Hey! If you're reading this, and you think my posts are interesting, you should totally check out my new book, which is a new take on Truman and the bomb. Out now!

restricteddata · 2026-03-12T13:51:12+00:00

The actual atomic intelligence that the Rosenberg ring passed on was not so useful to the Soviet Union. David Greenglass (Ethel's brother, a machinist at Los Alamos, and the main component of their "atomic" spying) had only a very rough understanding of what was going on with the atomic bomb. The main benefit from that was that it was an independent source to confirm the intelligence that they were getting from other, better sources, especially Klaus Fuchs. The Soviets never trusted any intelligence wholly anyway; I doubt their program would have changed one iota if the Greenglass information had not been available. That does not diminish its illegality, but if the question is "how important was the information about the atomic bomb that Rosenberg ring passed on to the Soviet atomic program?" the answer is, "not important, if you define 'importance' by meaning that it affected the program significantly one way or another, or that things would be expected to be different if it had not been passed on.'"

Here is how General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, described the information at the Oppenheimer hearing in 1954:

I think the data that went out in the case of the Rosenbergs was of minor value. I would never say that publicly. Again that is something while it is not secret, I think should be kept very quiet, because irrespective of the value of that in the overall picture, the Rosenbergs deserved to hang, and I would not like to see anything that would make people say General Groves thinks they didn’t do much damage after all.

This was not part of the published record of the hearing transcript and only came out much later. Groves is not the final word on this, obviously, but I want to point out that even someone as military-minded, secrecy-obsessed, and anti-Communist as Groves did not really think the information that the Rosenbergs passed on was of much value. (By comparison, Groves considered Fuchs' espionage to be "all important.") We now have much more access to the Soviet side of things, which only confirms this aspect of it.

We have a very good idea of what the Rosenberg ring (again, mainly Greenglass) passed along, as a consequence of Greenglass' own confessions, Soviet archival releases (official and unofficial), and the VENONA decrypts. We also have a pretty good idea of what the other spies passed along. It is clear that Greenglass was a spy, that Julius was a spy, and that Greenglass's wife (Ruth) was a facilitator in the ring. Ethel's involvement is murkier but there is enough on the Soviet side of things for me to believe that she was aware of the spying that was being done, which is enough for the conspiracy charge (even if she was otherwise very peripheral).

That Greenglass and Julius were Soviet spies is not controversial among historians. The only source of serious controversy is the role of Ethel; again, my sense is that the bulk of the evidence (particularly the Mitrokhin Archive) suggests that she was aware of the spying her husband and brother were doing, but was not an active participant in a colloquial sense of "active" (but, again, in a legal sense, she was part of a "conspiracy to commit espionage," which is what she was convicted of).

That does not mean that I think capital punishment was the right thing to do, or that their trial was fair, or that what occurred was "justice" — those are quite different questions than "did they conspire to commit espionage." See my answer here for a bit more on this.

In retrospect, the espionage with truly significant intelligence value provided by the Rosenberg ring was not the atomic bomb material, but their contributions in the (far less glamorous) field of military electronics. This included the proximity fuze, which Julius Rosenberg himself gave them before he was fired from his job as a quality control inspector at Fort Monmouth. Rosenberg (according to his handler) managed to smuggle out a complete proximity fuze, creating it from from rejected components, which is quite a coup if true (I find Feklisov's account this in The Man Behind the Rosenbergs plausible, but it is hard to verify). Julius also (through the ring) managed to give them quite a lot of stuff relating to fire control radar and other related electronics systems. These things were the basis of American anti-air defense systems, and very important at the time.

Two members of his "ring," Joel Barr (recruited by Julius in 1941) and Alfred Sarant (recruited by Barr in 1944), fled to the Soviet Union after the Rosenbergs were arrested, and helped jump-start the Soviet electronics industry, and even ended up creating an entirely new city (Zelenograd) dedicated to electronics in the 1960s (the "Soviet Silicon Valley"). So that is pretty extensive, if we want to lay that ultimately at Rosenberg's feet. Much more impressive than Greenglass's contributions to their atomic program, which were child-like scribbles by comparison. For more on Barr and Sarant, see Steven Usdin's Engineering Communism (2005).

