Angry Planet - UNLOCKED: Coping in the New Age of Nuclear Anxiety

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

Russia is at war with Ukraine and Vladimir Putin is making vague nuclear threats. Both Russian and U.S. officials are, mostly, trying to dial things down. A Russian defense official said they don’t have their hands on the button and the Pentagon said it had canceled the test of a Minuteman missile. And yet … days later the U.S. head of Strategic Command said America needed to modernize its nuclear forces and reminded everyone that the test had been postponed and not canceled.If all this is leaving you a bit anxious about the possibility of nuclear war, you’re not alone. To be clear, the possibility of nuclear war is still damn low … but that doesn’t always make the anxiety go away. Something that has always helped me deal with the threat of nuclear hellfire … is pop culture.That’s what we’re gonna talk about today.Here to help me with that is Jacqueline Bryk. Bryk is an analog Roleplaying Game personality, a nuclear policy dilettante, and a nuke wonk gadfly. She’s the writer of many fine games including the Ten Candles hack, Nuke: “A simple, stark game about slowly dying in a city hit by a nuclear weapon.”Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello there, Angry Planet listeners. This is Matthew. We've gotten a lot of flood of new listeners in the past 30 days, and we've been recording a lot of really great episodes that we don't want to put behind the paywall.

And given the situation in Ukraine and this flood of new listeners, we want to let them know kind of what those premium episodes look like and what we do. So we're going to release them on the mainstream this month. I really hope doesn't upset our substack listeners too much. But this episode in particular is one of the ones that would have normally been behind a paywall. But we thought it would be good to release it here. We're also recording another one that's about the changing nature of tank combat in land wars. and what this war in Ukraine means for that.

It's another episode that would have been paywalled that's going to be going out to everybody. So enjoy. If you like what we do here, we're at Angry Planetpod.com. But without further ado, I'll get out of your way and let you listen to this excellent episode. People live in a world and their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem.

Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. Jason Fields is busy working for a living today. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I'm pretty tired. Russia is a war with Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is making vague nuclear threats. Both Russia and U.S. officials are mostly trying to dial things down. A Russian defense official said that they don't have their hands on the button,

and the Pentagon said it had canceled the test of a Minuteman missile. Yet, days later, the U.S. head of strategic command said America needed to modernize its nuclear forces and reminded everyone that the test had been postponed and not canceled. If all of this is leaving you a bit anxious about the possibility of nuclear war, you're not alone. And to be clear, the possibility of nuclear war is still damn low, but that doesn't always make the anxiety go away. Something that has always helped me deal with the threat of nuclear hellfire is hop culture. And that's what we're going to talk about today. And here to help me with that is Jacqueline Brick.

Brick is an analog role-playing game personality, a nuclear policy dilettante, and a nuke-wank gadfly. She's also the wonderful writer of many fine games, including the Tin Candles Hack, Nuke, quote, a simple stark game about slowly dying in a city hit by a nuclear weapon. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So... I don't know if your listeners know this, but I've been bugging you to introduce me in a podcast as a nuclear policy dilettante for the last year and here we are finally in the world yeah it just all it took was a land war in

Europe to get us here no kidding um so before we go into nuclear pop culture i had no idea the pentagon was like oh we just postpone the test of a minute man missile yeah so the the the press secretary had come out and said like hey this is canceled we're not we're not doing this right now right And then yesterday's Strategic Command, I can't remember his name, was testifying. And he's like, look, we need to modernize our ICBM silos and all this X, Y, and Z. And also, we're still going to test that Minuteman missile. We're just holding off exactly. Yeah.

Listeners, you can't see me, but I am making a jackoff motion. Catch me gatekeeping ICBMs from US STRATCOM at this point. Just anytime stratcom talks. Someone should be in the background doing that. Yeah. Exhausting. Yeah, they're in their social media presence. Though okay recently is an all-time nightmare.

Yes. That's like a whole other tangent. What's your anxiety level right now vis-a-vis v. Nukes in the end of the world? So weirdly, my anxiety level vis-a-vis nukes is quite low. I mostly hang out on nuclear Twitter with people like Martin Pfeiffer and Jeffrey Lewis and your own good self. And people who actually know about nukes are very, very clear that, no,

nukes aren't going off anytime soon. We're probably still around DefCon 5 or DefCon 4. And for those of you listening who think, that sounds really dangerous. Defcon counts down, not up. But my anxiety is more around people who think they understand nukes. and to give a couple more credentials because you gave me a wonderful intro and I really appreciate that. My degree is in international relations with a focus in post-Soviet politics.

So what has been happening since February 24th has been affecting me pretty deeply? And there is nothing more rage-inducing than seeing people go, Russia is invading Ukraine to blow up Chernobyl and turn Europe into a nuclear wasteland. That's their entire plan. And attempting to explain to people that nuclear fallout doesn't actually stop at national borders. And

Priput is close enough to Russia that they'd be heavily endangering themselves by doing that is nearly impossible. Because people have catapulted directly back into Gen X anxiety. And not

I guess the best way of putting this is we're seeing the mutation of Gen X anxiety in real time because of social media. Yeah. I think that's a good way to put it. The one that gets me, and I had to, like, in real time, debunk a friend the other day who knows better, was telling me about how he's worried about a dirty bomb, somebody, some of the, like, fissile material being collected for, yeah, just, and like to give the listeners just, just like a very quick thing. Like, if you ever hear anybody about somebody storming a nuclear plant to get nuclear material to make a dirty bomb, they don't, like, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

They do not. Also, there's a Robin Williams bit about this from 2001 where he just grabs this crotch and goes, oh, you like the rushes with the dirty bomb. And that's all I can think of, am I allowed to swear on this podcast? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all I can fucking think of whenever anyone's like, oh, no, dirty bomb, suitcase, nuke. Yeah, just very simply, like the weight of nuclear material would make it very hard to make what would people traditionally think of as a dirty bomb out of something. The explosion that is caused is always going to be much worse than whatever they think

is going to be aerosolized. But anyway, setting that aside. I don't think people actually understand the weight and density of nuclear material. Like one of my favorite sort of nuclear accidents, because I'm the sort of person who has favorite nuclear accidents, is the Demon Corps. Yeah. And something I didn't realize until recently is that the Demon Corps, which has caused so many problems for so many people, was only three inches across. Tell the audience what the Demon Corps is. Oh, I'm so glad you asked.

The Demon Corps was a nuclear, not warhead exactly. but experimental nuclear ball of material that's about as plebeian as I can go with it, that killed, gosh, let me look up how many people it killed. It was called the Demon Corps because people thought it was cursed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's, okay, so it's three inches across. How much do you think it weighs, Matthew? Oh, it's shocking.

and I can't remember what I can't remember what it is, but you're about to tell me. 14 pounds. Yeah. It is the size of a large, it is the weight of a large cat. And it's three inches across. It killed one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight people, um, were involved with it and were hit with super critical radiation. Um, I think only two of them actually died at the scene.

but it was enough that this core, this tiny, honestly, freaking tiny piece of plutonium and it's literally referred to as a subcritical mass in case you want to use the actual scientific term instead of an orb. You could, in fact, ponder the demon core if you wanted to. It is a favorite past time of mine.

But this orb, this three inch orb have caused enough problems for the people studying in the Los Alamos Laboratory that they eventually just had to take it apart. Yeah. And you like, so, you know, you translate that into thinking somebody's going to make a suitcase nuke. And it just, it's not feasible. Like, you don't, yeah, it's just not going to happen.

Don't worry about that. One of the funniest things I think about nuclear accidents like that is an act, one of the accidents at the Los Alamos laboratory was. was literally a guy stacking bars of plutonium and he drops one in the middle. And had he not reached in, you know, reflexively to be like, oh, no, he wouldn't have died. But oops, now his hand is in the middle of the sun. Bomber. I think that's one of the things that fascinates me about it is how, like, so much of it is invisible to the naked eye that it feels like a magic.

force in some way. Tell me your... So you and I are younger, I think, than the generation that is traditionally frightened of nuclear weapons. Yeah, I was born in 92, so like a year after the fall of the Berlin Mall. So I have found with people around that generation that are interested in this thing, there's an origin story. Something happened that made them get interested in this.

What's yours? So mine is kind of funny. I was homeschooled for much of my life and I was homeschooled because of my ADHD. And my parents at the time did not realize that special interests and hyperfocuses were part of ADHD. They just knew that I had at the age of six developed a really quite alarming interest in the wreck of the Titanic. but they decided that if they were going to continue homeschooling me, they wanted me and my sister to be socialized. So we became part of a homeschooling co-op. And one of my friends in the co-op had movie nights in his basement because his mom was very interested in showing, you know, these homeschooled kids of the classics and, you know, getting us some culture. And one movie night happened to be Dr. Strangelove or how I stopped.

how I learned to stop wearing and love the bomb. How old were you? I was 11. Oh, wow. Maybe a little early. I did not understand all of the jokes like I do now. And I wasn't sure I would enjoy it because I didn't really enjoy war films at the time. I still don't.

It really depends on the war film. But these images of the cloud. and the way people were treating this crisis in that movie, both as a cudgel and as basically treating the crisis in every single extreme you can possibly think of, like, it's not a real crisis, it's a real crisis. This crisis will cause me to be able to push my political agenda. I got really, really interested in that. And I don't think my parents were thrilled by that because this is around the same time we were studying World War II in my history class.

And then I started reading up about the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I was like, oh, my God, what the hell? And the sort of monumental horror image of the nuclear cloud has really stuck with me to this day. So where do you put Dr. Strangelove now? I do not put it in my holy, I guess it is a holy trinity of nuclear films. It is definitely a film I will watch when I'm sad, because it's extremely funny, especially once you understand that what Kubrick is trying to say is that nukes are the dicks, we wave at each other. But, like, it's fine. it's not my favorite, but I will definitely watch it if someone is like,

hey, Jacks, do you like nukes? Do you want to watch a nuclear movie? And for being such a dark comedy, it's incredibly realistic. That's the thing that I like about it is we, can you imagine the early 1960s, right, that that thing comes out? Like, those are pretty similar to the conversations that are actually happening. but just played for laughs. No lie.

I am literally waiting for Lindsay Graham to go, one night I couldn't complete the act of lovemaking. Yeah. Yeah, I can see it. As a South Carolinian now, lots of thoughts on Lindsay Graham. None of them good. But, okay, what's in your Holy Trinity?

