Angry Planet - What Game of Thrones Teaches Us About Nuclear War

Episode Date: September 11, 2017

From The Day After to Threads, fiction has long reflected our nuclear fears. Today, Daenerys Targaryen’s flying dragons stand in for B-52 bombers armed with thermonuclear bombs and the ashen corpses of Lannister guards remind us of Hiroshima.This week on War College, nuclear weapons expert Timothy Westmyer talks us through the nuclear metaphors in Game of Thrones. Westmyer is a nuclear security expert with CRDF Global and the host of the Super Critical Podcast—a show that explores pop culture’s obsession with atomic power.It’s a geek fest this week, as Westmyer runs down the history of weapons of mass destruction in Westeros. We argue about whether Dany’s children really are weapons of mass destruction or just an effective air power, what Game of Thrones can tell us about our fear of an atomic confrontation between the U.S. and North Korea, and the TV movie from the ‘80s that’s still effective today.If that wasn’t enough, we dive into the Fallout video games series, which take place in an alternative American future where the bombs fell and the atom never went out of style. The popular games take players through a world that looks like the 1950s never ended, and nuclear armageddon froze it in place.Please let us know what you think of this show. It’s definitely a change for us. By making our break from Reuters, we have a chance to do a little experimentation, but we know it’s the serious stuff that got us here.You can reach us on our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Next week, we’re back to a more traditional topic, an Islamist group you may not think much about that’s reshaping the Middle East with the help of Iran.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. War College is now an independent production not associated with the Reuters News. So now there's loose nukes about. He has one, and I think that people might draw from that what happens now that the United States, or Generis, no longer has a monopoly on this type of. of firepower. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt.

I'm Jason Fields. After the Cold War, the pop culture took a break from the nuclear menace. Dr. Strangelove had taught us how to love the bomb. Superman had saved us from ourselves, and the day after chilled us to our core. But through most of the 90s and even the 2000s, pop culture largely avoided nuclear metaphors. That might be changing. North Korean advances have brought back fears of global thermonuclear war. Joining us on the show today is Timothy Westmeyer.

Timothy is the associate program manager of nuclear security at CRDF Global. He's also the host of the Supercritical podcast, which overthinks this stuff every week. We're glad to have him here. Thank you for joining us. Well, I'm great to be here. I'm glad we're able to set this up. and I'm glad to have any excuse to talk about the latest season of Game of Thrones, especially when you can get into this type of detail.

I don't have a lot of these conversations with my usual set of friends, my non-nuk friends. This is great. Well, let's jump into it. You wrote something, was it back in 2014? Correct. At the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which are the people that control the doomsday clock, for the listeners that don't know. Comparing...

Well, hold on. I'm not sure that's entire. fairly fair. I don't think they control it. They, okay, I actually did a story on this recently. They gather every year to vote on how to move the hand. Right.

It'd be fun if they can turn it the other way and then have reality reflect that. You'd written something for them about how DeNaris's dragons and Game of Thrones are nuclear powers. And why don't you, I disagree, but why don't you jump in with this

and explain it to us? Sure. So, Just to start it off, I'm not a crazy person. I know just watch everything I see and look for nuke imagery and analogs. But I was enjoying Game of Thrones as both, you know, the TV show as well as the books. And I'd seen a lot of people, the people that were highly respected that would do think pieces on Game of Thrones and how it applies theories of international relations or how it deals with issues of feminism or race or poverty. And I thought, well, that's true. It's a very detailed story, and it draws on a lot of real-world analogies.

And I also heard someone in passing every once in a while, someone say, dragons are like flying nuclear weapons or scaled nuclear reptiles. And I thought, well, that's really interesting. Has anyone done a think piece just looking at that for way too many words? And I hadn't seen anyone do that, so I definitely wanted to take that mantle up, because I've done a little bit of research, and even George R. Martin came out and said, you know, quote, the dragons are the nuclear deterrent, that Danny's the only one that has them. He's the most powerful person in the world.

And it's not just that. And I started to see a little bit more of how ideas of if you have this type of power, if you have this type of weapon that you can use, what does it get you? Does it get you the ability to destroy cities? It does. Does it get you the ability to rule the way you want to over the long run? It does not. And I saw a lot of parallels there for real world history as well as what the show and the books and how they describe these types of things.