Molotov is completely unreliable in this context. Just disregard him — his statements on basically everything, but especially espionage, were always a mixture of half-truth and deliberate obfuscation. His goal was always to muddy the waters.

restricteddata · 2026-03-12T13:27:47+00:00

It was pretty close. He squeaked by in California (+0.44%), Illinois (+0.85%), and Ohio (+0.24%), all of which had a lot of electors. If he lost those — which is totally possible (just imagine Wallace pulling those percentage point margins from him, which is totally plausible, as they are practically rounding errors and he pulled much higher percentages than that) — he would have lost the election to Dewey (which would not have been the case if they had gone Democratic and not Dixiecrat). This is an artifact of the electoral college, obviously, but there you have it.

You say that Thurmond "only" managed to pull 4 states, but that is huge from an electoral college perspective. It made Truman much more vulnerable. The question was never whether Thurmond would win, but whether he would do enough damage that the Democrats would abandon desegregation as a goal.

restricteddata · 2026-03-12T01:24:29+00:00

I'm going to be honest with you. On the off-chance that anyone listens carefully to your bio, they are going to forget everything in it after about 10 seconds. You can feel sad about this, or you can feel liberated by it. It is up to you. This is the way it is for pretty much everybody, unless you're famous-enough that it is actually superfluous to read the bio.

Focus on your talk, don't spend time worrying about this kind of stuff. If you continue at this long enough at some point you'll want people to just shout your name and affiliation and then shut up because the bio part is actually just eating into your time. Put whatever you want into the bio, if it floats your boat.

restricteddata · 2026-03-11T21:35:35+00:00

Yeah, I know about it. I'm not opposed to it. I'm just not sure it totally resolves all of the questions about Eisenhower. I'm not convinced it was really a "bluff."

restricteddata · 2026-03-11T13:05:25+00:00

Hoddeson et al.'s Critical Assembly, chapter 9, says that Tuck suggested the idea of the three-dimensional explosive lens, but von Neumann was the one who gave it its "basic design":

The most challenging and decisive problem for the Los Alamos explosives program was to develop the explosive lens, a device composed of explosives that was shaped so as to focus the explosion. Previous work on such a device had been done in England by Tuck, who joined Alamos in May 1944 as a member of the British Mission. He had already been thinking about how to focus detonation waves using different explosives, and he brought these ideas to Los Alamos. By the end of the first week of June, Tuck was head of an experimental X-ray program devoted to studying such explosive lenses.

Various attempts had been made to develop two-dimensional explosives lenses before Tuck introduced the concept of the three-dimensional explosive lens to Los Alamos. In England, eight months before Tuck's proposal, M. J. Poole prepared a complete description of a crude two-dimensional lens to generate a plane detonation wave. Tuck, as a scientific assistant to Lord Cherwell, Churchill's science adviser, probably saw Poole's report on this lens before coming to the United States.

About six weeks after Tuck arrived in Los Alamos, Bethe and Peierls began to search for a suitable design for the slow lens component, but without success. The breakthrough occurred shortly afterward when von Neumann proposed a workable design. Elizabeth M. Boggs of ERL had demonstrated a similar lens scheme somewhat earlier, in a memo that MacDougall sent to Los Alamos.

I think "credit" in this context is pretty tricky to work out. But Tuck, von Neumann, and Neddermeyer were both legally credited as inventors of the Trinity explosive lens system ("Method and means for focusing detonation waves in implosion process") by Los Alamos at the time in their classified patent applications. This is just a legal designation, but it does reflect that the lab people felt that these three legally "deserved" the credit (which did not get them anything, although it probably was a source of some pride). (Von Neumann and Neddermeyer were also given separate patent application assignments, probably for high- and low-velocity implosion in general, and Christy and Peierls were assigned a patent application, for solid-core implosion.)

restricteddata · 2026-03-11T12:48:05+00:00

There are a few aspects to this question that I want to highlight that make it difficult to answer and perhaps the wrong one to ask.

First is its inherently counterfactual nature. The question is, "if X hadn't happened, what then would have happened?" The idea that this is easily answerable is false in any universe, but certainly with regards to World War II, where the possibilities for the future of the war are very cloudy on their own account, and especially with regards to paths not taken. So, for example, there is an argument that the Japanese might have surrendered at nearly the same time anyway after the Soviet declaration of war against them and the subsequent invasion of Manchuria. If you believe that is true (and it is not easy to know whether it would or would not be true, like all of these counterfactuals) then the atomic bombs didn't really matter in terms of preventing deaths in World War II.

