, but the remaining factors of the problem can multiply requirements manyfold.

What limiting factors were there, ultimately, in such a situation? Only three, Morse argued: conscience, financial resources, or production capacity. Of these:

Since the first is flexible and the second has imposed no restraint as yet, only production capacity has so far limited weapon requirements. The close correlation between SAC requirements and AEC production capacity over a period of years is not coincidence.

Morse takes a slightly more positive view of the Army’s planning, noting that the Army’s perspective was much more respectful of the consequences of such weapons, given their proximity to their effects:

[The Army planner] is acutely aware of the damage that explosives can do, to him as well as to the enemy if he is not careful. He has often seen high explosive effects, although not nuclear, at first hand. The air planner has seldom seen the results of his own bombing. Consequently, the Army nuclear planner is subject to almost automatic restraints, which do not apply to the reasoning of the air planner. And the results are quite different.

As for the Navy (Morse’s own service), Morse acknowledged that he was largely going to skip them, as its approach “hovered between the two extremes” of Army and Air, but tended to side with Air just because their own nuclear planning at that time involved using similar platforms (planes launched from carriers).

Again, Morse concluded that while he felt Murray was probably right about the lack of a military need for very high yield weapons, he did not think that Murray’s “guesses” for military requirements were any less arbitrary than the military ones. The point of the memo was not to provide even his own “guesses,” but to create a context in which the AEC Commissioners could evaluate why the different branches had such different apparently “requirements,” and why the Air requirements should be viewed with a grain of salt. If these military methods were “not tempered by good judgment and restraint,” then they would result in “questionable estimates,” to put it lightly.

The estimating of military requirements for atomic weapons is still in the “stone age” of development. Certainly you among the Commissioners should be fully aware of this fact in weighing Commission response to requirements expressed by the military.

Morse’s memo is vivid, clear, and sharp in its critique. It contains many of the same critiques that later analysis, such as Daniel Ellsberg and Lynn Eden, have since levied at nuclear war planning in the Cold War: arbitrary systems, swathed by secrecy and apparent technical precision, with little room for consideration of larger effects, conscience, or the big picture.

But Morse was no dove by any definition— and neither was Murray, nor Strauss, nor Eisenhower, nor anyone under discussion here. Morse would become a major force pushing for increased use of tactical nuclear weapons, limited nuclear war, and the “neutron bomb.” All of these were hawkish in their own way, but still recoiled from the horrors of the “infinite” targets and “infinity” yields that he saw as indicative of the “stone age” approach to planning by the Air Force.