I think the latest episode that we saw, I don't know how spoilers are going to work here, but I'll just say at the end of the episode during the behind the scenes stuff, one of the showrunners, D.B. Wes Weiss said, it looks like Danny's got WMD. So I think there's some arguments to be made there, but I also enjoyed your article about how it, maybe it's not nukes, maybe they're A-10. So I'm wearing today, you can't see it, my A-10 wharthog t-shirt in solidarity for this conversation. Excellent. And that's exactly my point.

I think you can call them weapons of mass destruction. I think that's fair. But she has an Air Force. She is the only person in Westeros with an Air Force. But they are. They're like A-10 whartogs, right? There are these things that can, and we saw that in that battle where she almost killed Jamie. And by the way, Game of Thrones fans, it's going to be a spoilerific episode.

So if you haven't caught up, you should go do that. What are you doing on Sundays? Exactly. I mean, what you're saying, though, it very low flying just takes out what's immediately in front of it. It's, I mean, okay, it's an A10 with a very effective flame thrower. but yeah, I mean, Tim, I mean, how do you see nukes sort of fitting into that? Sure. So now that I know the spoiler range here, I can get into good detail. So I actually see them being nuclear weapons for a couple reasons.

One, in terms of functionality, and two, in terms of thematics and the narrative of the show itself, which is one of the reasons I think that's a very powerful analogy. In terms of functionality, I think it is something that could be deployed similar to an A-10 Wardhog, close combat support, and we see that in the show, because that's a very visually interesting and tactically interesting thing. But I see it as a disruptive military asset that really is not with a peer at all in the world of Westrose. And it hasn't been for, I guess, hundreds of years in the show canon.

And I think it can be deployed tactically in terms of use on the world. battlefield with troops. Kind of similar to the ideas, we thought we would use small tactical nuclear weapons, the artillery, the Davy Crockett's, how you would fire at a certain area and either get some tank battalion or a large unit of troops that happen to be in one area, or you at least seal that area off with radiation so they can't use it. Or dragons can be deployed strategically. They can destroy cities and mill castles if you deploy them the right way. And though in the books, there's definitely stories of dragons, smelting castles, the whole castle at Heron Hall, that really depressing place that Aria hangs out for a little while, that place has stone walls that were melted like candle wax because of dragons. So I think it depends on how you want to use them.

And I can see the show maybe not wanting to do that for thematic reasons. But I'll take a break here before I can go. So you can counter that with some more A10 knowledge. Well, I'm going to admit that I was torn after rereading your article, and you and I had had some back and forth online. Then that's actually what led to the creation of this episode. But watching, rewatching the spoils of war, which is the episode that really made me think of them as A-10s, they definitely used nuclear imagery there. And even more so in the Eastwatch episode, where Tyrion is walking around that field of ash,

and there are those charred and awful bodies that was very reminiscent of, you know, the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Especially when that episode dropped on the anniversary. Oh, I hadn't even considered that, but you're right. I don't think that it was intentional, but it's hard to not at least draw that comparison. I'm sure there's no way they could have timed the season of Game of Thrones,

even though it was pushed back than it normally is. But it's hard not to think about some of those comparisons. Although I wrote the article in 2014 seeing what I saw in the show back then a couple seasons ago and then what I saw in the book as well. I think my argument here is mostly that it feels like nuclear weapons to us because that's the closest metaphor we have for such a disruptive technology. But I think an A-10 is a better analogy because an Air Force is a disruptive technology in Westeros. Because nobody else has an Air Force, an Air Force feels like weapons of mass destruction. And I think this is where it's going to be really hard to create a clear division between the two, because it is all about relative dragon pun scale.

It's hard to see because there is nothing like it. Jamie, Lanister, you're right. He went back to Circe and said, hey, we should raise the white flag over the Red Keep. We're done here. We cannot defeat this force. And the only thing I see any sort of comparisons to that, to our world anyways, is that kind of to simply it's not just

while we got really defeated with because you know you see you're on the pirate in the show he's got these catapults that shoot fire something or another that catches things on fire I think that's certainly a big military acid but no one thinks oh well we'll never be able to deal

with that but dragons it just puts that focus on someone's mind that I think the only comparison is you know after we used the atomic bomb of the United States used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Japan. I think that's the only comparison that I can really make. And one thing I'll say about your article that I enjoyed was it tried to do, it did a good job of describing kind of what people's reactions to the