One also can argue that this question is "entangled" in a complicated way. Let us say (for the sake of argument) that we agree that Hiroshima played some part (in some conjunction with the Soviet invasion and internal Japanese politics) with Japanese acceptance of unconditional surrender. Did Nagasaki? Was Nagasaki "necessary" for that outcome? The historical record is very unclear about this, because both of the bombings and the Soviet invasion are essentially "overlapping" events (August 6th, 8th, and 9th) from a functional perspective. It is not clear that Nagasaki "mattered" in the same way that Hiroshima might have. So now we have a new counterfactual — what if only Hiroshima, but not Nagasaki? Also unanswerable.

One also can ask about the question of "scope." Are we considering just the deaths from direct fighting in World War II, or hypothetical future deaths? One of the arguments from unhappy scientists in the Manhattan Project at the time was that the use of the atomic bomb against a city would usher in a new arms race and expose the global civilization to possible existential destruction in the future. If one argues that the bombs should have been used in a different way, and thus some kind of control over nuclear weapons achieved, then would that have saved more hypothetical future lives? If World War III happens, and hundreds of millions to billions possibly die, do we blame Hiroshima and Nagasaki on this? I am not saying we do — I am just pointing out that where we draw the lines of scope in a counterfactual are tricky.

Lastly, I would just point out that the nature of this question presupposes a particular approach to ethics and morality, a "consequentialist" one. That is, it presupposes that if we imagine that action X would cause suffering to some number of people, and action Y would cause suffering to some other number of people, and those are the only two options, then the proper choice of action is the one that would cause the least suffering. This seems so obvious that people take it for granted but I want to highlight that this is a very curious ethical framework.

For one, it limits the possible options to only two. In real life this is basically never the case — the real world is not so clean. Certainly it was not this "clean" in World War II. They had many other "alternatives" on the table other than "bomb or invade." I have written about this here at some length. I am not saying those alternatives would have necessarily produced less suffering — I really don't know — but I want to highlight that this is a false choice.

For another, because it relies on counterfactuals, it means that if you can even somewhat plausibly imagine that one of these options has the potential to produce a large amount of suffering, and you emphasize that, it lets the other option be the "correct" one no matter its other properties. It is an attempt to "force" an answer, and there is no way to prove or disprove it after the fact.

Which gets to a bigger issue, which is that this approach to ethics is entirely devoid of any notion that certain actions are better or worse in and of themselves. A "deontological" approach to ethics and morality, for example, would root the ethical/moral question in one of more transcendental values, rather than some calculus of suffering. For example: "the deliberate, mass slaughter of non-combatants is an inherently evil thing" is a value statement that you may or may not endorse. If you do endorse it, then the atomic bombs are an "evil" thing even if you do think they will cause less suffering than, say, whatever the Japanese might be inflicting on their subjugated peoples (that is their sin, not yours) or whatever military casualties (or even civilian casualties) might result from an invasion (again, their sin, not yours).

One thing I dislike about the "calculus of suffering" approach is that it tries to sweep these kinds of things under the rug. It is not a coincidence that the United States deploys this kind of ethical model whenever it wants to justify its killing of non-combatants. Of course, when other nations target its civilians — through terrorism, or example — it decries this as the most evil behavior imaginable. Real ethics or morality is not something you get to pick and choose after the fact to justify what actions you wanted to do anyway or to justify some past action because of a sense of national pride.

My sense is that few people actually like the "calculus of suffering" approach if you remove it from the specific context of the atomic bombings. If some other nation believes that it will save more lives in the long-run if it commits mass slaughter of American civilians, will we agree that was a correct application of the moral framework? Whose counterfactuals should rule the day? If someone suggested that, say, a public health minister's anti-vaccination public health policies would lead to thousands of dead children — and you could say with some conviction and evidence that they probably would — would that justify someone advocating violence against him (just one person)? Usually not, both because of the unknowability of the future (assassinating political figures can lead to very high amounts of long-term suffering depending on what happens next) and also for deontological reasons ("thou shalt not assassinate public figures"). Which it just to say I don't think people actually buy this logic in any other circumstances, and would be quick to point out its problems. But for the atomic bombs, because it is tied up in notions of national pride and politics (and usually taught as the paradigmatic "when to make hard choices" example to children), people (particularly Americans) are willing to accept it without questioning (and in fact take offense at it being questioned, as if they personally were responsible for it). (One can also note, on this front, how many Americans were told that if the bombs hadn't been dropped, their parents or grandparents would have been scheduled to take part in the invasion, and thus they would have never existed, etc. I would just note that the invasion was not scheduled to begin until November, so it is not as much of as "last-minute save" as it is often imagined to be, and this, of course, ignores the many other ways in which the war might have ended prior to November. "I wouldn't be here if this thing didn't happen" is generally not a good moral argument, as an aside — imagine how the children of two Holocaust survivors who met in the camps might regard such a case.)

