But... but! It has been possible in the past (and is likely still allowable now) for a POTUS to pre-authorize the use of nuclear weapons under future circumstances. This is known as "pre-delegation" and it started under Eisenhower.

A rather innovative (if unintuitive) attempt to visually explain the concept of implosion... some assembly required... From an article about the possibility of smuggling atomic bombs in suitcases, Mechanix Illustrated, July 1954.

Study from 1978 on the role of truck stops in evacuating urban areas before a nuclear war... (a) what a subject to write +100 pages on and (b) what a graphic for the report...

(The cover from LIFE magazine — "FIRST PICTURES — ATOM BLASTS THROUGH EYES OF VICTIMS" paired up with "TV'S BIGGEST, PRETTIEST NEW SHOW." Dancers are from the latter...)

How a report from 1967 summarized the "weight" of two simulations of nuclear attacks against the United States. One is called CIVLOG 64 (which was generated by the DOD for exercise HIGH HEELS III), the other UNCLEX 66 (Unclassified Exercise). Also included are fallout maps for each...

I passed my A2.1 French class offered by the city of Paris they e-mailed me my "CERTIFICATE OF COMPETENCE" from the city. So it's official: I am competent...! At very basic French, anyway... (and now I can take A2.2 in the fall...)

There's a self-storage place in Jersey City that is next to a cemetery, and I will never find their big signs pointing to the graves not funny. Self-storage, indeed! This memory brought to you by my thinking about how useless most storage units would be in an apocalypse situation. Mostly junk...!

Finally, I asked it to show me what was inside the "peanut." Don't tell the NNSA — the true secret of one of the most sophisticated US thermonuclear warheads is revealed by to be... springs! 😂 Again, while it is certainly impressive it can do this at all... graded for accuracy, it gets an F. (3/3)

I suggested that the innards probably were more "peanut" shaped, and it revised it like the below. Which is interesting — I never told it that it was a warhead, but it seems to have associated the word "peanut" in this context with the famous North Korean "peanut" thermonuclear design. (2/3)

I asked ChatGPT to take this image of a Mk4 nuclear reentry vehicle with a blanked out W76 warhead and fill in the missing part. It responded with this — another entry in "plausible but not correct at all." (1/3)

because a) they are cooler, b) I'm basically a corpse already, or c) all of the above?

This conversation would have taken place only a few days after the Hyde Park Aide-Mémoire was signed by FDR and Churchill, which also expressed some doubts about whether the "bomb" would actually be used against Japan or not. No US official was aware of this document until after FDR's death.

In September 1944, FDR asked Vannevar Bush whether they actually were planning to use the bomb against Japan, or whether they should just threaten to use it. Bush quickly tabled the question, promising a "very careful discussion" in the future. But neither FDR nor Truman had any such discussion.

another diagram for the ages

*taps the graph of doom*

saw this very stupid meme on LinkedIn presented quite unironically I find it hilarious to imagine that there are people who believe that academia was idyllic and perfect in 2016

That's interesting. Both of the covers also appear to have used specific nuke photos as their reference materials. Pulling Through is very similar to some shots of Plumbbob Smokey, while that one is clearly a riff on the French test "Licorne."

Some of these topics were also explored in classified studies. E.g. Bowen & Little's "History of the USAF Atomic Energy Program" (1959), or May's "History of the Strategic Arms Competition" (1981). Relationship between these and unclassified would be interesting to probe, as well as purpose.

(I realized it while on some calls today and I noticed that my headphones did not sound balanced unless I set them to about this setting. I then remembered I'd been occasionally hearing a sort of white noise in my left ear since Wednesday night, after I had a tough time clearing it while ascending.)

I was reading about barotrauma (I think I have a ruptured eardrum — again) and ended up seeing a reference to the Valsalva maneuver, which is the fancy term for plugging your nose and mouth and breathing out. But the explanation I found on the Cleveland Clinic's page... raised some questions for me.

"Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (1941) by the Polish-Jewish painter Marcin Kitz, who was living in Lvov at the time. In mid-1941, Lvov was taken over by the Germans. Within 2 years, Kitz was dead.

While I do not think that supporting Amazon is actually a positive thing (boo Bezos), I WILL just note that if you wanted a copy of my (award-winning!) book about Truman and the Bomb, THE MOST AWFUL RESPONSIBILITY, the Kindle version is currently on sale for a mere $1.99 / €1.72. amzn.to/3L1lMDH

graffiti from a preserved part of the Berlin Wall that works as well today as it probably did in the mid-1980s when it was written

self-aware graffiti spotted in Potsdam, Germany, last week

RIP David Hockney. What a weird headline from CNN. Was he the world's greatest living artist, and then he was surpassed by someone else (who!??!)... or is he no longer the world's greatest living artist because he died...?

pondering my orb

See also this photo-map from the post-attack assessment. You can see that about half of Nagasaki (in the lower part of the image) was not strongly affected. The main city center is in that part. The Urakami valley, where the bomb went off, was less built-up.

Topography of the cities. Nagasaki was a very "unideal" target from the perspective of city destruction. It did not lead to a firestorm, the total area of destruction was lower, and the main city center was not hit. Below are the cities and areas of destruction at the same scale.

This is so dark — the little "plus an atom bomb" footnote added to the number for total tonnage of bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in this table about the strategic bombing of Japanese cities. 97% of homes in Hiroshima estimated destroyed — higher than anything else on the list by far.

I just end up feeling boiled after awhile. Sweaty. Gross. Sleeping with multiple fans on you is better than nothing, but not great. Today the temp has dropped dramatically, and it is such an improvement. Lyndon agrees btw (photo from our walk this morning).