having dragons. We have them, but they still continue to fight. So it's more like an Air Force where it takes out certain things, but obviously people are still fighting Daeneres. They're not giving up completely. So that actually made me retool my thinking here a little bit. And the thing that I've come up with there is twofold. One, I think there's a deterrence effect in place with dragons in this world, but it's slow to emerge. It's very much like early nuclear history where people are trying to figure out how to use nuclear weapons. Are they just large bombs like we had in our conventional force or that's something radically different? And it took a lot of time for that to happen. Information moves slowly. People may not believe what the dragons can do. And I think

that's similar to Nagasaki when it took time for simply communication to tell what had happened at Hiroshima, to believe what had happened in the process that information. And I think you see the bigger thing here is DeNaris is reluctant to burn down places like Kings Landing or any of the other cities because she's worried about what that would have for her future ability to rule. She doesn't to rule over the ashes. She wants to rule over people that respect her. So I think that that results in dragons being used more like 8-10s, but it's not the full capacity that they can be used. You know, it's like a dial, a yield weapon that's not been turned all the way to 11. It's been turned down to maybe a 6, and that results in those smaller battlefield-like conditions. I think it's

interesting. I would be curious to see what it's going to be like in the future of the show when two dragons are used later on, maybe in other era. as instead of just the one on the battlefield. Well, it's actually, I hate to be the peacemaker here, but it does seem like it's a combined feature. There's the ability, I mean, it's almost like an ICBM in that it's the only way you can project power in Westeros, right? You can actually get from one place to another incredibly quickly and deliver firepower, like in the last week's episode, where all of a sudden she's from Dragonstone all the way up to,

you know, north of the wall in seconds, as far as I can tell. Yeah. Is it, is it an 8-10 or like a Black Hawk? Sorry, like a Blackbird jet. Right. I think it is whatever you need it to be. I mean, it could be a set of MacGuffins with wings, you know. Well, I think you're right.

I think that it is certainly something that the showrunners, the people, who make the show, they want us to be visually interesting. And I think just having lots of scenes of the Red Keep being destroyed by fire would be interesting for a second, but then you kind of wonder what's next there. So that's why narratively is what matters to me quite a bit. What's the purpose behind using them in this world? Why does DeNaris, at least up until last episode, why was she the only one that had them, which really forces her to make choices about what she wants to use the dragons for, what she considers her dragonfire doctrine to be. And I think that kind of story is really fascinating to me, the idea that you have mutually assured destruction and you have mad kings.

Nuclear weapons or dragons in the hands of the people that we trust the most, we might feel comfortable with that. Similar to what we do, maybe we would feel comfortable with President Obama to have nuclear weapons, but we don't feel comfortable with President Trump having them. So these are the kind of questions you have with this type of destructive force. Is it something that we should have only in the hands of certain people that we like, maybe allies, but not rogue states or our adversaries. I think those thematic questions are more interesting to me, and I think more powerful than something analogous to an Air Force, even when these weapons get used in like an Air Force type position. That kind of begs a question. Does having these kinds of pop culture

discussions and having these kind of metaphors readily available make it easier for all of us to live in a world where weapons like this exist, even if they're horror movies like the day after in threads? So are you saying that we would make it more comfortable for people to have the weapons? Just what's the purpose of having this kind of arsenal in our fiction? The way we deal with nukes in fiction, does it just make it easier to live with them? So I could see two angles to that. One, from a, if you think about it in practical terms, in terms of military,

utility, why would we have these things? And someone would say, well, it allows us to have victory over our adversaries. And I think this, at least in terms of some aspects of that, the show and the books do a good job of showing the limitations of dragons being used as nuclear weapons. And that's what I enjoyed about your article too, when you pulled from Robert Pape and bombing to win, the limitations of air forces and nuclear weapons against things like insurgencies. Deneres is fighting an insurgency in Marine for most of the show. During the backstory of Agon's conquering, the first person that brought dragons over to this Westrose continent,

he was able to destroy most of the places that were fighting him that had castles and big armies that would meet in the field. But in Dorn, our friends to the south, they weren't able to defeat them because they didn't have a target-rich environment. They had very small towns. People lived in the mountains. There was lots of places to hide.

So that army just didn't meet them in the field. They conducted insurgent warfare, which I'm sure is drawn on from George R. Martin's past of his roots in Vietnam, and to say, we're not going to meet you in the battlefield. And that showed the utility of dragons not being absolute. So I think those thematic things from a strategic standpoint are interesting to me. But from the other side, I think we will see over the course of the show and those books that these weapons, even the utility that they do give you, it comes at a cost. People, innocent people get hurt.

