This repository contains a web-native, accessible conversion of the 1977 edition of “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons”, an unclassified publication of the United States government compiled and edited by Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan. The repository also contains the PDF scans of the original text that were the basis of this conversion project.
The conversion of this venerable document was undertaken in 2022 by Chris Griffith and Eric A. Meyer. For some details on the technical aspects of this version, see the Preface (2022) file (html/preface2022.html). You can find the live version of this project at The Atomic Archive.
In the online conversion process, we did our best to make the content as robust, accessible, and readable as possible across a wide range of browsers and browsing contexts. If you find there are accessibility barriers or any other problems, and are not sure how to fix them, please file a Github issue on this repository outlining the problem and what should have happened instead. We would particularly welcome well-written alt text for the various photographs and figures, which all have descriptive captions but would almost certainly benefit from more precise descriptions.
For the more technically inclined, please feel free to fork the repository and submit pull requests containing fixes for any errors or omissions. Please note that where content is enclosed in a <span class="sic">…</span> element, the error existed in the original print publication, and has been preserved for the sake of historical accuracy. Errors which are not so marked are likely the fault of the conversion team, and fixes or issues regarding them will be gratefully accepted. Common errors in the image-to-text conversion process included substituting uppercase I for the number 1, uppercase J for a closing parenthesis, and lowercase L for a solidus (forward slash).
This version does not (as yet) include a recreation of the Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer (NBEC) that was included with the print edition. For a much more modern and full-featured take on the NBEC, see Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP.