Alex Wellerstein

I think most of them shunted those kinds of questions to the side while they were enlisting in this project.

My guest today is nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, a researcher at Sciences Po in Paris, and a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.

I began our conversation talking about one of the most significant letters of the 20th century.

It was written by the Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard, signed by Albert Einstein, and delivered to President Roosevelt.

Thanks so much.

I hope that these don't get used again.

again.Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, researcher at Sciences Po in Paris and a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.

After the break, my friend and colleague Matthew Bunn, faculty chair of Managing the Atom Project at Harvard, joins me for a chat about what Alex Wellerstein had to say.

He's got a website called...

Wellerstein?

Is that it? Yeah, he has a

website that allows you to simulate nuclear

But just above the dimensions, it specifies stabilized mushroom cloud, which only occurs when the cloud has reached its final stage of growth and is significantly taller and wider than the initial explosion.

Alex Wellerstein, nuclear weapons historian and creator of Nuke Map, explained on Reddit that the mushroom cloud only stabilizes 10 to 15 minutes after the explosion.

What we normally see in nuclear detonation test footage is just the fireball and never the late stage cloud, which is what the dimensions of Nuke Map represent.

So Forest is comparing the red hot balls of plasma we see rising in the opening scene of the Fallout show to the much later stabilized clouds on-

The problem was everything you needed around it.

Alex Wellerstein, who runs the Restricted Data blog, points out that it's an amusingly euphemistic name.

Physics package sounds like something that arrives in a padded box.

It's a bomb with a gift wrap name.

Listen to this.

Created by Alex Wellerstein, 2012-2026, 402 million detonations and counting.

Just kidding you, but 400 million.

We're talking half a billion detonations of people testing it.

Today, leaders can be offered smaller weapons, limited strikes, and the promise that escalation can be managed.

For Professor Wellerstein, the danger is that they might believe it.

At the top of my list right now is the United States and Russian leaders deciding they could get away with a small nuclear weapon under some circumstance.

And so for me, that makes having small nuclear weapons a dangerous feeling proposition.

Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein is an associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology and the author of the book The Most Awful Responsibility, Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age.

He joins me to talk about what Truman really knew before Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what that history tells us about who controls nuclear weapons today.

Professor Wellerstein, welcome to Frontlines and Backrooms.

It is a pleasure to have you with us today.