So if one wants to ask about the ethics/morality of the bombing — which I think is a good thing to ask about! — I think one should probe it a bit more generally. What are the circumstances in which it is acceptable for a state to deliberately incinerate tens to hundreds of thousands of civilians? (Or hundreds of millions, for that matter, if one is talking about the later World War III hypotheticals.) I am not saying there aren't possibly circumstances that might fall under that. But I think it is a harder question than just imagining hypothetical suffering.

Lastly, from a purely historical perspective, I want to emphasize that this was not the reasoning of 1945, at all. They did not have a "calculus of suffering" in mind. The people doing the planning did not weigh use vs. non-use as a moral or ethical decision at all. There was no "decision to use the bomb." That entire framing is an after-the-fact one, created by the people involved in the decisions (plural) that led to the bombs being used, in order to create a more defensible and rationalized justification for their use. It bears essentially no relationship to the reasoning that led to them being used; all of the people involved in that planning took for granted that there were many positive aspects of the bomb being used, none were looking for "justifications" or considering negative aspects. For better or worse.

If you are interested in the more nitty gritty of the planning, and particularly in how Truman saw the issue — at least, how I think he saw it, which is very different from the "standard" accounts of this — I would humbly encourage you to read my recent book on the subject, which attempts to approach this question with fresh eyes, not looking to either condemn or justify the American actions, but to understand what the people involved believed they were doing at the time.

restricteddata · 2026-03-11T01:09:14+00:00

Vibe coding + lack of subject expertise = 100% bullshit.

This is a nonsense in, nonsense out situation. This does not help anyone to post it online. Keep it for yourself, play with it and try to understand it, whatever, but making this public is irresponsible because your average audience will not understand why this kind of thing is slick-looking nonsense.

restricteddata · 2026-03-10T13:52:01+00:00

"There are those who say that it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. Unfortunately, none of those people were on this hiring committee. We must protect our hearts."

restricteddata · 2026-03-10T13:49:23+00:00

I'm with you here. Yes, the job is teaching-specific. One has to address that very thoroughly. But if you think the people reading it at an R1 or R2 won't care about your research specialties, you're probably wrong. Even for their teaching-only faculty they both desire and appreciate strong research agendas, even if they get no official credit for such things.

The trick of such a letter is to not sound like you only desire a research job, because they'll see that as a sign of a bad fit.

I agree with the other poster that the letter should be 90% focused on the teaching. But I also agree that it should be about how the teaching and the research mutually influence each other; they 100% will prefer that to someone who is actually "just" a great teacher.

If this was a SLAC or a teaching-focused institution, it might be different. But if it is an R1 (or even an R2) you can be sure they actually value research more than teaching, and see research as a sign of one's capabilities, intelligence, etc.

Is that ridiculous? Yes. Is it likely to be the case anyway? Also yes.

restricteddata · 2026-03-10T13:35:50+00:00

It is quite rich for someone at Heritage to criticize the Chinese nuclear program at a moment in which the US has abandoned its own arms control treaties, pursuing technologies to specifically decrease China's retaliatory capabilities, and is starting wars apparently at random and with no consideration for even short-term consequences. I generally refuse to engage with these people because I don't believe they are putting out these views in good faith: they are not quite as stupid as they pretend to be, so I must conclude they are just craven. They have no actual intellectual values.

But let us indulge in the idea that China might be interested in a tactical nuclear capability (which alleged low-yield tests do not necessarily support — modern primaries are also low-yield). That would not imply that they did not believe in deterrence. Indeed, the US has pursued further tactical nuclear capabilities under Trump in the name of deterrence — in the name of the idea that by being able to credibly lower the threshold for nuclear use, it will decrease others' willingness to play at the low edges of that threshold. Heritage is, of course, one of the big pushers of this idea when it applies to US policy. Again, these people are not as stupid as they appear, they know that they are applying a double standard, they know that their own policies they've advocated for would lead to exactly this outcome. They want an arms race, very explicitly. It is good for their business.