So a lot of people who engage with nuclear media, I guess it's fair to say that my special interest now is more nuclear media than it is actual nuclear policy, but I am a dilettante, which I'm still really happy about. Everyone who's involved, everyone who watches nuclear films has their Holy Trinity. And the top of everyone's Holy Trinity is Threats. That one is indisputable. I have never met anyone who enjoys realistic nuclear media and doesn't say that Threads is their favorite movie. my second one is actually probably the war game the 1965 one by peter watkins that is actually sort of the granddaddy of all these other films and it has my single favorite line about nuclear weapons in it in any any media give me the line uh the line is at this distance a third oh no no i screwed it up let me look it up so i can

read it to you in the voice. Yeah, the dry British narrator voice. Oh, it's perfect. It's so perfect. I'm in a mug while you're doing that. So, like, that one is super fascinating to me because I think at the time I saw it, I had to, like, find a pirated copy

because it had aired, I believe, once on television in the 60s when it was commissioned by the BBC. Or no, it hadn't been. It had aired for executives. and then the executives were like, we shouldn't show this to people. And then they had a screening in a movie theater that was attended lightly by the public,

whoever I guess could get into the movie theater. This thing was very controversial at the time. It's only about 50 minutes long. And it's incredibly good. It's incredibly good. And it's kind of a style of thing that no one was making at the time, where it's a documentary

as if a nuclear war is happening in and it's kind of set in Britain I think Sheffield, some like a smallish I don't think so. I think it's in the northeast. The northeast, okay. Are we talking about threads? Are we talking about the war game? War game, war game.

Threads is set in Sheffield. Okay, that's why. The war game is mostly set in and around London, if I remember correctly. Okay. Yeah, I think, yeah, you're right. And so it's this start. black and white 50 minute, what feels like a documentary.

And Watkins, the director, used basically like all the civil service and home defense stuff that was available to like put together, you know, what it would actually look like if a nuke went off in Britain,

if like nuclear war happened. And it's fascinating and strange. And it absolutely terrified BBC executives. And it was strangely, even though it was a faux documentary, it was nominated that year for an Oscar as a documentary film.

And then the BBC basically put it in a vault and where it sat for decades until it recently started to kind of get some airplay. And it was for, it's one of those that's like, comes onto YouTube occasionally. It's on archive.org as well. It is on archive.org.

And it bubbled up on Netflix. for a little while of all places. Oh, weird, really? Yeah, yeah. I don't know if it's there anymore, but it was definitely there for a little bit. He's got another great, have you ever seen any of his other stuff,

other Watkins stuff? I know about Punishment Park. I haven't seen it. The other one I've seen is Kaladin, which is about the Battle of Kaladden between the Scottish and the English. And similar thing, it's about an hour long,

and he filmed it where the battle was taking place, and it's in that same war game. style where it's a faux documentary. Awesome. I love his work and I don't remember if he narrates the documentary himself. But whoever I think he does. But whoever he

got to narrate the war game, just it's phenomenal. It's perfect. Give me the line. All right. I found the line. The blast wave from a thermonuclear explosion has been likened to an enormous door slamming in the depths of hell.

You're right about the delivery of all this stuff Because it's all it's very dry in matter of fact The best part The best that's the best line The best part of how this movie is how dry and it's actually really fairly cool to the viewer Yes Not in a way that it wants Not in a way that it wants the viewer to like vomit or anything

Or like it's not edgy but it is cool Yeah. There's one part I remember where I think it's the Anglican bishop who's like, I still believe in the war of the just. And then the next line is immediately, in this car, a family is burning alive. Yep. And then he gets his, is he the one that gets his eyes blown out too? I think the Anglican bishop.

No, it's the little boy and the woman who goes and rescues him. Yes, because they look at the, yeah. They look at the flash. Don't look at the flash. Don't look at the flash, people. That's your nuclear survival tip for today. Don't look at the flash. What's the third leg of your nuclear war film triad?

So this might be a little spicy for some people because a lot of people say it's either the day after, which is the American version of threads. And that one's okay. John Lathgow does give a wonderful performance in that one. But that one gets a little silly in part. and it's not when the wind blows, which is also excellent, but I prefer the radio play because the radio play has the voice actor of Wallace from Wallace and Gromit playing Jim. Oh, that's good.

I've never heard the radio play. That's on Archive.org as well. I'm going to have to look that up. That one's rough because you're basically hearing Wallace and his wife go through a nuclear war and he calls her a bitch at one point, and you're like, oh. Yeah, I don't want to hear that. I don't want to hear that voice say that word. in that context. It's no good.

But no, my third one is actually Testament. I don't think I've seen this. So Testament is based off of the 1980 short story, The Last Testament, which is a short story about a woman whose husband goes to work in San Francisco. It's either San Francisco or Los Angeles. Sorry, California cities blur for me. but her husband goes to work about 100 miles away and then suddenly all of their TV, their TV and electronics go down, and then there's a massive flash outside the window.

And all they find out is that someone new to the U.S. We don't know who. We don't know why. but instead of being a direct hit like threads or the war game, it's very much what happens when your only interaction with the bombs is fallout. Oh, that's fascinating. I've got to see this. Yeah, it's got Jason Alexander and Kevin Costner in it.

I've, yeah, I'm not to watch this. That's interesting. It has this absolutely heartbreaking scene that's not in the short story. Although the short story is very worth reading. where the mother is playing the piano, either playing the piano or managing the costumes for the elementary school's production of the Pied Piper. And one of the lines is the children went away

because the town wasn't worthy and maybe in a hundred years or so will be worthy again. And it just kind of stabs the viewer in the heart. And it's this little hope spot in the middle of this movie where everybody is slowly dying of poisoning. Yeah. Radiation poisoning. And then you remember, because we were talking about this earlier,

the radiation isn't magic. You can't negotiate with it. You can't avoid it by doing the right hand gestures or writing the right symbols or doing the right chance. It is there and you now have to deal with it. It's a force. It is. Mine is

Threads Obviously War game And I have a weird I also have a weird one Matinee The Joe Dante Have you ever seen this?

