Alex WellersteinVerified account

New concept to me: This site is run by someone I guess you could call a nuclear truther—a person who thinks we're being lied to re: how bad a nuclear attack might be http://www.nukefallout.com/ 

There are many "nukes are more survival than people think" people. It is not entirely false, but only because most people's perceptions of nukes is pretty far out of whack with the (still pretty bad) reality.

Here’s another one - has been posting walls of text since 2006 and still going strong: http://glasstone.blogspot.com.au/ 

Yes, I know his work well. You can find various screeds about me in his archives because I stopped letting him post comments to my blog, which apparently makes me Hitler and Chamberlain simultaneously (the only two political analogies he knows).

Here's the tricky thing, though. Many of the documents his posts ARE interesting and useful. And he is right that most people DO devalue Civil Defense more than they ought to. So it is one extreme of this, and the "nukes kill everyone instantly" is perhaps another extreme.

In my work on Reinventing Civil Defense, I have been trying to find some kind of helpful medium, something that acknowledges that the popular notions are wrong (and largely unhelpful) but doesn't completely drink the "nukes are really no problem" Kool-Aid.