Alex WellersteinVerified account

I had a conversation with Karen Darling where she essentially said, regarding my work on my book, figure out what you need this book to do for you, and what you want to be because of it. Is it going to get you a job? Is it going to establish you as the expert on a specific topic?

For whatever reason it suddenly just clicked that what I wanted was to be the nuclear history guy. Like, the one that would get called up on all these kinds of stories, the guy you had to check with or footnote. That was the ambition.

And then I thought: well how do I do that? And I concluded that spending all my time on a long, academic monograph wasn't how it was going to happen. So kind of ironically given the context, I decided instead I ought to start a blog, and see where that regimen of writing led me.

It led me to try a number of little projects, out of which eventually the NUKEMAP (February 2012) also emerged, and that thing got super famous/viral, and then everything else I did got sort of attached to that as a result.

So it's one part deliberate action, one part huge lucky break (that I was already in the position and mood to capitalize on). The whole thing worked out a lot better than I would ever have predicted at the time. I still kind of marvel at its strangeness.