I am not familiar with that one Tell me about that one So this is the guy that directed Gremlins It's a movie from the 90s And I think this may be the first My parents rented it Okay And I watched it with them as a family

And it's about a town in Florida dealing with, like during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Like everybody in the community is related to the military in some way. So like there's, you know, there's a family with like Air Force pilots and everything, et cetera, et cetera. And at the same time, John Goodman plays a, I can't remember what his name is. It was either William Castle or Frank Castle, the like Schlock Horror Director from the 50s and 60s who would put like. I think it's Frank Castle. It's Frank Castle who would put like the electricity in the seats to like shock people in theater and that kind of thing. And there was always a gimmick with whatever his bad movie was.

Sure. Like that guy played by John Goodman comes to town at the same time and is trying to put on like a big matinee feature about a mutant ant. And so it's like kids dealing with cold, like it's dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War anxiety through horror films. Oh, I love that. Like trying to distract yourself with this bad movie about a mutant aunt and like maybe going into the movie theater, you're going to come out to nuclear hellfire. And it's just kind of weird tone. You know, that kind of like grimlinsie, cartoony yet a little mean with a little edge to it kind of thing. And I don't know.

That one's always, maybe it's because it's one of the first ones I saw. That one's always spoken to me. I always like that. I would like to give a special mention to Terminator. Two judgment day for actually having one of the best nuclear scenes in fiction thus far that is not just directly about realistic nuclear war. Yeah, I mean, that's why you see that like that screen grab everywhere online constantly, right? Was that in the, that was the director's cut?

That wasn't in the full movie, I don't think. I don't know if the dream sequence is in the full movie because the only one I've actually watched is the director's cut. I know that Kyle is in the director's cut. cut and not the full movie, but I think the nuke scene is in the normal movie. I'd have to watch it again. Why is this? I mean, maybe it's different for you, but for me, like talking about these things and like watching these movies, I also like to play Fallout, even the bad ones, are a comfort when dealing with this stuff. Why? I'm so glad you asked that. because I am a horror writer primarily. For those of you listening who play tabletops,

you may have seen my work in Changing the Lost or Deviant or any one of personal and systemic horror games. And I think it's so comforting to just be able to take an hour or two and either watch or play or otherwise engage with something that you think is scary in a controlled environment, and then everybody else around you going, oh, yeah, that's all so scary because it allows you this moment of bonding over what some people might consider a weakness. I don't necessarily consider it a weakness. And really just being able to be vulnerable in a control way, allowing yourself to feel these huge emotions and reaping the benefits of whatever endorphins come out of that.

Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that hits the nail. in the head. That's perfect. And I think the horror analogy is really good. Because I would say that my path to this stuff also runs through, I mean, that was pretty much all I read growing up. It was horror fiction. And it was because I was often a very scared

kid and it allowed me to like kind of grapple with these things and have a carthus with it, right? And like you said, experience it in a controlled and entertaining way and bond with friends that were maybe reading the same material. So two people that are new to this right now.

So I feel like Threads is like... That is a little much. That is not the movie you want to start with. I saw Talia Lavin talking about how a friend of hers had been like, oh, we should watch threads and then not telling her what it was about. And it's like, no, you don't do that to your friends. And, you know, we're talking around it right now. What is it?

Because I think, you know, it's one of these people may have seen images on or heard of from nuclear friends, you know, that, you know, Threads is this horrifying movie. What, what is it? Threads is the movie that caused me to never want to move to Great Britain, even though my husband has a dull citizenship. It is a very, very famous or infamous. I believe it's, it was filmed in 1983, and it is set in 1984 or 85. On March 5th. Yes, you're correct. Thank you. It starts on March 5th. Starts on March 5th, yes.

It starts with two young adults in a car. One is upper middle class. One is working class. And they're necking in the car as jets fly overhead. They get into a little bit of a fight. He picks her a flower, makes it up to her. They get back in the car. A couple months later, you find out she's pregnant. You find out there is a crisis in the Persian Gulf, I think.

I think so, yeah. But you're here, this is not a military film, right? You're hearing all of these military updates in the background, which is something I love so much about this and why I'm going to shit so hard on some of all our, some of all fears later. But the first hour of the movie is just this sort of. soap opera drama. So Ruth and Jimmy are in this relationship. He gets her pregnant. He decides he's going to marry her because he's very proud and doesn't want to get an abortion. His parents

for 1984 are very understanding. Like, you know, we could, you could get it taken care of. Like, have you talked? We're just going to get married and have the baby. And he has this whole masculinity thing about taking care of Ruth. they meet, their families meet, the dads get preoccupied by the TV. Elsewhere, we see a guy who is some functionary in a local government being told that he has to go underground for his local planning committee because the threat of nuclear war is so high that they need to start getting people together to make sure there's a continuance of governance after the war. he finds out he can't take his wife. The stress starts ramping up as people start realizing what's going on,

but everybody's dealing with their daily lives for the first hour of the movie. And then someone, some motherfucker, decides to use tactical nuclear weapons. And listeners, you can't see the scare quotes I'm making with my hands here. There is no such thing as a tactical nuclear. weapon and anyone who says tack nuke's work is a fool and you shouldn't be listening to them. Hey, Matthew, do you know how much, how many tons of dynamite are in the smallest nuclear weapon, or not in the smallest nuclear weapon, but the, the blast force of the smallest

nuclear weapon. Do you know what that is? My answer to that would be, it doesn't matter. It's still a nuke. It's 20 tons, but yeah, basically. 20 tons of dynamite. the Davy Crockett, a quote-unquote handheld nuke can level two city blocks. I mean, we don't have any more date.

Well, there's probably some in storage somewhere. Oh, yeah. But nobody's fielding. People kept getting sick and dying when they were testing them. So nobody's fielding those anymore. But the point still stands. Yeah, wild how being that close to a nuclear core will cause you to get sick and die. Funny that.

