Welcome to Galaxy Brain—a newsletter from Charlie Warzel virtually applied science, media, culture, and big ideas. You tin can read what this is all about here . If yous like what you see, consider forwarding it to a friend or two. We're still figuring things out in our new home so let me know what you lot recollect: galaxybrain@theatlantic.com.

This is a gratuitous edition of the newsletter, merely y'all can subscribe to The Atlantic to become admission to all posts. Past editions I'm proud of include: Guardians of the Internet , Don't Alienate the Willing , and How to Spend 432,870 Minutes on Spotify in a Year .

Devoted Galaxy Brain readers might recollect a mail from my Substack days in which I interviewed Tom Neill, a Londoner who, while bored in lockdown, built a silly website tracking the container transport that was and so currently (and rather gloriously) wedged in the Suez Canal. I am generally fascinated past what information technology'due south like when something a person builds is at the center of a viral storm (equally Neill'due south site was). That interview is still one of my favorite newsletters. Today, I'm standing the series—though under far more serious circumstances.

The outset fourth dimension I used Nukemap was sometime in 2013, when I was living in New York City. I'thousand not certain how I stumbled on the site, merely I know I spent at least an hour toying with information technology. Nukemap is a nuclear-effects computer, which is to say, a website that shows you the various radii of destruction, if a nuclear bomb went off in the given location. You can customize the area of detonation, the size of the bomb, and other details. The site is somewhat of a cult classic, with over 220 million "detonations" logged since it came online in 2012. The results information technology shows are, as you can imagine, sobering—particularly now.

Concluding calendar week, after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin ordered his nuclear forces into a college land of alarm. It was the first time the Kremlin had done this since the Russian federation was established in 1991. I'm not a nuclear expert at all, so I'm not going to speculate well-nigh what this means—you can read my colleague Tom Nichols on that—but the move has brought the notion of nuclear war back into the global conversation in a nontrivial way. As you might expect, Nukemap'due south traffic has surged, and the site has, at some points, crashed.

I reached out to Nukemap's creator, Alex Wellerstein, to talk near the site's creation, how people have used it for the terminal decade, and what he'due south seen change in the concluding week. Wellerstein is a historian of science and nuclear weapons and a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Seriousness of the subject area matter bated, information technology'south i of my favorite interviews in a while. The chat has been lightly edited for clarity.

Charlie Warzel: Let'due south first at the beginning—over a decade agone now—why'd you build Nukemap?

Alex Wellerstein: In that location'due south the truthful story and the one that makes me look more rational and smart. Let'south start with the one that makes me wait smart. I recognized that it's difficult to conceptualize the size of nuclear weapons. I take a very difficult time dealing with numbers and visualizing them and translating these equations into code that makes a visualization allows me to better understand these weapons for my job.

The real story, which is more haphazard, is that I first created a visualization tool for this a long time ago, back in 2004, earlier Google Maps. I used a terrible series of screenshots of MapQuest and it was a mess. I didn't have the technology to practise what I wanted.

That changed in 2012. I had started a web log, and as you lot, a content creator, know well, you demand content! I was investigating a totally dissimilar nuke projection, which required drawing circles to prove nuclear radii. And in the procedure I realized the code had matured and what was difficult to do in 2004 was trivial in 2012. I figured I'd bang it and some of my fellow academics and policy people would detect it interesting. I didn't imagine it'd get seen by the general public. I built it in the course of a weekend and I sent it to some colleagues and gave it a terrible proper noun—something like Alex's Amazing Nuclear Weapon Simulator. Anybody told me that proper noun was awful, and so I inverse it to Nukemap.

Warzel: Did it take off right away?

Wellerstein: Not quite. It got a footling traffic from my web log. My weblog is almost the history of nuclear weapons, so nosotros're not talking about tons of traffic here. Only so, somehow, the U.K. tabloids picked it up and wrote a terrible story near this new viral nuke tool that was so scary. Nukemap hadn't gone viral merely, as I learned then, a story about something going viral can make it become viral. I got tons of traffic, and that made me take the project more seriously. [I figured] if this is a tool for other people, and so I should probably spend more two days working on it. So I upgraded the features, gave the code an overhaul, made fallout models and casualties models, all by 2013. And that's where it is now, basically. For better or worse it's the most engaged-with affair I've ever washed. And then far, about xl million people have used it. It's been a cardinal part of my career and probable led to the job I have at present.

