Tasteless Depictions of Nuclear War

[spookydom]

One film in particular I want to mention is the film Threads http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/ Not so much as a tasteless film but more of an education. Anybody who thinks you can win at Nuclear war should watch this bad boy, totally chilling and has effected me my whole life ever since we where made to watch it in secondary school at the height of the cold war as I guess The Day After must have done for many of my American cousins. This film got me more as it is set a bit closer to home odviously I still can't belive how close we came to doing it to ourselves and also 30 odd years later it's still a cloud hanging over our heads....../shivers. On one hand I think that glorification for entertainment value of nuclear war is wrong and that it breeds contempt and that people should be educatated as I was about just how dangerous it is and on the other hand I have one of the biggest collections of Apocalyptic and Post Apocalyptic films/books/comics of anybody else I know. Guess I have always found it a fascinating subject.

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

In the military we use nuclear war as the be all and end all on exercise scenarios. We know the horrors of it, and the terminator 2 video is nothing compared to the live pig test videos from the 50s! They make your blood curdle... I have never heard anything worse than the sound of the pigs frying alive in a nuclear blast... not even the gurgling sound someone makes whilst screaming when they are being beheaded.

The problem with nuclear weapons in the media is that the media became desensitised to it... During the cold war the threat was real. Very real. And we came to the very brink of nuclear war. People were terrified, the media spun it crazy![footnote]Well, in the US they did, the UK played it down. Knowing we were the first target, and there was no point panicking the public when there was no defence against it, the UK decided that public blissful ignorance was more humane. Threfore there were no drills in schools, no national drills or even any indication that we were a target. (I am talking more cuban missile crisis here than later)[/footnote] The problem was that there was no nuclear war. We didn't sling atom bombs at eachother, and we ended up with a boy that cried wolf scenario. The media, and in turn, the public became desensitised to it, and it is no longer seen as a viable threat, and because of that it is now more of a glorified fictional weapon, born more out of sci-fi than real life. Hell, the media, and part of the public, were outraged recently about how much the state spends on its nuclear deterrent without understanding how that deterrent works...

 

[Sixcess]

Personally I've never been at all moved by that scene in Terminator 2 - the burning playground is a cliche one step above a dropped dolly being trodden on by fleeing civilians, and James Cameron, in general, loves nukes as awesome visuals - see True Lies, where a nuclear detonation is used as the backdrop to a kiss.

The thing is you simply can't incorporate a nuclear war into any form of 'entertainment' and be remotely realistic about it. The Terminator, Mad Max, Fallout... all of these push the enjoyable fantasy of a survivable nuclear war, in which sure a whole lot of people will die, but hey, if you survive you can go all post-apoc punk and shoot dudes.
]
Watch Threads - a BBC drama made in the 80s, around the same time as The Day After, that really does show the likely aftermath of a nuclear war. It's brilliant, powerful drama, and almost 30 years on it's lost none of its impact.

Spoiler: Threads

But it's not entertainment. It's probably the most depressing film I've ever seen.

I get what you're saying, but I don't think there is a way to portray a nuclear attack and be true to what would actually happen without overwhelming the rest of the film, book or game.

Edit: I see spookydom brought Threads up while I was writing this. Oh well, it's worth repeating.

 

[PhantomEcho]

There has at no point, before nuclear weapons, been the ability to kill 80% of the human race in 40 minutes flat.

And, up to now, there still is not.

The effects of nuclear weapons are grossly over-exaggerated, to the extent that many people don't feel that any precautions are worth taking in the event of an attack. Should a war occur, this would cost millions of lives.

There are around 3000 warheads in existence currently in the arsenals of the big 5 nuclear powers. The vast majority of those weapons are with yields of 100kt-500kt, each more than capable of destroying a city. I suggest you look at this list an add the number of dead just from 100 cities http://www.worldatlas.com/citypops.htm#.Ubc18fmsh8E

The problem you're not seeing is that, while there are around 3000 -known- nuclear weapons in the arsenal of the major nuclear powers... they are not all ARMED and LOADED. Some are hopelessly lost in crates of ordinance. Some are stashed away in various warehouses. Some are sitting in weapons development laboratories, where they work to make them even more terrible and deadly.

Now. You fire ONE nuclear salvo. Your targets... what will they be? Cities full of people? Hell no. They're going to be MILITARY installations, in an attempt to disable your enemy's ability to counter-attack. Those enemies return the favor. Now, -SOME- of those military installations will be in cities, and yes... casualties will be high...

But there will NOT be 3000 nuclear warheads flying around the globe all at once, blasting us into endless oblivion. There will be, at most, a few hundred tactical nuclear warheads, aimed strategically at our enemy's best guesses as to where all of our nuclear missile silos might be housed. We'll be doing the same.

