Editorials
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).
“Can Trump just declare nuclear secrets unclassified?” Lawfare (18 August 2022).
(with Benoît Pelopidas), “The reason we haven’t had nuclear disasters isn’t careful planning. It’s luck,” Washington Post (10 August 2020).
“Hiroshima, Truman and American myth: After the bombings, how the president claimed the ultimate power,” New York Daily News (6 August 2020).
“America’s Nuclear-Weapons Policy Isn’t What You Think—It’s Much Worse,” Quartz (6 August 2019).
(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 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).
“No One Can Stop President Trump From Using Nuclear Weapons. That’s by Design.” Washington Post (4 December 2016), B1.
“Five Ways That Nuclear Weapons Could Still Be Used,” The Guardian (6 August 2015).
Reviews
Review of HBO’s Chernobyl. American Historical Review 124, no 4 (October 2019): 1378-1380.
“The Many Places of Cold War Science [essay review of Joanna Radin’s Life on Ice and David Munn’s Engineering the Environment],” Isis 109, no. 4 (December 2018), 806-808.
“The Myth of Apolitical Science [review of Audra Wolfe’s Freedom’s Laboratory],” Science 362, no. 6418 (30 November 2018), 1006.
“Of Chemistry and Conflict [review of Jennet Conant’s Man of the Hour],” Nature 549, no. 7670 (September 2017), 28-29.
Review of John Krige, Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe, H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable 9, no. 19 (July 2017), 11-14.
“The Many Hats of a Cold War Scientist [review of Joel Shurkin’s True Genius],” Nature Physics 13 (2017), 319.
Review of Sonja D. Schmid, Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry, Isis 108, no. 1 (2017), 229-230.
“Civilization VI and its Discontents [review of Sid Meier’s Civilization VI (2016)],” Endeavour 41, no. 1 (2017), 1-2.
“Bomb’s Away? [review of Dan Zak’s Almighty],” Science 353, no. 6299 (2016): 549.
“The Race that Wasn’t [review of Graham Farmelo’s Churchill’s Bomb],” The Nonproliferation Review 22, no. 1 (2015): 93-97.
“Cult of the Machine [review of Michael Hiltzick’s Big Science],” Science 349, no. 6252 (2015): 1062-1063.
“Physicist. Defector. Spy? [review of Frank Close’s Half-Life]” Science 347, no. 6224 (2015): 833.
Review of B. Cameron Reed, The History and Science of the Manhattan Project, American Journal of Physics 82, no. 9 (September 2014), 914.
Review of Brian Balmer, Secrecy and Science: A Historical Sociology of Biological and Chemical Warfare, Isis 104, no. 4 (December 2013), 863-864.
Review of Sean Malloy, “‘A Very Pleasant Way to Die’: Radiation Effects and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb against Japan,” H-Diplo Article Reviews 371 (17 October 2012).
“Heterodoxy and its Discontents,” review of Michael Gordin, The Pseudoscience Wars; Science 338 (12 October 2012), 194-195.
“Nuclear Others [essay review of Gabrielle Hecht’s Being Nuclear],” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 3 (2012), 235-245.
Review of Matthew Kroenig, Exporting the Bomb; Marine Corps University Journal 3, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 106-108.
“Contingencies of the Early Nuclear Arms Race [review of Michael Gordin’s Red Cloud at Dawn],” with S.S. Schweber, Metascience 20, no. 3 (2011): 443-465.
Review of J. Samuel Walker, The Road to Yucca Mountain; Isis 101, no. 4 (December 2010), 928-929.
“Our Special Bomb [review of Michael Gordin, Five Days in August],” Endeavour 33, no. 2 (2009): 44-45.
“State Secrets [review of Kristie Macrakis, Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World],” Endeavour 32, no. 4 (2008): 123-124.
Review of Mary Jo Nye, Blackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth Century; Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 36, no. 2 (2006), 400-401.
Review of Peter J. Westwick, The national labs: Science in an American system, 1947-1974; Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 41, no. 1 (2003), 201.