In the show a small child is eaten by Drogon, who DeNaris considers her favorite dragon and her child. So there's this question for her, can I control this? Do I have a sense of responsibility for this? And I think a lot of that allows people who may not think about nukes for a living because they have regular jobs and they aren't as anxious as me. I look apparently, but it allows them to at least question the reality of some of those choices that we make and whether or not these things are necessary. At least that's how I see some of the people discussing this in Twitter.

I definitely have a Dragons and Nuke Twitter search that just pops up and I enjoy reading it any time the dragons are on. You study nuclear weapons for a living and their consequences, right? Correct. I did. I've been in this field for about 15 years. I did a Georgia. town security studies master's degree in what's called unconventional weapons and nonproliferation. I've worked at the State Department handling loose nuclear material during the Nuclear Security Summit, worked for the Arms Control Association for a little while at the very beginning. I've been around and I've seen different angles of this, so it's part of my brain that's difficult to shut off when I see any sort of pop culture.

Well, with what's happening right now, the confrontation with North Korea, does this put you more in mind? Do you think that more people will be watching the show with North Korean in mind? Does it make people more nervous? I think it will, especially after this latest episode where, you know, again, spoiler, there's maybe that someone hasn't caught up all the way to, I think it's episode six, that Danny deploys all three of her dragons. And I always consider the dragons not to be ICBMs, but to be slow-moving, somewhat vulnerable under the right conditions, B-52s, that could drop nuclear material or dragon fire, wherever

they needed it to be. And we see the Knight King, the big White Walker bad guy, take it down. And not only did he just kill one of the dragons, I think it was a Veserian, he brings it back to life. So now there's loose nukes about. He has one. And I think that people might draw from that. What happens now that the United States, or Deneres, no longer has a monopoly on this, type of firepower. Is there going to be deterrence? Probably not. People might think that the

Knight King is just going to use it as much as he can, which might make people think that it's not U.S. versus the Soviet Union where there was that deterrence relationship there. You hurt me, I hurt you, so don't hurt me in the first place, but maybe more of like a mad, irrational actor who's just bent on destroying something. And that something being you, people might draw from that about North Korea, getting weapons, not thinking that you could deter them, or potentially if you think about it in terms of Iran for some people that are watching this. So I'm excited to see how this plays out from the TV show and also people's reaction to it. All right. Let's move on from Game of Thrones, because there's a lot of nuclear pop culture

to cover. And that's part of what you do. You've got this super critical podcast where you really dive into this stuff. And I want to know you do this for a living. How can you also do this as a hobby. Yeah, it's a little difficult. I think that there's definitely a connection there. The origin story for this podcast many years ago, just watching shows when I was starting to come into this world professionally, TV shows, movies where there's some sort of either the theme is about nukes, whether it's just a plot point in a larger movie itself, and then my initial reaction of, wow, that's not right. Why would they do it that way? My co-host for the longest time was my roommate and and we he was always the had to bear that uh complaint force uh pretty much by

himself just we would go to a movie and that's all i would think about afterwards was wow that's not really how that works there's no self-destruct button on a nuclear weapon or that's not how the nuclear football works you can't just order an attack from out of nowhere what are what what are nuclear codes everyone just seems to have them uh those kind of things made me want to have a conversation about this and and then also it eventually evolved for my sanity into a discussion of what what does what does the story trying to tell about nuclear weapons is it just using them as a plot device is it a thematic and what does it how does it reflect maybe societal anxieties at the time about a particular thing relating to nuclear weapons whether it's the collapse of the

Soviet Union and loose nuclear weapons or is it a mad actor getting them who runs a country and we don't know how to handle this, or is it potentially the filmmakers take on all of these things? And then how does the public learn from things? A lot of the times people don't go out and get two-year hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of loans for a master's degrees in this. So I think people tend to learn through movies and film for a lot of this. And I would love to at least have a context that I can place into these conversations in movies that people might see.

If they actually saw it as a more realistic threat, they may take out. more loans because they'd be less worried about having paid and back. I've thought about that for real. I was like, you know, if the banking system gets hit, at least I can write those off somehow. Can you tell us a little bit just generally speaking how nuclear pop cultures change since the Cold War? So we've done about over 20, maybe 25 episodes over the course of the two years that we've been doing this podcast. and I like the podcast because I consider myself at least someone who has claimed to be a professional in this field, studied it, works on nuclear security and my day job.