Yeah. Anyway, so about $50. minutes in after the tactical nukes get dropped, then the nukes fall on Sheffield, which is where the movie is set. I believe the entire nuke sequence takes about five to 15 minutes. It feels like a fucking eternity. There is no swelling orchestral music. There is, there's no like cool sound effects other than explosions and screaming. There are no moments of heroism. It is disgusting. It is awful. Like, something I actually like more about the day after than I do threads is the monumental

horror image of the mushroom cloud is actually more interesting and more classically horrifying to look at. The mushroom clouds and threads actually look fairly small. Yeah. Given what you're expecting. But the point isn't the mushroom cloud. The point is what's happening on ground level. Jimmy goes missing looking for Ruth. We don't see him again until the very end. Ruth's family basically dies of radiation poisoning. Ruth goes a bit mad and starts wandering through the streets of London afterwards. And then you realize that there's an entire hour of the movie to go. Yeah.

This movie does not give you the climax of the movie is halfway through. The rest is just the nuclear dynumau. Yeah. And it's rough. It's one of the only, because usually these kinds of movies either end with the nuke or begin with it or something that happened off screen beforehand, right? Yeah. So to have that, the nuclear daintomau is a really great way to put it. to like have that be the back half of the film and like where the movie leaves you is so brutal.

Yeah. Also, do you want to talk about the film bookend? Yeah. Because there's beginning and end of the movie. Both start with what song? I don't remember. Johnny Be Good by Chuck Barry. I can see the little girl running through the field at the end, but I can't hear the music.

Mm-hmm. Wow. Do you know about the Do you know about the direct line between the war game and threads? I do not. I know some cool film trivia about threads, but I do not know the direct line. Please tell me.

Actually, I've interviewed the director. Because I think they had the anniversary was a few years ago, and they did like a big marketing push and put out a fancy Blu-ray transfer and all this stuff. The BBC, well, like the, into the 80s, the story about the war game and the BBC suppressing it was like something that people kept bringing up and they were, it was like a black mark against them.

Yep. And they wanted to get rid of it. And so they were like, we'll, let's do the war game again. And, you know, like try to do a modern version of that. And Mick Jackson's the guy that directed. It like gets really deep into nuclear war studies, does the same thing that Watkins had done. does all the same research but sees like where it is 20 years later and produces this little another 30 minute Watkins style documentary called QED a guide to Armigan which I believe is on

YouTube yeah I'll I'll drop it I'll drop a link for you um then it's such a success that their BBC's like well what else you got and Jackson was like well I want to do something about nukes but I want it to be about the psychological effects on society. I want to hit it in a way that a documentary can't. And he pitched threads. And they said, great,

go for it. And that's why we have that movie. So, like, war game getting censored leads to the creation of threads in this roundabout way, because people were, people at the BBC were ashamed of what had happened. Wow.

Yeah. And yet they still ban threads. Did they afterwards? They did. Oh, they did. You're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

They did because it was they showed it when they show it once and then it was it was I mean it's it's I can't stress how horrifying. Like horrifying is the wrong word, but like it's not sexy. No. The way that a lot of these other, the way that like a lot of stuff is, right? Like it's very bare bones and matter of fact. It is torture in the way torture actually works instead of like the sort of. Hellraiser, sexy blades and leather way. Some people think torture works.

It is not, it's banal. Yes. Yeah. But that's a good way to put it. It's banal. There's no, there's no Mad Max style post-apocalyptic gangs running through. There's just people in rags trying to eat, you know, and just trying to survive.

Yeah. And like, don't get me wrong. I love a Mad Max movie. I loved Fury Road is pretty much in like my top 10 movies of all time. But like whenever people hear me say, hey, I'm looking for more nuclear media. The thing I get most often is, have you watched Mad Max? Have you played Fallout? I'm like, guys, that's, that's not what I mean.

Well, which fallouts? There's a big, you know, there's a big difference between all. I would argue those first two are actually pretty good. Yeah. If you've ever played the old ones, the isometric ones. I haven't. I think those first two, and this is why I always play them whenever they come out, even though they make me sad now, because they're just theme parks. But the first two, I think, really do get at something.

They really get at why this stuff is. bad and they really expose those anxiety those anxieties of the boomer generation in some interesting ways new Vegas too actually I think really yeah yeah um like a great a great anecdote uh like there's all in new Vegas there's like there's a faction literally called the boomers um that are they they worship like sac pilots because they are um they've settled near where like a B-52 went down, and they know it's down there. They want to excavate it. And so, like, the way you have to, if you want to try to win them over to your side,

you have to, like, go through this whole thing where you learn about their history and you start to piece together that they are the kind of people that are like, the exact kind of wrong people you don't want to have nuclear weapons. They want you to help excavate this B-52 for that. It's fascinating. You should, the New Vegas is worth playing. The first two are worth playing. The other ones are mostly like three and four and 76 or theme parks.

And you kind of uses, you know, I think uses the aesthetic, but doesn't really have much interesting to say. And like no shade to you guys if you like fallout. It just, it is not my thing. Weirdly, weirdly, Stephen King, who is one of the people I have Twitter just yelling. him to shut the fuck up, has really interesting things to say about nukes in the stand. And it's buried because of everything else that happens in the stand. And like, don't watch the 2020 version. It's God awful.

It was very bad. It completely misses the point of Randall Flagg as the magical fascist. But at least the costumes were good. What does the book have to say about nukes? So, laid in the novel, Randall Flagg sends the trash can man into the desert to locate the big fire, which is a nuclear weapon. And what he's essentially attempting to do is use this incredibly damaged, volatile young man to build an army, which I don't know of anyone who has ever done that before. the trash can man blows up the airfield that they had so carefully cleared. It was like, oh no, I fucked up if I go get him the big fire, then I will be forgiven.

So trash can man goes into the desert, gets a nuke on his little, I guess it's like a four-wheel there with a dolly behind it. And in the novel and in the 94 version comes back covered in race. radioactive burns, which is not actually something that would have happened based on the type of new keys carrying. It's not a minute, man. It's smaller, but. Yeah, I don't remember what it was, but it was a rocket. It's a rocket.

Yeah, it's a rocket that you drop out of an aircraft. So it's not an ICBM. But he comes back and he's like, look, I brought you the fire. And flag flips out because this person that he so very carefully grew up. to be his demolitions expert and, you know, is using, has now brought this incredibly dangerous device into the middle of his city at his moment of triumph when he's going to murder the two remaining witnesses by not drowning, which was one of the worst choices made in the 2020 version, but by dismemberment via truck. And he's like, what are you doing? Why have you brought

this here? And he's like, I brought you the fire. Randall Flag starts throwing around all kinds of crazy energy. There is a literal Deuce X Machina where Randall Flagg's energy turns into the hand of God and destroys the nuke and Vegas along with it. And it's just such an interesting commentary on the sort of people who want to use nukes because Trashkin Man doesn't actually want to use the nuke. He just wants to please flag. Flagg really, really, really wants to use the nuke because wow, that's so much destructive power in the palm of my hand. And by the end of the novel, it's basically his own hand that destroys himself. Yeah.

No, I think that's a really good, succinct way. Like, there is so much there, right? This double-edged sword that you're always kind of stabbing into your own throat. Should you push it into your enemies? What makes a bad... nuclear movie. I feel like I've been saying, I'm so glad you asked too many times, but these are, these are all the sorts of questions that I wanted to be asked in this interview, and I really

appreciate it. So somebody recommended the TV series Jericho to me recently. I have seen Jericho. Yeah. And I was like, oh, cool, that looks interesting. It has a deaf character. It has this, that, and the other. it's not really about people dealing with fallout.

It's not really about people dealing with explosions. It's about people trying to uncover a conspiracy of the U.S. to nuke itself. Did you, well, wait, did you finish it? I got to the third series where they made the barrel bombs. Yes, because they were nuclear barrel bombs detonated all across the country. Yeah. So that business interests could move the capital, to Wyoming, if I remember right?

And then Texas ends up saving everybody. Yep. But setting that aside, the reason you're not, I remember this and I just thought it was really funny. The reason they're not dealing with nuclear fallout in the TV show is because Jericho, Kansas, where it is set, is for some reason magically in this, like the perfect place where the winds will never bring anything bad ever. I remember that distinctly.

For some reason, Jericho was spared the worst of the radiation because of... Pageing Alex Wellerstein. Pageing Alex Wellerstein of Nuke Map. Alex Wellerstein to the floor, please. Yeah, it's very strange. No, I didn't. I somehow missed that bit entirely and now I'm just even madder at it because it's not, it's not a show about nukes. It's a show about conspiracies that somehow.

decided that nukes are going to be the way this business interest is going to move the capital to Cheyenne for some fucking... Cheyenne, that's where it was. Yeah, because they wanted to move it to Cheyenne Mountain. Yeah. And like the 100, which is an absolutely ludicrous show that I really enjoyed, made a better use of nukes than Jericho, which is a show about nukes. like it's it's absurd it's people are like oh it's so realistic and it's it's really cool and jacks you'll really like it whenever okay i keep talking about the monumental horror image of nukes and there's a

wonderful article on the outline by shanty collins which is what i am referencing when i say this um the mushroom cloud is something we all understand to be bad right like seeing a mushroom cloud on the horizon means that the no fun times are here and no one's going to have a good time ever again. What we fail to understand about that is that any explosion big enough can make a mushroom cloud. And like, do you remember when the fireworks factory exploded in Lebanon? Yeah, yeah, yeah, with all the ammonium nitrate in it. Yeah, and there was a huge mushroom cloud and people like, oh my God, oh my God, Israel, new Lebanon or whatever. Or like, oh my God, it's a dirty bomber, suitcase.

I'm like, no. There was another round of this recently, I think it was like an ammo or a fuel depot exploded in Ukraine or, you know, was shot and exploded. I think it was a fuel depot, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I had friends reaching out to me being like, oh my God, is it nuclear

war? It's like, no. If you get a big enough explosion, it makes a cloud like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's actually really interesting too, because what they did for the nuclear explosion in threads was actually a practical effect. So they had to, yeah, they had to let the entire town know that they were just setting off this massive explosion for those couple of shots so that they didn't freak out.

It's actually why they thank the town of Sheffield and the credits. And also there's a lot of, a lot of the extras are from Sheffield. But we sort of understand nuclear weapons. And this is become a thesis that I have formulated in the past couple of years. We sort of understand nuclear weapons like we understand a true crime. Right. Like we have this idea that serial killer bad, but serial killer also sexy. And so you have nuclear weapon, bad, nuclear weapon, also kind of sexy.

And then you wind up getting movies in the serial killers on them, like the Poughkeepsie tapes, where the serial killer just outsmarts everyone and no one can possibly understand what's going on in that brain of his. And then you start getting stuff like Fallout where, uh, the nuclear radiation mutates everything and you get cool powers out of it. And you never actually see the human cost of it because we're so focused on this thing that is very, unlikely to happen. I can't remember the name of the logical fallacy. It might be like the frequency, the frequency myth or basically the idea that the more unlikely something is to happen,

the more, but the more dangerous we think of it as. You think that's why we've generated so much art about this? I think so. And I think, I think some of the art is quite good. because we talked about threads. We talked about Testament,

talked about the war game. But then you get stuff like the sum of all fears. This is my next question is, what's your beef with Tom Clancy? What isn't my beef with Tom Clancy? Or rather, no, when we talk about some of all fears,

are we talking about the Ben Affleck movie? Oh, yes, I'm talking about the Ben Affleck movie. There's a couple of really cute lines in it. Like, when he's in bed with the woman he's sleeping with, she's like, you have a problem. that you're in love with me and like, okay, that's actually kind of charming. But then you have the line where Morgan Freeman's like,

ah, yes, we have these drills for worldwide nuclear war, but what would be more dangerous is if a random guy gets a hold of a nuke, then we're really in trouble. And then you see a bunch of generically Bedouin scavengers pull a fully active and, minimally damaged Israeli nuclear weapon out of the sand where it's been laying for like 20 years nobody went to look for it. This is just a find that they discovered

and they pull it out with a fucking flatbed truck and a pulley and then they sell it to a guy who has a gold ring that has a swastika carved into it because that's how you know he's a bad guy and this bad guy's like, oh, I have this nuke. Now I'm going to start war between the U.S. and Russia for reasons. And it's a military movie, so they're trying really hard to show you how smart they are. And nobody gives a fuck.

Like, nobody in the audience gives a fuck? No, nobody in the movie gives a fuck. They're all treating it like real politic. They're not treating it like the end of the fucking world. They're not treating it like the characters. And again, I'm going to reference threads here again, sorry. like the scene where they're watching protect and survive, which if you haven't seen protect and survive,

it's fucking awful. It's so much worse than duck in cover. And like Ruth and Jimmy are painting their apartment, and Ruth just stops and collapses because she's like, oh my God, what if I have to deliver my child into the apocalypse, which, spoiler, she does. But meanwhile, in some of all fears,

it's like they're playing a freaking chess game. I think it's thinking about it. Like war movies are all, I've always thought that like war movies in general are a kind of exploitation. There's different levels of grossness to them, right? And there's something about nukes that because they've only been used twice in war, because we have like the John Hershey book and like we know how devastating they are, that when you see them used as a plot point in something like some of all fears,

it really highlights how gross turning some of the stuff in entertainment can be. It's not handled properly. Yeah. It becomes a true crime podcast. Yeah, very much. It becomes what TV tropes refers to as the idiot ball. Right. Yeah, that's...

And it's interesting because we sort of have the same brain rot around this that we do around true crime. because you will see so many people nowadays on Twitter or Reddit be like, to give you an example I saw this morning, this woman is like, oh yeah, you know, sometimes I put on Deadpool for my toddlers because they really like all of the loud visuals and the, you know, the silly faces that Ryan Reynolds makes. And someone commented, why would you show your children this movie unless you are literally grooming them? Like that that's not what grooming means. I know I've been groomed by older men before. I've seen people say, oh, if somebody's following you around a store, that means they're marking you for human trafficking. We have this sort of mythology around specifically trafficking, gang, and sexual crimes, this elaborate ritual mythology. And like, oh, no, guys, I think I was almost trafficked today.

this weird thing happened to me or guys there was a zip tie left on my car door should I go to the police or will they kill me if I do that like this sort of we were talking about how horror becomes this fun adrenaline rush in a controlled environment but once you start taking it out of a controlled environment where everybody is consenting to the experience then it starts becoming a problem right that and that's how you get people Twitter advocating for the use of tactical nukes. It's how you get QAnon. And how you get Q&N.

QAnon would have been fine if it had literally just been a LARP. Like I have designed a LARP based on how Q&ONN spread because I didn't even have to write any new rules. I just had to read the Q&Rops and listen to Q&ONN anonymous, big shout out. And like, figure out what paths these people were following. Because at the end of the day, what they actually care about is, is not child sex trafficking or, you know, cabals of evil people or whatever. They want the dopamine. They just want the dopamine of it.

Oh, my gosh, I figured out this out. Oh, my gosh, I figured out this super secret thing. They want to be solving a puzzle. They want to be important. They want to be at the center of a narrative. And yes, you're correct. These people on Twitter who are like, ah, just nuke Russia into glass.

Like, I grew up far right. I think I was like nine years old, eight years old, nine years old when the Twin Towers went down. And the number of people in my family in the years passing going, why don't we just nuke the Middle East into glass? It's not like it's a useful region anyway. Is astounding to me now. So how do we then engage with this media responsibly? Oh, that is a good question. And I'm not sure I have, I don't know that I have an overarching answer.

I don't know that I have a solution to this because people are always going to look for their dopamine wherever they can find it. I'm using dopamine specifically because as somebody who is neurodivergent, I have trouble making dopamine in my own brain. And I know it can be really hard for me to find it. I am the sort of person who, when I'm struggling, will read about genocides or I will, you know, watch threads. And I think what it becomes, I think it becomes really important to have these boundaries between yourself and the material, right? Like if I am reading about genocides, if I am reading about the Holocaust, if I'm reading mouse or the any of the books I had to read for my history of the Holocaust course in college or even show a charnel houses of Europe for race, the oblivion, which is actually one of the best tabletop books in existence because it's not a tabletop book. It's a history book with tabletop elements in it. And I think that's what's really important is it becomes less about. the endorphin generation and more what can I take from this instead of how can I cause there to be more of this horrible thing that I am thinking about in my life so I can get more

endorphins out of it. Does that make sense? Yes. No, it makes perfect sense. I mean, as someone who also is pretty attracted to some pretty gross things, it is something I think about And it's something I am constantly aware of what my own personal barriers should be. And what I put out into the world. Yeah. Right. And it's hard. I won't lie to you.

I'm not perfect. I've made missteps. I'm sure you have too. And the best part is the best thing we can do at that point is be like, hey, I fucked up. Let me do what I can to mitigate this. move on. But like if people are interested in nuclear weapons texts, like there's a lot of good stuff out there. You just need to know where to look. I finished rereading Jeffrey

Lewis's, I think it was 2022 commission on the U.S., the North Korean attacks on the U.S. Right. When Twitter causes a nuclear war, written by a guy who would know how that would happen, very engaged. It was very, very good. Yeah. And what's interesting is, again, we were talking about Dr. Strangelove earlier and how it sounds like the sort of conversations we're having today. And it does. Like, this, Jeffrey, Jeffrey Lewis is a professor of nuclear history and policies, isn't he? You would know better than I. You've had him on the show. That's not, yeah, I'll just say yes. Okay. But it's an incredible text because it, is written like an investigation or commission report.

And it's still just bananas. Like the level of absolute, I don't even know the word for this. The level of absolute nonsense you have to get to in order for a nuclear weapon to actually be fired is a lot. like it involves Trump getting punched by one of his aides in one of the most memorable scene actually the aide who is carrying the nuclear football in that scene fucking punches Trump in the face it's it's very very cathartic um because Trump wants to instigate

the war um people everyone should read that I think I think it'd be it's interesting especially now because we're past that particular scare yeah so it makes it I think a little bit more palatable at the moment because we can look back in hindsight, he's not in power, nothing happened on that front, that I think it makes it easier to digest. So for anyone that wants to get, that is fresh to this stuff, that is their nuclear anxiety is just starting. What do you recommend as like a starting point, either fiction or nonfiction, to like learn and engage in this stuff and get like better educated and also allay some of your fears?

One of my favorite tools is Alex Wellerstein's nuke map. It is an interactive tool that you can see how a nuke would affect your city directly or indirectly. I strongly recommend it. That is the only nuke map I recommend because if you go looking for maps of nuclear targets, you will find maps that are basically out of date by between 20 and 60 years and you will just scare yourself. These do not do that. please do read Dr. Jeffrey Lewis's book. It is wonderful. You will really enjoy it. It's written very frankly, but also officially. So it is, it's actually a surprisingly easy read. It is very much a political thriller in some ways, but it is not the sort of political thriller that uses a nuke as a cute little go-away button, which is sort of my derogatory nicting for stuff like some of all fears. Um, definitely watch the war game. The war game is very good. Um, some people may say, oh, you know, you should watch or read when the wind blows because it's our cartoon and that makes it easy. Do not.

Do not. No, that one's hard. That one's rough. It's wonderful. It's very good if you want to cry a lot. Um, that's another movie that has a nuclear denouement. Yeah. Almost the whole movie is a nuclear denouement, really.

I think we've coined a new term here. That's very exciting. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, if you want to look into actual international relations paper on this, papers on this stuff, Alex Went is my favorite international relations theorist. He's a little weird, but he's really fun. All the new people are a little weird. Well, he's a constructivist. He's not specifically a nuke person, but he's a person who wrote papers titled Sovereignty in the UFO.

Nice. Okay. you're going to have to send me some Alex Wint stuff. I sure will. You can have me on to talk about norms and values next time because boy, howdy, do I have a lot to say about that? I sent you the Carol Cone papers. You did, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You should mention Carol Cone, too, because she was, I loved the sort of feminist approach to nuclear war theory because, as we said earlier in the episode, a lot of fiction tends to have the nuclear weapons being the dick that people are throwing on the table and being like, how are you going to hand it?

this. And I think, I think in some ways, a lot of our favorite nuclear movies that we've mentioned tend towards a more feminist interpretation. Yeah. They have a lot of, there's a lot of women at the center of the stories. And it's about kind of their experiences, right? And it's about their community. And it's about the communities. Yeah. Like, well, you know, it's in the title, threads. Yeah. It's about the delicate threads that interweave everybody. Yeah. Carol Cohn is a, as an academic and did a lot of

really amazing work, just kind of what I would call, like, academically calling bullshit on the way that people in charge, the nuclear priesthood, we call them, the people that are actually in charge of this stuff. Oh my God. I forgot that that's where that term came from. And it's such a good term. It's so good. It is very much this religion about who gets access to nuclear weapons and why they get

access to nuclear weapons and the rituals that surround nuclear weapons. And again, the sort of brain rot that goes into thinking about nuclear weapons in the same way that we think about true crime and this almost, I don't want to say theocratic, but this almost fantastic religious way thinking about them. It's not something that could possibly happen or something that could possibly be banal. It's something that we want to experience almost in theophanie. I'm reading a book right now. It's nonfiction. Russian nuclear orthodoxy.

It's by a Russian academic. And it's about the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and their nuclear priesthood. And it is. Send me your copy once you're finished with it. I will send you the copy once I'm finished with it. It's fascinating.

All right. But we've got to go. Thank you for coming onto Angry Planet. Can I plug my plug? Yes. Plug your pluggables. To quote Robert Evans. It's good friends.

But you can find all of my links on Linktree slash Rufflejacks. That's Linktree slash RUFFL-E-J-A-X. You can also find me on Jacquelinebrick.design, which is my personal website. Also, please go check out Alex Wellerstein, Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, Martin Pfeiffer, all those wonderful nuclear folks that I follow and that Matthew follows who do a wonderful job of sort of breaking down. the anthropology and sociology of the nuclear weapon. Jaxx, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. This has been a dream come true.