You won't see 100 cities wiped off the face of the map. You'll see low-yield nuclear bunker-busters leaving city-block sized radioactive craters in the ground where subterranean launch complexes used to be. At best, the global powers will wipe out enough of one another's governments and military structures that they all collapse in on themselves. At worst, you'll have a paranoid bunch of post-nuclear nuclear powers arming up a second round of attacks with the millions of lives lost... and millions more doomed to a slow death by radiation poisoning... fueling their vendettas.

But more likely than not, that second round of attacks would be conventional warfare... as the moment you launch a nuclear missile, everyone is going to know EXACTLY where you launched it from and target your launch facilities.

It would be catastrophic, yes... but it wouldn't look a damn thing like what popular culture wants you to think.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Well, in the US they did, the UK played it down. Knowing we were the first target, and there was no point panicking the public when there was no defence against it, the UK decided that public blissful ignorance was more humane. Threfore there were no drills in schools, no national drills or even any indication that we were a target. (I am talking more cuban missile crisis here than later)

Really? That sounds very unwise. Lots of simple precautions have a reasonable chance of saving some lives.

 

[IBlackKiteI]

You could say the same thing about a ton of different weaponry. For instance automatics mean that a guy can walk into a room and kill and maim dozens within seconds, a very real and terrible possibility, yet we often see settings going on about how stupidly fast their guns can shoot and how the big the holes they can punch into people are.
This kind of thing is not at all exclusive to nukes. Thanks to a combination of years of action-fuck yeah style media and the Western world not suffering a extremely grueling, long conflict (on a national level, to the extent of conscription/drafts) in that time, weaponry and violence has effectively become trivialized and we don't see how terrible their effects can be until we a) see something as gripping and horrible as the Terminator scene, or b) experience it firsthand.

That said, so long as we don't lose sight of what weapons like nukes can do, I don't think you have to depict nukes as what they are and what nuclear war entails whenever you bring them up within a work, unless the theme of realistic nuclear war is most definitely what the setting is trying to convey first and foremost (in that case, just as you said, show us it's horrors and don't hold back or trivialize. If you're gonna focus on something so heavy, make it fucking heavy).
CoD games and Mass Effect aren't solely about nuclear wars so it simply wouldn't make much sense to have big banners going on about how terrible nukes are throughout. Let's teach kids about Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Cold War so they'll hopefully know to not repeat those events, but we don't have to go on and on about how bad nukes are in any work that features them.

I thought the nuke thing in COD4 was pretty good. It wasn't that 'greatest and most gripping deconstruction of the nature of modern warfare since Platoon' or whatever variety of untrue pretentious crap some people go on about with regards to it, but I thought it was pretty well done and gave you a good incentive to stop the nukes later in the game after seeing the effect of one firsthand. I thought that was the whole idea. I was more determined to race through the final sections of the game as quickly as possible because I didn't want to see another nuke go off, not because I just wanted to get the game over with. A story event had a fairly significant impact on how I was playing the game. There's very few games where I've felt that, at least consciously.
(also, I groaned at how bored I was with MW2's airport shooting and laughed at the gas bombing. Now those were pretty fucking poorly done. Doesn't sour my view on the nuke in COD4 though.)

I'm not sure about the 40k bit. Whereas in Terminator the threat of nuclear war is first and firstmost meant to be dramatic and fucking scary (which it is, something akin to it is an occassionally recurring nightmare of mine) in 40k its moreso just to highly the Imperium's stupidity, (nuking a minor chaos infestation because why the fuck not?) or sheer desperation (nuking a planet overrun by swarms of bad shit). You're not meant to go eyes wide processing how fucking terrible WMD's are, you meant to go 'huh, that's dumb' or 'huh, that's full-on.'

tl:dr - The full effects of a nuclear conflict need only be portrayed/conveyed if that's what the story focuses on most prominently. Nukes, and all weapons are fucking bad. I think it's ok to use nukes as devices of sorts within works so long as we don't lose sight of that fact.

 

[Muspelheim]

Snip

I'm curious. Do you count Fallout as a proper depiction of the effects of nuclear war?

I will say this though: nuking Megaton is right up there with COD4 for pissing away consequences. An entire settlement is leveled, and the only major effect is that one character is now a ghoul. There is no emotional weight behind it, and Moira just laughs it off anyways. Nevermind that a whle town of friends have been turned to dust, you get to study the effects of radioactive skin cells!

You do have a point. But I do think it's individual. I did choose to blow up Megaton once, since the option came up. I did feel very guilty afterwards. And then Dad expressed his disappointment with me. That was a kick.

Even more so considering that it was the last thing we ever discussed.