But my co-host, Joel and now Gabe, are just friends of mine who like movies. They don't come into it with notions that this is how this works. So they just like movies or take certain things away. So I enjoy the back and forth on that to see how maybe a movie in the 1960s may be different than. a movie in the 1990s. So I broke movies that I look at into three categories. There's movies that are serious nuke plot movies, trying to say

something about nuclear weapons. Movies like Dr. Strangelove, fail-safe with Fonda back in the day. I think it was like 1964. Threads, which is a BBC TV movie, and then a U.S. TV movie called Special Bulletin. These are very serious movies.

Nuclear weapons are, if they're not scary, they're serious issues. They may approach them from a comedic standpoint, or, this may be just something to scare the heck out of you. Those are those movies that I don't see a lot anymore these days. A lot of the movies these days are these films that maybe borrow nuclear imagery or use nuclear weapons as mere plot devices. I think of things like true lies, the nuclear bomb in that with stolen, I think, from

Russia, but then used in a terrorist plot in Miami. Then you have Mission Impossible for, the peacemaker, broken arrow, the Independence Day movies. Nuclear weapons and those are MacGuffins. They're things that might be scary to someone, but they're ultimately just a plot device for the hero to either use a nuclear weapon to save the day or stop someone from using a nuclear weapon in a bad way. And sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail,

most of the times they succeed. So I've seen the evolution of film take a different approach than it used to be where a lot of these weapons, there were these plot device movies back in the day, but a lot fewer of the more serious films are, I think, here today, which I think is depressing to me a little bit from people's understanding of this. Some of these films could be remade today, and I think would be, would be a good service to people in today's time. Which one would you remake?

I think the one we've talked about remaking the most is special bulletin. This is a film that it was a TV movie, kind of like the War the World set up where we didn't, it was meant to be real. It was the whole thing is done through the lens of, if you, were at home watching on your local TV news, a terrorist hostage situation in Charleston, South Carolina. Someone stole nuclear material, a scientist built a bomb. They weren't terrorists, at least from the idea of a foreign terrorist. Their motive was disarmament.

It will scare the United States into disarming. They were U.S. scientists that had turned disillusioned about this. And it's just such a very powerful film in how it critiques the media. It critiques our relationship to violence and how we consume it. And then, you know, spoiler alert for that movie, it doesn't end well in terms of the bomb not going off. And then there's this gut punch at the end about how the media just moves on to the next thing. And it's just powerful imagery, powerful scenes. I think it could be remade today.

The other one I think would be, is threads. I think my co-host and I there, who's Tim Collins, who's a PhD candidate studying British nuclear history at King's College London. He suggested we remake Threads, which is another TV movie about what would happen in the middle of the United Kingdom if there was a nuclear war during the Cold War, remaking that with Korea these days, having it from the perspective of a regular small town somewhere, maybe Busan in South Korea, and seeing what their perspective would be if there were to start a war that they didn't necessarily start themselves but got caught up in. I think that would be a powerful movie to remake. Or they can just make another mission impossible movie. That seems to be the most likely case.

Are you familiar with the Fallout series? Very. I was calculating the number of hours that I might have played in a number of them. I haven't played the original ones, the ones for the PC that were, I think, Fallout 1 and 2. It's hard to get my hands on those, trying to find them somewhere. But I put a lot of hours into Fallout 3, New Vegas, and 4. And we actually just recorded an episode that I'm editing right now that will be released. sometime in the next couple of weeks on the Fallout series,

because I think it's terrific. Did you end up playing them, Matt? Yeah, I've played all of them, actually, playing those when I was a kid. Okay. Yeah, so I just want to intro for people who might be listening to the show who don't know the series. The basic premise is that the 1950s

becomes the nuclear age that, you know, they had sort of dreamed of. I mean, so you have nuclear-powered cars fins, the timeline completely diverges. Things stay in sort of a propagandistic America where everything is upbeat, cheerful, and terrific. But then there's a nuclear war, and things aren't so terrific anymore. So your main character is reborn into this world, which is just the remnants of what the 1950s might have looked like if it was nuclear power. So, and you're playing a character coming, going through that world.

One of the things that really strikes me about that game, one of the reasons I really love it is that it's so tinged with nostalgia for a time that I didn't live in, and it helps me understand kind of the world my parents grew up in, if that makes sense. As I feel like these are the things that they would have lost if there had been a nuclear explosion, and you're literally walking through the remnants of that world. I could see that. One of the things that really hit me with those games was it happened to oddly follow places that I've lived. So I live in Washington, D.C. right now and Fallout 3, that's where it takes place. I grew up in California, right where the first two games were there. I spent a lot of time in Las Vegas growing up in Southern California. So it was interesting there. And then my now wife finished her law degree in Boston.

