The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 7/4/17
Science historian Alex Wellerstein had been teaching about nuclear weapons for years when he put NUKEMAP online in 2012. It’s a tool that lets users pick a place, pick a type of nuclear weapon, and click a red button that says “detonate.” Users then see concentric circles laid over their chosen location – hometowns are popular – denoting the size of the fireball at ground zero, the size of the air blast that would destroy or kill most everything in its path, and the areas within which people would receive heavy doses of radiation and third-degree burns.
It wasn’t the first tool of its kind, but it was well designed and quickly became popular: By June of 2017, at just over five years old, NUKEMAP had enabled more than 113 million “detonations” by users all over the world. People were spending, on average, about five minutes interacting with the tool, a long time in an era of endless possibilities for internet distraction. It got Wellerstein thinking about how people learn outside of formal educational settings, where lectures just aren’t very effective.
Wellerstein, 35, is an assistant professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. He developed NUKEMAP using Google Maps, existing equations on the impact of nuclear explosions, and his own longtime programming skills. In this interview with the Bulletin, he talks about why NUKEMAP is so popular, who uses it to bomb whom, and why it’s important to understand nuclear risk in a way that’s more nuanced than “we’ll all be dead.” He also discusses how scientists can, with the help of others, change the culture.
BAS:
You launched NUKEMAP in February 2012 and had more than nine million so-called detonations by the end of that year. At five years old, it has now had well over 100 million. What’s the public appeal?
AW:
Most people are trying to find out what would happen if a nuke went off near them. It’s pretty clear that users from most countries nuke themselves, although there is also a significant proportion of people who nuke others. In some cases, I’m pretty sure they’re nuking people they just don’t like. You’ll get people who nuke Pyongyang. Literally only one North Korean-identified computer has ever used NUKEMAP, and yet, many thousands of detonations have gone off in North Korea.
We are in a funny space, historically, where the lack of education about nuclear weapons is sort of stunning. But while the base knowledge about these things is really low, especially for younger people, there’s incredible interest. If you put something nuclear on the Internet, people will flock to it – if it’s in a language they can understand, and doesn’t look like it’s trying to push a political platform.
BAS:
You made a map of where detonations have been set off, and there is a high concentration in the United States, Europe, Japan, and the Koreas. Does that just show where the population is greater, or is there something else going on that you can extrapolate from the location choices?
AW:
Sometimes you can extrapolate, sometimes you can’t. You can sometimes see interesting national trends. For example, American users, most of the time and by a large majority, nuke America, which is exactly the point of the thing. You’re meant to experience something. But who do you think they nuke with second-greatest frequency? Japan, by a long shot.
The reason is, they’re recreating Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is some kind of historical engagement going on. They’ve seen pictures of Hiroshima, where it’s all scoured away or everything is rubble.
Other countries do other patterns. The Ukrainians are nuking the Russians a lot; that makes sense, historically. But the Russians don’t nuke the Ukrainians nearly as much.
BAS:
Who do the Russians nuke?
AW:
The United States.
BAS:
What else from your data have you found that is interesting or surprising?
AW:
Some of this comes from small sample sizes, so I wouldn’t give all the statistics huge weight, but I do notice odd pairings. Like, at one point in time, the Israelis nuked themselves first. That’s normal. They nuked Iran second, and very heavily. That makes sense – this is an area of tension, and also, they might want to know whether there would be radioactive side effects for Israel if somebody launched a nuclear weapon at Iran.
But then I looked at Iran. They nuked themselves first, but their number two at that time was Russia, not Israel. This is something political scientists I’ve talked to find very interesting, but Iran is one of the places where the sample size is small, so this may not be generalizable to international relations.
About 50 per cent of all the users are Americans, so we have a very large sample size there. Americans are interesting because other than themselves and Japan, they nuke almost everybody equally.
BAS:
What do you learn from social media about how people use NUKEMAP?
