Alex Wellerstein

I frequently work with journalists. This is not how it works if one actually does want to be a useful source for any news coverage. If one does not want to be that — which is one's prerogative — then one can just say "no" and save everyone the trouble.

"It is obvious that the immediate destruction of the complete list of 66 cities would have an even more devastating effect on Russia" The earliest postwar American planning for waging a full-scale nuclear war from 1945

This week, for DOOMSDAY MACHINES: A dive into the military imagination of full-scale nuclear war, drawn up while the embers of World War II were still warm… doomsdaymachines.net/p/it-is-obvi...

That's my suspicion as well — has that feel to it. The list itself and my "quotes" are all plausible but lacking expert insight and qualification.

A phenomena not helped by increasing reliance on AI, I am sure. I admit that my "plausible but not what I said and lacking the kind of specific qualifications I would add to it" quotes makes me suspect such things...

I have sent an e-mail to the Daily Mail requesting my name be removed from it. I do not have much hope that this will be rectified, and it is not the end of the world (pun intended), but I felt it was worth clarifying this point somewhere publicly.

Experts participate with journalist inquiries fully knowing that their quotes will, at a minimum, be truncated, and that they might be lightly edited for purposes of clarity and space. But this goes well beyond that in my view.

I did not notice this at the time because I was in the middle of selling a house and an international move, and so it slipped under my radar (and the reporter never sent me a copy of it, either; it is now paywalled).

Anyway, I am just making this clear because I have seen derivative articles from the first one going around now, with my name attached in them, and even been asked for sources on this list of cities, and the whole thing is essentially fabricated.

The attributed quote is very odd in that it is not entirely wrong from what I said, but it is definitely not what I said. It also leaves out many of the specific qualifications I made in my reply. I will not speculate as to what happened here, but it is a significant re-write.

The article quotes me as saying: "If the adversary is Russia and their goal is to disable US retaliation, command centers and ICBM sites will be hit first. If the attacker is a rogue actor, symbolic or densely populated areas might be targeted instead." I did not say this.

Chilling list reveals which US cities targets hit in WWIII While strategically vital cities like New York and Washington top the list of likely targets in a nuclear attack, several other targets that could be in the crosshairs may surprise the everyday Americ...

The article that came from it is a list of cities which I did not provide, which it attributes to "experts" vaguely, and I am the only "expert" cited in the article. I did not provide any list of cities.

www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/...

In June 2025, I gave a Daily Mail reporter some e-mailed answers about NUKEMAP and nuclear targeting in response to questions sent to me. You can see the entire correspondence below. I did not reply to the last e-mail.

So there is a story about the "top 10 cities at risk during nuclear war" circulating in various tabloids/etc. with my name attached to it, and I will say that a) I never have (nor would) make such a list at all, and b) I never said any of the quotes attributed to me in the article.

Polymarket Pulls Bet on Nuclear Detonation in 2026 ‘How ghoulish.’ The depravity economy moves into the nuclear war business.

super odd. Polymarket was hosting a bet on the possibility of a nuclear detonation in 2026 and it's now "archived" it. You can't view it anymore.

new conspiracy theory just dropped: 2000-2007 did not happen, all of the memories from that period were retrospectively embedded into our brains Men in Black style

you left out the weary shrug 🤷‍♂️

Now, the French MAY pull ahead here, as they are requesting copies of records I already have the originals of (and have already given them), just because they want it to have been re-certified within the last year, which is, well, irritating. So they are the prime movers of my frustration, here.

The answer, it turns out, is to get it directly from the county registrar that issued it, which in this case is one that seems to have its act together, and so is probably a better bet anyway, but jeez, when I saw that list of years, I just said, "are you kidding me..."

California vs. French bureaucracy, which is worse? A close match-up, but California Vital Records is making a real effort at taking the crown by telling me that they cannot give me a certified copy of my 2007 marriage certificate because it falls into a weird black hole of years they don't have.

The Slippery Slope From Nuclear Warfare to Eating Kittens Filmmaker Errol Morris considers the ethical quandaries of the Bomb, then and now.

Amazed to share that Errol Morris (!!!) wrote a really favorable review of my new book for Airmail.news — airmail.news/issues/2026-...

Can confirm that I get asked to participate in mythical book clubs constantly. Huge shout-out to the AI companies that decided that making bullshit generators easily available to the general public was a good way to try and make a buck.

These little drawings of proposed diagnostic experiments from Operation CASTLE (1954) fascinate me — the little "devices" (thermonuclear weapons), the palm trees, waves, the isometric views. I find "top secret art" pretty fascinating as an emergent visual genre in the 20th century...

The Slippery Slope From Nuclear Warfare to Eating Kittens Filmmaker Errol Morris considers the ethical quandaries of the Bomb, then and now.

Amazed to share that Errol Morris (!!!) wrote a really favorable review of my new book for Airmail.news — airmail.news/issues/2026-...

The irony of the whole thing is that Charlie Kirk himself would object to him being included in that line-up — the audacity to put him in the same league as Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, cuts both directions, given how little admiration and respect he had for King...

also one of the more amusing aspects is that this guy is what the AI algo apparently thinks 45 looks like

if my name was Claude right now I'd be really unhappy with the world

absolutely mesmerized by this AI slop YouTube ad where everyone's face changes a little bit in every scene

I like bad things sometimes, too