Never did it again, and I did feel genuine guilt for destroying a functioning settlement for the sake of living with a bunch of entitled fops in a tower. I am a bit of a bleeding heart, though, and the Megaton thing could've been handled better. About the only consequence was dear old Moira Alzheimers moving to Underworld, and a few handful of Megaton survivors ambushing me in the desert once, with predictable results.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

There are conventional bombs that literally suck the air out of victim's lungs upon detonation, before the air itself is ignited like a match to propane fumes with the entire area (a mile or so wide) is reduced to ashes.

You're talking about Fuel-Air Explosives, also known as Thermobaric weapons.

What you have wrong is the order in which things happen... fuel vapour is dispersed in the air and then ignited this causes a massive wave of heat and pressure (thermobaric means heat and pressure). This is immediately followed by a localised 'vaccum' (it's an ultra low pressure area not a true vaccum), an effect you can get from any large scale incendiary device or campaigns that employ a large number of incendiaries in a relatively small area, see: the dresden firebombings, the tokyo firebombings and the effects of napalm on entrenched troops during the Vietnam war.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Watch Threads - a BBC drama made in the 80s, around the same time as The Day After, that really does show the likely aftermath of a nuclear war.

... or Sheffield on a sunday morning.

 

[Froggy Slayer]

There has at no point, before nuclear weapons, been the ability to kill 80% of the human race in 40 minutes flat.

And, up to now, there still is not.

The effects of nuclear weapons are grossly over-exaggerated, to the extent that many people don't feel that any precautions are worth taking in the event of an attack. Should a war occur, this would cost millions of lives.

Kill 80% of humanity in 40 minutes flat? No. But doom them? Yes, I think that they could do.

 

[Froggy Slayer]

Well, in the US they did, the UK played it down. Knowing we were the first target, and there was no point panicking the public when there was no defence against it, the UK decided that public blissful ignorance was more humane. Threfore there were no drills in schools, no national drills or even any indication that we were a target. (I am talking more cuban missile crisis here than later)

Really? That sounds very unwise. Lots of simple precautions have a reasonable chance of saving some lives.

We had precautions (like those Protect and Survive shorts-terrifying) but just didn't spend a lot of time fussing over it.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Kill 80% of humanity in 40 minutes flat? No. But doom them? Yes, I think that they could do.

Depends what you mean by doom. You'd kill the odd billion, and send humanity backa a few centuries, but enough people would survive for civilisation to recover.

 

[Froggy Slayer]

Kill 80% of humanity in 40 minutes flat? No. But doom them? Yes, I think that they could do.

Depends what you mean by doom. You'd kill the odd billion, and send humanity backa a few centuries, but enough people would survive for civilisation to recover.

This is where it gets unpredictable. We (thank god) haven't had a full blown nuclear conflict yet, so we have no idea how survivable a post nuclear world could be. It could set us back a few hundred years, or it could lead to us all starving to death in the grip of a nuclear winter.

Either way, I don't want to find out.

 

[Tom_green_day]

The don't try to "sell" how cool nukes are in Mass Effect if you remember correctly
"You are going to ruin SOMEBODY'S day... THAT is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution!"
Even the Cain can only be used once every other mission. And the one time you DO use a nuclear device in combat, well... it's costs you either way.

I agree. When a nuke is used in the first game, the consequences are brought up numerous times throughout the series

An entire settlement is leveled, and the only major effect is that one character is now a ghoul.

Visit the Megaton ruins. That should give some idea. And throughout the series there are other examples of nukes and the effects that I feel are respectful.
However, I can't actually think of too many works of fiction using nukes. MW, Fallout, Mass Effect 1... That's about it.

 

[Axolotl]

Now. You fire ONE nuclear salvo. Your targets... what will they be? Cities full of people? Hell no. They're going to be MILITARY installations, in an attempt to disable your enemy's ability to counter-attack. Those enemies return the favor. Now, -SOME- of those military installations will be in cities, and yes... casualties will be high...

But there will NOT be 3000 nuclear warheads flying around the globe all at once, blasting us into endless oblivion. There will be, at most, a few hundred tactical nuclear warheads, aimed strategically at our enemy's best guesses as to where all of our nuclear missile silos might be housed. We'll be doing the same.

This is a pleasant fantasy but it's not what would actually happen. You're claim that would target military installations over cities isn't backed up by the facts. If you look at the declassified military plans that were made in the 960's for a nuclear strike by the USA then cities very much were targets with estimated casualties well in excess of 200 million. Now that's not from a nuclear war or even a nuclear exchange, that's just from a first strike. If a first strike has a higher death toll than any war before then a full blown nuclear war isn't just going to take out the respective governments and militaries, it is for all intents and purposes going to destroy any nation involved.