AW:
My favorite thing that people do with it – on, say, Reddit – is use it to resolve arguments. That means a lot to me, because this is a world in which nobody agrees on facts anymore. When the United States used the MOAB – a large conventional weapon – in Afghanistan in April, a number of news stories misreported its yield. They reported it as being “just like” 11 kilotons, or even 11 megatons, which is bonkers. It was 11 tons of TNT. There were people using NUKEMAP who pointed out how different 11 tons, 11 kilotons, and 11 megatons are. That’s the kind of thing I appreciate people doing with it, to calibrate their own understanding and see that sometimes, the news coverage is not quite technically accurate.
BAS:
Do you think there’s any danger that something like NUKEMAP normalizes the idea of nuclear war, by encouraging people to think of it as inevitable?
AW:
There’s a big difference between normalizing and thinking about it as inevitable. In the reactions I see online, people are not saying, “That looks fine.” They’re saying, “That would be horrible.”
NUKEMAP allows you to answer certain kinds of questions in a back-of-the-envelope way. I ask groups of students, “What would happen if a nuclear weapon went off in New York City?” The answer, even from engineering students, is always along the lines of “everything would be destroyed, and we’d be dead.” But their answer ought to be, “How big a nuclear weapon are we talking about?” A terrorist nuclear weapon would have one effect. The kind of nuclear weapon available to China or Russia would have another. They should also be asking where this bomb goes off, because New York City is pretty big, and that will make a difference too.
When people who don’t have a lot of education on the issue think of nuclear war, they tend to think one nuke equals the end of the world. Superficially, it may seem like that’s a good thing for them to think, if you’re antinuclear. But the result is that people associate it with almost a religious end of the world: some hypothetical thing that will probably never happen, and if it did, there would be nothing you could do about it.
The NUKEMAP can help show that no, a single nuclear detonation wouldn’t end the world. It would make the world really unpleasant for a lot of people, including probably you and people you know and love. It would not be over in a flash. For a terrorist weapon, unless you’re pretty close to ground zero, you’re going to live on for a little while, and it’s going to be really, really unpleasant. Like awful on a scale Americans haven’t experienced.
As their understanding becomes less abstract, people may take it more seriously.
BAS:
You’ve written about how divisive US civil defense programs have been in the past, with some people in favor but others seeing them as ineffective at best. Do you think the United States needs a new civil defense effort?
AW:
I do think our state of emergency management leaves a lot to be desired, from what I’ve read and heard, especially for things like terrorist nuclear weapons. I recently watched a conference of emergency management professionals who were extremely disturbed by the fact that our medical infrastructure for dealing with a large number of radiation casualties is not that great. It’s remarkably fragile.
A lot of our way of talking about nuclear weapons today is about if a bomb goes off. In the real civil defense era, they often talked about what to do when the bomb goes off. That’s a very different way to think about the world. It’s about taking seriously the fact that you live in a world in which over the long term, the chance of a nuclear weapon going off is greater than zero.
We can argue about the probability, but it’s not zero. My impression is that most people devote almost none of their mind to thinking about these issues. They think about a lot of risks, some of which are real, like car accidents. If you’re on the road, you should probably think about car accidents. But people also spend a lot of time worrying about things that are going to have either no health effects or absurdly small ones. Like health effects from eating GMOs, which as far as we can tell, don’t make people sick, whatever their other properties. I think the consequence of using nuclear weapons is serious enough that even if the probability is fairly low, it should be on people’s minds, part of the ecosystem of possible risks.
If you go into any high school today, you will find people doing all sorts of drills for regional threats, like earthquakes and tornadoes. You have people doing drills that would not have existed 20 years ago, like “active shooter” drills. That tells you something about the fears of our age, and what things people imagine are problems in the world. I feel like nuclear should be part of that.
BAS:
How do you convey an appropriate sense of risk in a way that is effective without seeming like scaremongering and making people either become very depressed or tune out?
AW:
Social scientists have done a lot of research on this question in nonnuclear contexts. Fear is not a very motivating emotion. Anger is much more motivating. If you tell somebody something that makes them afraid, they will close their web browser and go do something else. If you tell them something that makes them angry, they will write to Congress, donate money, sign a petition, whatever. My goal is not to be a fearmonger, but sometimes fear is the appropriate response to circumstances.