Warzel: It's e'er the things yous don't expect that take the biggest impact online, I find.

Wellerstein: I can come up up with reasons why Nukemap works simply ultimately some of this is idiosyncratic. If the U.One thousand. tabloids don't selection it upward, does it go to this level of popularity? Now information technology is high in the search results for how big is a nuclear explosion? With algorithms and social media, the more attention you get the more you're going to get. It becomes self-building.

Tabloids go along to do Nukemap stories (Screenshot/The Sun)

Warzel: Has traffic been steady since the tabloid stories?

Wellerstein: Over time you become peaks. These range from crisis moments, like N Korea testing a missile or what is happening correct now in Ukraine, to moments that are rather innocuous, like the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, where people are looking at it in schools or wondering what it would be like if that bomb had been dropped on their hometown. I've institute those moments where people are using Nukemap with existential dread are less spikes and more of a plateau that lasts for a while. Those events give y'all a user peak and a actually long tail to information technology, and the baseline usage then steadily grows over fourth dimension—the next peak is bigger than the final.

Warzel: Are there interesting insights you've been able to glean from information technology about how people utilise the tool?

Wellerstein: In terms of preliminary findings, I did some analysis a while dorsum—it's non up to appointment, but it hints at something really interesting. Something I've seen is that users in unlike countries use information technology differently. There are two categories of how people use Nukemap. The first is cathartic nuking, which is nuking somebody else. Say, Americans are mad at Russia, and so they're seeing what happens when you lot do it to somebody you don't similar. The 2nd is experiential nuking, or nuking yourself to come across what happens if it happens to me.

Warzel: How practice Americans use it?

Wellerstein: Last fourth dimension I ran this, Americans by far nuke themselves most of the time. They prefer experiential nuking. I'm not going to get so far equally to say it's narcissistic, but our main mode of using Nukemap is to look and see what will happen to us. When Americans nuke somebody else, the No. 1 country—terminal time I did it—was Japan. There's a reason for this, and it's that they're re-creating the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events. After that, Americans tend to nuke all other countries equally. Japan is really the but one that stands out.

Warzel: How almost other countries?

Wellerstein: Israel is one of the few countries that doesn't nuke itself more than than other people. Now, for lots of countries there aren't huge sample sizes, and then maybe this data isn't that significant. Israel Nukemap users' No. 1 target is Iran. If you look at Iranians, which is a modest sample size, their No. 1 target besides themselves was Russia. Is this information useful? I don't know. Simply yous tin tell little stories in your caput almost what's going on. Or at least I do. The other data are non as interesting. People always choose the biggest bombs to drib beginning. It's what yous'd expect with gamble scale. They're getting a sense of the worst-case scenario.

Warzel: I've used this website over the years on different occasions and find something almost weirdly soothing nearly using the tool. Do you get feedback as to how people are mostly using information technology? Is it in an academic capacity? Is it a kind of doomscrolling?

Wellerstein: If you look at what people post on social media—information technology'south all over the place. Some people are scared. Some do it for fun. Some people are doing mortiferous serious calculations about their families, based on the emails I've received from people. Some of them brand me really uncomfortable—they're describing their family unit situations and asking me if they'll survive based on specific calculations. I endeavour to give people the best general advice I can, and I'll just say right now, I don't think they need to get in the basement—non at this stage in the current disharmonize. But it'southward always skillful to be aware and prepared. I besides like to indicate out that in an actual nuclear war, yous don't know the targets and what the verbal weapons volition be. Nukemap is a tidy manner of looking at this, but the reality wouldn't be tidy. Plus, it's a website that is created and run by 1 guy.

Warzel: But people seem to really rely on it! I wonder if the site blueprint has anything to do with that?

