Writing and Research

The examples below are selections. For a full list of publications in each category, click the section headings.

Books

The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (HarperCollins, 2025)

President Truman’s choice to drop the atomic bomb is the most debated decision in the 20th Century. But what if Truman’s actual decision wasn’t what everyone thinks it was?

Eight decades after the bombing of Hiroshima, the conventional narrative is that American leaders had a choice: Invade Japan, which would have cost millions of Allied and Japanese lives, or use the atom bomb in the hopes of convincing Japan to surrender. Truman, the story goes, carefully weighed the pros and cons before deciding that the atomic bomb would be used against Japanese cities, as the lesser of two evils.

But nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein argues that is not what happened. Not only did Truman not take part in the decision to use the bomb, but the one major decision that he did make was a very different one — one that he himself did not fully understand until after the atomic bomb was used. And the weight of that decision, and that misunderstanding, became the major reason that atomic bombs have not been used again since World War II.

Based on a close reading of the historical record, The Most Awful Responsibility argues that despite his reputation as an ardent defender of the use of the atomic bomb, Truman was in fact deeply antagonistic to nuclear weapons, associating them primarily with the “murder” and “slaughter” of innocent civilians, believing that they never should be used again, and hoping that they would, in his lifetime, possibly be outlawed. Wellerstein makes a startling case that Truman was possibly the most anti-nuclear American president of the twentieth century, but whose ambitions in this area were strongly constrained by the domestic and international politics of the postwar world.

Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021)

The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual, and very nearly unprecedented. It was foreign to both American science and American democracy—and potentially incompatible with both. From the beginning, this secrecy was controversial, and it was always contested. The atomic bomb was not merely the application of science to war, but the result of decades of investment in scientific education, infrastructure, and global collaboration. If secrecy became the norm, how would science survive?

Drawing on troves of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time through the author’s efforts, Restricted Data traces the complex evolution of the US nuclear secrecy regime from the first whisper of the atomic bomb through the mounting tensions of the Cold War and into the early twenty-first century. A compelling history of powerful ideas at war, it tells a story that feels distinctly American: rich, sprawling, and built on the conflict between high-minded idealism and ugly, fearful power.

Blogs

Since 2011, Wellerstein has regularly written entries on the history and present of nuclear weapons at Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog. A few examples:

• “How to die at Los Alamos”
• “Tokyo vs. Hiroshima”
• “A bomb without Einstein?”
• “Would the atomic bomb have been used against Germany?”
• “When did the Allies know there wasn’t a German bomb?”
• “The worst of the Manhattan Project leaks”
• “What did the Nazis know about the Manhattan Project?”
• “The Uncensored Franck Report”
• “Web-based Primary Sources for Nuclear History”

Since 2024, Wellerstein has also written at Doomsday Machines, a blog dedicated to the post-apocalyptic imagination in fact and fiction. A few examples:

• The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”
• “The battlefield is everywhere”: The wild nuclear maps of “Wild” William Bunge (1988)
• Exponential stockpiles: How the meaning of the Cold War nuclear arms race both is and isn’t revealed in counting bombs
• The fate of cities: Building a video game model for the impact of a large-scale nuclear war on American cities
• Civil Defense and Preppers: A brief history of Preppers, part 1
• The perfect horror of Chesley Bonestell’s nuked New York
• Pantex employee photos, 1980s: Team photographs at a nuclear weapons factory offer a glimpse into the mundanity and materiality of the bomb

Popular writing

• “Truman never ordered the use of the atomic bombs—but he did order atomic bombings to be stopped,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (10 August 2025).
• “An Unearthly Spectacle: The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Bomb,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (29 October 2021).
• “Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (4 August 2020).
• “Did the U.S. plan to drop more than two atomic bombs on Japan?” National Geographic History (Summer 2020).
• “What We Lost When We Lost Bert the Turtle,” Harper’s Magazine (December 2017).
• “Remembering Laika, Space Dog and Soviet Hero,” New Yorker (3 November 2017).
• “The virtues of nuclear ignorance,” New Yorker (20 September 2016).
• “The demon core and the strange death of Louis Slotin,” New Yorker (21 May 2016).
• “Nagasaki: The Last Bomb,” New Yorker (7 August 2015).
• “The First Light of Trinity,” New Yorker (16 July 2015).
• “Bomb Appétit!” Lucky Peach no. 6 (Winter 2013), 144.

Academic writing

• “The Kyoto Misconception: What Truman Knew, and Didn’t Know, About Hiroshima,” in Michael D. Gordin and G. John Ikenberry, eds., The Age of Hiroshima (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020).
• “John Wheeler’s H-bomb Blues,” Physics Today 72, no. 4 (2019): 42-51.
•  “Manhattan Project,” Encyclopedia for the History of Science (April 2019).
•  (with Edward Geist), “The secret of the Soviet hydrogen bomb,” Physics Today 70, no. 4 (March 2017), 40-47.
• “States of Eugenics: Institutions and the Practices of Compulsory Sterilization in California,” in Sheila Jasanoff, ed., Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011): 29-58.
• “Patenting the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Intellectual Property, and Technological Control,” Isis 99, no. 1 (March 2008): 57-87.

Editorials and reviews

• Essay review of Wirtz and Larsen, eds., Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications,” H-Diplo (9 July 2024).
• “Fact, Fiction, and the Father of the Bomb: On Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’,” Los Angeles Review of Books (30 August 2023). (Included as part of the LARB’s best of 2023.)
• “Nuclear threats? Climate change? What catastrophe will lead to doomsday?” Los Angeles Times (6 February 2023).
• (with Benoît Pelopidas), “The reason we haven’t had nuclear disasters isn’t careful planning. It’s luck,” Washington Post (10 August 2020).
• Review of HBO’s Chernobyl. American Historical Review 124, no 4 (October 2019): 1378-1380.
• (with Kristyn Karl and Ashley Lytle), “A nuclear bomb might not kill you. But not knowing how to respond might,” Washington Post (14 January 2019).
• “The myth of apolitical science [review of Audra Wolfe’s Freedom’s Laboratory],” Science 362, no. 6418 (30 November 2018), 1006.
• “The Hawaii alert was an accident. The dread it inspired wasn’t,” The Washington Post (16 January 2018).
• (with Avner Cohen), “If Trump wants to use nuclear weapons, whether it’s ‘legal’ won’t matter,” Washington Post (22 November 2017).
• “Of chemistry and conflict [review of Jennet Conant’s Man of the Hour],” Nature 549, no. 7670 (September 2017), 28-29.
• “Civilization VI and its discontents [review of Sid Meier’s Civilization VI (2016)],” Endeavour 41, no. 1 (2017), 1-2.
• “No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons. That’s by design.” Washington Post (4 December 2016), B1.

Academic talks and presentations

• “What is a nuclear secret and who can make one?” Colloquium, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, September 16, 2021.

• Book talks about Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States virtually at Stevens Institute of Technology (March 2021), Science and Global Security Program, Princeton University (April 2021), SciencesPo, Paris (April 2021), National History Center, Washington, DC (May 2021), Lyceum Society, NYC (June 2021), Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (June 2021), Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (July 2021).

• “Physicists and Nuclear Secrecy.” Webinar, Physics Today, May 5, 2021.

• “Seeing the Unthinkable: Historical and Contemporary Approaches to the Visualization of Nuclear War.” Colloquium, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark, December 4, 2020.

• “The ‘Best-Kept Secret of the War’? The Successes and Failures of Manhattan Project Secrecy.” Los Alamos Historical Society, November 17, 2020.