Alex Wellerstein, Stevens Institute of Technology

This project will create two new pieces of software, OpenSIOP and TARGETMAP. OpenSIOP is an application designed to make the curation of nuclear war scenarios by researchers easier, quicker, and more transparent. It is an open-source framework for managing datasets of possible nuclear targets, national nuclear arsenals, and target allocations. It will allow expert researchers to easily share and modify target sets, create subsets of targets on the basis of sophisticated targeting philosophies, create force allocations (war scenarios) based on those targets, and export these results to other tools for consequence estimation. It will also be designed to accommodate historical data and methodologies. At every stage, this development will be informed by close communication with other researchers working on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons. TARGETMAP will be built upon the data model developed for OpenSIOP as a public-facing tool for lay audiences to visualize nuclear war scenarios across time and enable them to think concretely about the nature of nuclear war and its impacts. These two tools have the potential to radically improve and enhance academic research into realistic nuclear war scenarios, both in the present and past, as well as facilitate an increased level of engagement with the topic than has ever been possible among lay (and journalist) audiences.