Wellerstein: I call back it's a clean and straightforward website and we live on an internet where everything is constantly updating with a new awful Javascript interface that kind of works and kind of doesn't. Nukemap is hand-coded and barely a step above HTML. I have a very belatedly '90s mindset when it comes to how to plan webpages, which is at present getting me into problem when Nukemap gets a lot of traffic. But to answer your original question, I don't know what people take from information technology other than it'south been effectually so long.

Warzel: I think at that place's something to that. There's not really a timeless aesthetic on the internet, but I think that tardily-1990s vibe might be the closest thing to it. It is cool, though, that it's a piece of old, reliable internet infrastructure.

Wellerstein: At least it doesn't have a GIF of a guy doing construction on it!

That part leads to me feeling old. I'll get a student proverb, "Oh yeah, I used that in middle schoolhouse!" And I'll feel ancient. But I like that it'due south become a standard reference. That'southward the best kind of goal for this. And it's interesting that information technology has been a standard reference across political lines. It'south been featured in Breitbart articles and mentioned past Newt Gingrich, but likewise, Jimmy Kimmel cited it one time. To me, it's hard to do something in the world of scientific discipline and tech that has broad support, no matter your political orientation. You can tell large stories well-nigh using the tool. And the site doesn't expressly say that nukes are good or bad or whatever. You, the user, experiment equally you see fit. I in one case joked with my class and asked how different would Nukemap feel if there was, similar, a big American flag plastered on it. I think it would have a huge difference there in how people perceive it, which is why I'm glad information technology is the way it is.

Warzel: On Nukemap'due south fifth anniversary, you wrote, "My main frustration with Nukemap as a communication tool is that the superlative-down, concentric-circles arroyo is the view of the military planner. It's the view of the nuclear targeteer, or as a friend and collaborator put it earlier this week, information technology's the view of real estate." Do you lot worry even so that the tool could cause people non to engage as much with the "on the ground" reality of a nuclear assail?

Wellerstein: I'm a historian start and foremost. In my role every bit a nuclear historian I've looked at a lot of visualizations of nuclear bombs. It is catchy because the experience of a nuclear bomb in reality is not from 30,000 anxiety; information technology's from the ground down. Now, there have been tremendous interpretations of this in culture—John Hersey'south 1946 book, Hiroshima, still hits very hard. There are graphic novels, fictional depictions of nuclear war, like The Day After. Those all deal with the reality. I would similar to split the departure between what Nukemap is now and that. Information technology's why I added the casualty calculator. I saw people in 2012—around when Democratic people's republic of korea was testing modest nuclear weapons—that were testing the small nukes on the site and noting on social media that This blast barely fits across Cardinal Park! It's a infant nuke. And I found myself thinking, In that location's a lot of people in an area the size of Central Park! It's always hard to go people to run into a city non equally a drove of streets but as a identify with humans. I congenital a 3-D version of Nukemap in 2013, but information technology isn't supported past Google World anymore. Only what I liked was that by tilting the map a bit you tin see the volumetric cloud, and that triggers a different understanding in your brain.

An quondam screenshot of Nukemap 3D depicting a mushroom cloud over New York Urban center

Warzel: For those reading, how would you describe that understanding?

Wellerstein: My favorite trick is to use the new World Trade Heart. Most people in New York take seen information technology from distant and many have been near its base. It towers over y'all. Information technology'south dizzying if you're underneath it. And to the top of its antenna is one,776 feet. To get the Hiroshima mushroom cloud—which is, I should note, not even the aforementioned as today's nukes—you'd take to stack 11 World Trade Centers on top of each other. That's the kind of sublime awe of how big these weapons are. I'd like to show that.

I'm also interested in building a humanitarian-impact button—I got that proffer at a briefing. It would go over the nail zone of the nuke and say how many hospitals are nearby or how many schools, how many places of worship. It's meant to be a punch in the gut to show the human being costs.

Warzel: To come back to the present twenty-four hours for a moment … Since Russia invaded Ukraine last week, nosotros've already seen some very unnerving nuclear saber-rattling from Putin. I've seen some reports that Nukemap has gone offline at moments in the last week. How large is the traffic surge you've experienced?

