Alex Wellerstein

Civil Defense and the Deep South in the 1950s.

An early attempt to visualize the broader implications of thermonuclear war.

At a pivotal moment in the Cold War, the decision was made that the President would be ultimately responsible for atomic weapons.

The rabid, apocalyptic Beat poetry that is "Mission with LeMay."

A conversation with historian Zachary Schrag and his father Philip Schrag about their multi-generational encounters with nuclear threats.

What can be learned from how people responded to false alarms about nuclear war in the late 1950s?

Team photographs at a nuclear weapons factory offer a glimpse into the mundanity and materiality of the bomb.

On Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.”

How many people really died because of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings? It’s complicated. There are at least two credible answers.

As we approach the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings, we're going to see a lot of journalistic takes on them — many of them totally wrong.

In 1953, as a political battle raged over the US’s nuclear future, the physicist lost a classified document on an overnight train from Philadelphia to DC.

A set of speech drafts suggests that Truman may not have fully understood the implications of dropping an atomic bomb on the city.

Who killed J. Robert Oppenheimer's Communist lover?

Why was a second bomb used against Japan, so soon after Hiroshima? A review of several theories.