BAS:
You’ve written that banishing the kind of civil defense messages we had during the Cold War, like the “duck and cover” campaign, may have been counterproductive to disarmament. How so?
AW:
People who were really against civil defense were against the Bomb, and their argument was that civil defense messages would make people think the Bomb was survivable. I’m not sure it’s actually true that anybody thought that, except maybe the more hawkish think tankers. The people actually doing the drills reported feeling quite vulnerable.
The irony is that getting rid of civil defense meant people stopped thinking about nuclear weapons. It replaced a hypothetical evil – people thinking the Bomb was survivable – with another evil, which may be worse, which is nobody thinking that use of nuclear weapons could ever happen.
BAS:
You’ve talked about wanting to change the culture with your nuclear awareness projects. What does that mean?
AW:
I would like it if people – in a non-scaremongering, non-paralyzing way – saw that nuclear weapons risks are part of their world in a really tangible way. That nuclear risks are salient to them, a part of their lived experience.
I don’t have any illusions that you can accomplish this with a single website. But if you were going to try to change the world so that people thought and behaved and acted as if nuclear risk were real, how would you do that? It’s an interesting research question having to do with communication and education. And the answer will not be specific to nuclear. You could generalize it to climate change or other subjects. Public health is really the king of this topic – they’ve convinced us to live as if we truly believe that infectious diseases are real things in the world, and that’s fairly profound given how relatively recent that idea is.
A couple times a year an academic tells me, “I’d love to make a website where I could put up a lot of information for people to get.” I say, you could do that. It’s not that hard and can be done nearly for free. But what’s the point? There’s already Wikipedia. There are already a million websites. If people are looking for information, they can find it. That’s not going to change the culture at all. But if you can imagine ways of getting people to engage on a different level, and really think about subjects differently, in a more personalized way, I could imagine it being quite powerful.
BAS:
Not a lot of historians know coding and data visualization. How did you learn?
AW:
I started programing computers when I was very young, sometime in elementary or middle school. I learned layout and graphic design while working on my high school newspaper. I’ve kept up with both of those things for something like 20 years. Programming, graphic design, and history were totally separate threads in my life that started to come together around the time I was in college. In retrospect, it looks like a really wonderful set of coincidences, because a lot of the work I do now requires all these skills at the same time. But none of it was planned.
BAS:
What’s your next project?
AW:
I’m really interested in exploring technologies that have not yet been really exploited for this purpose. The real promise is in something like augmented or virtual reality, because it allows for a much more radical personalization. One of my problems with NUKEMAP is that the view from Google Maps, which it relies on, is from the air. That’s the view of a person in a bomber, or the view of a missile targeter. It’s not the view of the person on the ground, the victim. I would love it if you could put on a headset and be able to see what a 20,000-foot mushroom cloud would look like – from the ground, from the street.
BAS:
Any suggestions for other social scientists or scientists who want to communicate better with the public?
AW:
Consider reaching out to colleagues who can help, people who are good at the interface between science and the rest of the world. I don’t necessarily think it’s incumbent on every scientist or social scientist to communicate with the broader public. Not everyone has to learn to write for a general audience. I don’t expect a physicist to get good at Web development. If you’re really good at making models for pandemics, you should spend all your time doing that. You don’t have to learn web coding or graphic design. But there are people who can help, especially in a university setting. Including people like me who have some familiarity with the technical tools.
It’s depressing to me to see how much time academics spend making work that ultimately doesn’t have any public impact, when it could have a lot of public impact if it were translated into a different form. Academics usually publish a paper. Maybe they post the code on a website so you can download it, but then they stop. They don’t really know how to build an app that the public might find useful, how to make a tool for communicating their big idea.
There are more people out there who can help than many scientists seem to realize. People who can facilitate a breaking down of barriers, who are comfortable moving back and forth between the world of the technical and the world of the humanistic. Historians of science and technology, in particular, are natural boundary crossers, if I can say so. We exist in both worlds. We’re not beloved by either world. We don’t fit in anywhere, but can facilitate really interesting interactions and intersections. And there’s a lot to be gained in that.