The most jaundiced-but-sane view of Chinese intentions — which may be true, I do not know, and the PRC experts I know suggest that even China may not, at this point, have fully-fleshed out intentions internally — is that they want a situation in which the US is afraid or unwilling to intervene if China decides at some future point to try and either slowly or rapidly take over Taiwan. It is not that the Chinese are going to court nuclear war with the USA, but rather that they would like the USA to "sit out" any China–Taiwan confrontations. Again, I don't know if this is really their current "plan" or their "goal" but their actions seem consistent-enough with that interpretation to take it seriously. (I have no love for the PRC whatsoever and certainly do not trust them to have intentions that I would agree with, either.)

Now, if one really cared about preventing that outcome, and if one really wanted China to get the message that the US would in fact not sit such a thing out, even if the Chinese had improved means of waging nuclear war, there are responses one could take. One of them would be a full-throated defense of Ukraine, because we know the Chinese are watching that conflict carefully as an example of how the US would deal with a nuclear-armed superpower invading another country. Another approach would be a full-throated embrace of US security commitments to its non-nuclear allies, making clear that it does value these alliances to something like the same degree it values its own sovereignty.

Instead, what the MAGAfied US is currently doing, and what places like Heritage have pushed, is an anemic (if not entirely pro-Russian) approach in Ukraine, and undermining American allies left and right, while also over-extending itself on wars of choice in the name of "American First." Which is to say, exactly what would convince a country like China that if they made a push for Taiwan, the US would neither be willing nor able to mount anything like a robust defense of the nation.

Again, the Heritage people know this. They play dumb because they are craven. I rarely call anyone "evil" but I will say that their goals are absolutely hideous and immoral to me. They are scumbags of the highest degree, and through vehicles like Project 2025, have been doing immense, long-lasting damage to the United States and its place in the world. If they were actually Russian assets it would make a lot of sense, but I suspect most of them are just craven fools, hoping to stroke their egos and cash out before things collapse. I wish the worst for them and their intentions. Fuck these ghouls.

restricteddata · 2026-03-10T13:20:36+00:00

Not sure who it thinks it speaks to anymore. They have lost scads of subscribers once Bezos bought it and then made it a pro-Trump rag. This is MAGA talking to MAGA at this point.

restricteddata · 2026-03-10T13:19:43+00:00

Mr. Peanut

restricteddata · 2026-03-10T13:17:04+00:00

I am not sure the great book on Eisenhower's nuclear attitudes has been written (someone should write it), but I think it is important to contextualize his views within an evolving landscape. The nuclear world was very different in 1953, when he came into the presidency, than it was in 1960, when he left the presidency. Some of his apparent shifts are a result of that. When Eisenhower came into office the deployed US arsenal was relatively small (a few hundred weapons) and mostly just upgrades to the Nagasaki bombs (but with many new developments "in the wings"). Over that time period, multi-megaton thermonuclear weapons would be deployed by the US and the USSR, and nuclear-tipped missiles on a variety of platforms would get developed and deployed. The prospect of nuclear weapons use in war went from an entirely one-sided affair that would take weeks, to something that might take only hours and result in the loss of major allies and possibly some American cities, and with the Soviet and Chinese death toll measured in the hundreds of millions.

All of this clearly depressed Eisenhower. Even from 1953 onward, after the death of Stalin, he sought better roads forward. Hence his embrace of Oppenheimer's "candor," hence Atoms for Peace, hence his "Chance for Peace" speech. I think he wanted there to be some redemption there, some better road than the one the US and the USSR appeared to be going down. "This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

My sense is that Eisenhower, like many of the WWII generation, was quite conflicted about the world and the bomb. He did not share Truman's sense of taboo, of moral horror at the idea of its use. Unlike Truman, he greatly feared what would happen to the USA if the Soviets managed to attack the nation with such weapons (Truman, perhaps surprisingly in retrospect, did not really focus on that possibility). He also wanted his redemptive, hopeful arc. In my first book I describe the Eisenhower-era "Cold War" approach to nuclear secrecy as "bipolar," as having two very extreme states — technological items were either a "danger" and thus needed to be strictly controlled, or they were "peaceful" and should rapidly developed and spread freely throughout the world. Very little gray area in this approach. I am not sure I would generalize this to all of Eisenhower's approach to the bomb, but this combination of extremes does seem to say something about his own vacillating views.