Wellerstein: It's been actually heavy usage of the servers to the point where I can't say definitively how many people are trying to admission it, because the server can't handle information technology. I've done some fixes to endeavor to help handle it and volition have to do more. At some point nosotros're in levels of systems administration that I am not comfortable with. I do not empathize DNS and Amazon CloudFront. I've been getting stuck at step B of a 100-step process. But information technology's just me.

At any given second, we have at least 600 simultaneous users globally. The traffic is heavily American and heavily European—Central European and the Britain. Lots of people are constantly on the website. The traffic graph looks less like a spike and more like a tsunami, similar a massive cresting moving ridge. The baseline traffic on a normal day without a crisis can range to about upwardly to 20,000 people a twenty-four hours. On a very ho-hum Lord's day when the atmospheric condition's nice, it sees about 10,000 people. Right now, though, we've been at more like 150,000 people every day, and that's probably just the level the server can take. Now that I just optimized it, mayhap it tin can at present handle a flake more than.

Warzel: That is a significant increase!

Wellerstein: When I say seismic sea wave, I don't mean it metaphorically. The graph right at present looks similar a pic of a big wave. A steep rise that stays up for days and days.

Warzel: Is this unprecedented?

Wellerstein: During the scarier parts of the Trump administration there were times when it would get up and be craggy on the graph. A series of ups and downs. This is much more consistently high. Now every fourth dimension somebody on site leaves, another person waiting in line replaces them. It'due south taken up a lot of my time the final calendar week to effigy out how to fix the site to requite access to those who want it. I've spent a couple of days rebuilding the server from the bottom. I'm sitting effectually looking up best practices for server maintenance and talking to people on forums to learn more. I'1000 pretty calculator-savvy for a historian, but I'm nonetheless having trouble parsing things written for total-time engineers. If I was going to do this the right fashion, I would hire somebody to practise it, but I don't take the coin for that. Nukemap doesn't generate revenue—it'due south being paid for generously past a sponsor.

Warzel: The circumstances are obviously grim, simply information technology must be gratifying to see and then many people using it.

Wellerstein: It's been interesting to me to run into the stuff online where people are complaining almost not being able to access the site. They await it to be, like, a fully operational service, just it's simply me, and I'1000 already doing a million things with my full-time job. But I'thousand deeply flattered past the idea that anyone out in that location would actually care that my site is down.

Warzel: Y'all're a nuclear-weapons historian, and there'southward a bit of irony here that at the moment your expertise is in high demand, you also need to, like, exercise server maintenance!

I'one thousand having problem finding the words to ask this last question, but do you think there's annihilation to learn from your experience over the past week? Is this merely—nukes are in the news and people are nervous and Googling? How are you processing this, both as Nukemap's creator but also equally a professional who is closely watching this war?

Wellerstein: In that location'southward this old XKCD cartoon that charts how scared a person should be, correlated with what kind of practiced is on TV. The joke is: When you've gotten to the person who is an good in meteors, you should be terrified.

The grim joke I have with colleagues is that the worse the world is, the more than demand there is for me. When things are going swell, nobody wants to talk to me about nukes. When the world teeters off a cliff and everything is terrifying, I'm in demand. I have that paradox. I have the grim irony of information technology. It is why I pursued this chore in the first place.

Then when I wait at the last week of Nukemap, I think I'm glad I tin contribute something to this situation I'm proud of. I'm glad to play any kind of role. Even if that role is making people nervous, I believe they come to the site because they still want the knowledge. They wouldn't be less worried if they couldn't detect out how large a nuclear explosion is. I recall it's fine however people use the site—even if people employ it in ways I personally find distasteful. Because in that location's some sort of pedagogy happening at the aforementioned time. I believe that you have to meet people wherever they are.

I wish we had a earth where a website like this could be a purely bookish curiosity, simply we don't. You can use this website to brand whatever arguments y'all want, but the website is based on some actual data. And that feels similar something.