 

[Thaluikhain]

This is a pleasant fantasy but it's not what would actually happen. You're claim that would target military installations over cities isn't backed up by the facts. If you look at the declassified military plans that were made in the 960's for a nuclear strike by the USA then cities very much were targets with estimated casualties well in excess of 200 million. Now that's not from a nuclear war or even a nuclear exchange, that's just from a first strike. If a first strike has a higher death toll than any war before then a full blown nuclear war isn't just going to take out the respective governments and militaries, it is for all intents and purposes going to destroy any nation involved.

Cities themselves aren't targets, there's no point attacking people. However, various important things happen to be located at or near cities.

Certainly, it's going to destroy nations, but the people (as a whole) will survive.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

The effects of nuclear weapons are grossly over-exaggerated, to the extent that many people don't feel that any precautions are worth taking in the event of an attack.

Tell me about it. My dad (who is usually pretty knowledgeable about politics and such) once told me that the combined power of the world's nuclear weapons "is enough to destroy the earth several times over." It really makes me wonder what kind of bullshit the media have been spreading to make him think that. I mean, maybe if you got them all together in one place and set them off at once, you could get a pretty big crater, but that's it.

 

[exobook]

Settings like Mass Effect, or Warhammer 40000, will use Nukes as a unit of measurement to try and sell you on how great and awesome the power of their weaponry is. And it is meant to be shown as cool. "Whoa, that ship's gun fires shots three times more powerful than the Little Boy? Wicked!" That's what we're being told, not "Dear god, this is a weapon of mass destruction greater than the most infamous weapon in modern history, and we are making a joke out of it."

Side stepping the arguments about nukes and nuclear warfighting (yes this is a phrase actually used), part of the problem is that the Hiroshima is so often used as a measurement for a weapon or event because its the largest event of destruction in the public conscious so for narrative convience writers will often use such event to tell the player how big the threat is.

However there is also the fact that in real life, space warefare is going to be just a leathal. If you acclerate an object of sufficant mass to sufficent speed it is going to hit with the explosive yield comparatble with nuclear weapons (1KG at 75% of light speed is going to give you a 11 Mt impact). So when mass effect and Halo and other universes throw around these numbers they atleast have a reason to do so. Would such a future be terrifying? Probadly but as we've yet the experience it on any great scale we can't visualise it so we fall back to using Hiroshima to compare it.

But of course we play these games for entainment and so often these games do not so the consequence of such weapons not only people it does not fit with the pacing or plot but also because the resulting images would not sit well with the console owner looking for something to unwind. This is compounded by visual media (TV, Film, Games) often shrinking the scale of space combat and its explosions to fit everything on the screens. According to the lore the photon torpedos on Star Trek have a 1 Mt warhead yet on screen they look like normal missilse.

All of this however has the effect of making many people desensitizatied to the effect of nuclear weapons since they keep seeing them having less effect in the media, that and the end of the cold war mean many people do not understand the effect of nuclear weapons. However this can also lead to the overplaying of the effects of nuclear weapons. Not to go into it but while the effects of the nuke denonation in Terminator 2 are realistic, it still gets the detail of scale all wrong. Not way the airblast could hit Sarah from a ground zero in central LA assuming she's in somewhere like Malibu. Not unless we're getting into the 40+ Mt weapon range.



On the case of Warhammer 40K its a bit more complicated. While on the surface Extermanatris (the destruction of a planet) looks like a immature "OH Wow we can blow up Planets AWESOME!" idea. Orginally the setting was more of a black comedy in which the setting creates an environment where the worse aspects of humanity (facism, extremism and hatered) are needed to survive. While this black comedy aspect has been lost to some extent, in this light the ideas of Extermanatris is more an example of mankinds brutality but also the cruel logic used to justify it.

 

[Thaluikhain]

The effects of nuclear weapons are grossly over-exaggerated, to the extent that many people don't feel that any precautions are worth taking in the event of an attack.

Tell me about it. My dad (who is usually pretty knowledgeable about politics and such) once told me that the combined power of the world's nuclear weapons "is enough to destroy the earth several times over." It really makes me wonder what kind of bullshit the media have been spreading to make him think that. I mean, maybe if you got them all together in one place and set them off at once, you could get a pretty big crater, but that's it.

Apparently active nuclear activists are responsible. While I support persuading people that nuclear war is bad, I don't like persuading people that if it happens, they can't survive, so don't bother trying.

 

[Varrdy]

One film in particular I want to mention is the film Threads http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/ Not so much as a tasteless film but more of an education. Anybody who thinks you can win at Nuclear war should watch this bad boy, totally chilling and has effected me my whole life ever since we where made to watch it in secondary school at the height of the cold war as I guess The Day After must have done for many of my American cousins. This film got me more as it is set a bit closer to home odviously

I watched Threads last week and The Day After last night. Whilst Threads is undoubtedly more disturbing, both need to be seen equally. What disturbed me most about Threads is that it was set in Sheffield, a city just 30 minutes (tops!) drive from where I live. I have relatives there, too.