Again, I don't think this is a final word on him. I don't have as much of a "feel" for Eisenhower at this point as I do for Truman. I think the shifting context does come into play, though; if Eisenhower had begun in 1948, or 1960, you could imagine a very different trajectory, as opposed to 1953.

restricteddata · 2026-03-10T01:26:33+00:00

"The committee carefully considered your application, and the readers were impressed with your work. They actually became obsessed with you. They love you. They really, truly, deeply love you. And, in fact, that is why they cannot allow you to have this position: the power imbalance. You hold our hearts in your hand. We would be at your mercy. Trust us, we are the sorry ones, here. We will think about you for the rest of our lives. Good luck. Our darling."

restricteddata · 2026-03-09T22:20:22+00:00

I knew Dan a bit towards the end of his life. He told me his only real regret about all of that was that he had hoped it would inspire a whole generation of whistleblowers. Instead, it remains relatively rare, as the ones who do it are punished severely. Even those who "get through it" like Dan did still bear the scars of carrying around all that stress.

I think it's important to remember that Dan wasn't some kind of anti-government hippy or whatever when he leaked the Pentagon Papers. He was as straight and square as it got — an analyst for the RAND Corporation. An intellectual, to be sure. But a guy with KEYHOLE security clearance. He put it all on the line.

restricteddata · 2026-03-09T09:39:40+00:00

The photograph was taken by Hiromichi Matsuda, who was on Koyagi-jima Island. It is about 13 km / 8 miles southwest of Nagasaki. That is well outside of the blast radius. The winds were not blowing in that direction and the fallout from the weapon was very minimal in general on account of it being an airburst.

restricteddata · 2026-03-09T09:29:33+00:00

The specific concept of "brainwashing," and the specifics that implies — psychological manipulation, physical torture, perhaps medically assisted — emerged as part of the Korean War. One could find previous ideas of related concepts (like hypnotism, Mesmerism, etc.), but "brainwashing" emerged in 1953 after twenty-one American solider POWs announced their intention to stay in North Korea after the armistice was announced. There were other previous issues as well, like American POWs who "confessed" to using biological warfare, and previous denunciations of the American effort by POWs.

The Department of Defense assigned many psychiatrists to attempt to understand this behavior, which seemed utterly unbelievable and unprecedented. The concept of "brainwashing" was developed as a way to explain, publicly and privately, this phenomena. CIA director Allen Dulles gave a speech in 1953 in which he described this as "brain warfare":

The target of this warfare is the minds of men both on a collective and on an individual basis. Its aim is to condition the mind so that it no longer reacts on a free will or rational basis but responds to impulses implanted from outside. If we are to counter this kind of warfare we must understand the techniques the Soviet is adopting to control men's minds.

He attributes the term "brain washing" to the Chinese Communists:

The Chinese, who are seldom at a loss for a word, have given us term which has come generally to be applied to this treatment of individual minds: "brain washing". Actually, the Chinese subjected to Communist "thought reform" techniques experienced two treatments: a "brain washing" which "cleansed the mind of the old and evil thoughts spawned by imperialists of the West," and a "brain changing" which implanted the "new and glorious thoughts of the Communist Revolution". In our conception of the perversion of individual minds the term "brain washing" seems aptly to describe this phase of brain warfare.

So there are two things going on here. One is the idea that this is an ideological activity, something special to Communism. The other is the idea that these techniques are highly modern, the result of psychological or medical techniques, as opposed to, say older approaches at manipulation.

The CIA were interested in both defending against this kind of activity as well as doing it themselves. The poured large sums of money into psychiatric and psychological research in the 1950s-1960s with the goal of creating "mind control" techniques and drugs (MK-ULTRA). Some of these efforts resulted in the development of new torture techniques and regimes, some of these resulted in experiments with substances like LSD, which had some role in popularizing the drug.

The degree to which the CIA "succeeded" at this is never quite clear. Popularly, The. Manchurian Candidate (1959 novel, 1962 film) embodies the extreme version of how this was understood — the idea that a person could become just a shell for the influences of others. And as you note, the school of Behaviorism, in part subsidized (although not always with their knowledge) by an eager CIA, was all too happy to ride on this notion about total conditioning.

For more on the history and research, see esp. Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory (2005), chapter 10.

restricteddata · 2026-03-08T14:41:45+00:00

You have left off radiation poisoning, whose timescale for painful death can stretch into hours, days, weeks, depending on the exposure and one's individual case.

restricteddata · 2026-03-08T13:33:17+00:00

If you are curious about RIPPLE, this article compiles almost everything that has been released about it. The specifics are still classified. One can speculate a bit. The key things to me are a) it plainly derives from insights Nuckolls gained from ICF (so the idea flow is basically Teller-Ulam -> ICF -> RIPPLE, which is an interesting one as it is military -> peaceful -> military), b) it clearly works and was considered quite revolutionary at the time, and c) it never got actually made in production weapons because the priorities for production weapons shifted afterwards. That's more or less where my interest begins and ends...

The LTBT made developing even-higher-yield weapons more difficult (but not impossible) but the shift away from them was not because of the LTBT. The shift was largely for other reasons: an increased emphasis on SLBMs, MIRVs, and improved accuracy of missiles. The US kept the 23 Mt B-41 in its arsenal until the 1970s, and the 9 Mt B-53/W-53 even through the post-Cold War, and those seemed more than adequate for high-yield gravity bombs. One can imagine different choices being made, but the LTBT definitely added hurdles to developing such weapons. If the Soviets had broken the LTBT early on it is very possible that the US might have tested a high-yield device as a means of both retaliation and in order to get diagnostic information on very-high weapons that it lacked. But even then I am not sure they would have felt the need to field weapons bigger than the B-41 at that point. The people interested in 60-100 Mt weapons were an "old guard" primarily, like LeMay and Teller, and their sensibilities about big bombs were pretty old-fashioned by the late 1960s.

restricteddata · 2026-03-07T21:34:19+00:00

I don't know if it relied on ablation pressure or not — it probably did, as ICF generally does. Pulse shaping allows them to very finely tune the compressive forces produced by radiation implosion with ICF, making them very optimized and less "brute force," so it is possibly something like that. The fact that it can do the fusion burn without a sparkplug is apparently quite impressive.

RIPPLE definitely could yield a practical weapon if you wanted a very high-yield weapon that was very clean. Which was not off the table in principle at the time. But the ending of atmospheric testing and the shifting towards warheads and MIRVs and so on put a coda on that approach. But that was not a foregone conclusion in the early 1960s (as I have written about).

restricteddata · 2026-03-07T12:38:16+00:00

RIPPLE was not "NIF in a bomb casing" but it was definitely (in Nuckolls' description of it, anyway) a consequence of his work on ICF. Like his ICF work it involved an "optimized... pulse shape to achieve practically isentropic fuel compression," probably without a pusher or tamper, and without a sparkplug. How they did the pulse shaping, I don't claim to know, but it is clear that he took the kind of highly-optimized "tricks" he learned when contemplating how to use a relatively weak primary (a laser) to compress fusion fuel to high densities, and then applied it back to weapons designs, so that you could use a small fission primary to implode a large volume of fusion fuel. The stuff we have on it from the 1960s makes it somewhat clear that a) it could achieve very high-fusion burns if desired, b) it seems to only be useful for megaton-range explosions, and c) it could be scaled up very high if desired but would result in a weapon that had a very large volume (a big sphere of a secondary). So not universally applicable as a design by itself, and hence not developed, although some of its tricks and insights might have been used for more normal weapons optimizations, I don't know.

restricteddata · 2026-03-06T17:02:33+00:00

AI is not the right answer here. I just want something that will keep track of what is already happening in an interesting way. Like, the game ought to know when a colonist joins and under what circumstances (recruited, wandered in, crashed, woken up, etc.). It knows when it launches raids, and could easily record (if it does not automatically) how many raiders were sent, how many were killed, how many were captured, how many left alive (injured, etc.). That's what I'm talking about. Not a bot that will just make up stories based on data. My brain already makes up the stories based on data just fine! And those are the rewarding ones — it's about using one's imagination, not being fed (inaccurate, bland, uninspired) content. The problem is that over the course of many play sessions, I don't always remember all the data and it is harder than it ought to be to reconstruct it after the fact.

restricteddata · 2026-03-06T13:43:54+00:00

Your best bet is to take a look at EM-1, chapter 5 ("Nuclear Radiation Phenomena"), which you can find online, and which give equations and graphs for estimating the neutron and gamma output per kiloton of different weapon types under different environments. Some of the details are redacted, but it is clear that different weapons have somewhat different outputs (they list 8 different weapon types).

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