So all of these things, I've been everywhere where the games have been taking place. So it's fascinating then to see them, you know, similar but not completely the same, but still all rubble from a nuclear attack. how the people there, the characters in there, responded to that. How do they survive? What's the loss there? It's fascinating to see all the different angles there. And that's what I enjoy so much about those games is you make the story yourself. There's a main story that you can follow or choose to ignore. And I think for a lot of people, nuclear weapons are things that they understand somewhat. But if they're worse to take place a nuclear attack, everyone would have

their own angle and how to respond to it. And those games really do a good job of letting you decide how to deal with that. For some people, it might be great for them to be a survivalist. Other people, you might go around trying to save people. So you can approach it any which way you do. I don't know what type of ways you guys play. Not just one way. Trying a bunch of different scenarios, yeah.

Yeah, I really reacted to depending on which world I was in. Well, one of the things that we talked about in our upcoming episode that will be released in the next couple of weeks, is because it's so much like a build your own story, choose your own adventure story approach to storytelling, what people may take away from nuclear weapons and how their use and what their purpose is and whether we should have them is so hard to judge and predetermine ahead of time

because you can approach it any different way. It's like a movie where you can draw different interpretation of the ending. It could be like inception, was he in a dream at the end? or was he not in a dream? Those debates are there, but in films, there's still apparently a narrative message that you can say is a little more crystallized and sure of itself.

In the Fallout games, there isn't. You can take what you want from it. You can take, this is awful. Nuclear weapons are terrible. I can't believe we let this happen. What can we do to stop it? Or, hey, you know what? It's going to be bad.

It's going to happen. But life's going to go on. It will make better people out of us. people have different ways of taken out of that and I think that's an interesting if maybe scary approach to discussing nuclear weapons even though it's very entertaining and fun

that's a really good point I didn't I hadn't thought about it that way I mean I mostly was playing through to you know you get to the end title it reads to you and the wanderer travels back into the wilderness you know I mean it has this great prepared script

and mostly when I'm done with it I just feel exhausted. And also kind of depressed, I have to say, even when I've won. When you're dealing with a post-apocalyptic world, it doesn't seem to be a world that is cut and dry with good and bad. And this is a game that takes a very serious approach to the idea that there is bad in every choice you can make. There is no just outright happy ending. Every mission, the little missions you can do that aren't related to the main story, you can always finish them. You can maybe get a certain item if you finish it one way versus another, but it's really, it's up to the choice that you make and you have to deal with the consequences of that.

And you may not understand what the result will be when you make that choice, I guess much like life. You guys are making me feel really bad about blowing up a megaton. You should. You should feel bad. So, but I do have a question. What do we think that a game like Fallout is really, does it say anything about nuclear weapons at all? Or is it just, you know, I mean, it's just a human thing and that the apocalypse is a convenient place to put things. You know, it makes things more extreme.

I think for some of this, it's sadness. It's sadness that this world, and it's a very detailed backstory. So when we did the research for this fallout episode that we recorded, it's so much that you could maybe not necessarily see when you play the game just once or twice. If you don't read all the books, you don't check all the terminals. If you don't do all the missions, you may not get the full spectrum of the history behind it because it's really fascinating this idea that after World War II, transistors were never invented. So technology is just big and inefficient, and we never had small computers.

Those things never happened. So we ran out of oil. The whole nuclear war in this world started because oil ran out in the United States, didn't let China have any of its oils in Mexico or in Alaska. So China invaded. We fought them off. In a last ditch effort, somebody fired. Maybe China, maybe it was the United States, according to one story in the game,

and maybe it was aliens that started it. But somehow it happened. And then just all the potential that we could have had was lost. And I think generally the theme there is sadness and what can we do to prevent that. But maybe not. I guess you can take away something different from it. I think that's the way that these stories go. It's different than another game that deals with nuclear weapons, the Metro series, Metro 2033,

which takes place in Russia. It's based on a series of old Russian novels where using Russian civil defense practices, where they would, instead of building fallout shelters, they said we have these gigantic and very beautiful and secure railroad tunnels. Why don't we just get everybody in there, seal them off, and then come out in a couple years, and we'll be fine. So the whole story takes place there. I think that game has more of a consistent message that you follow and play than fallout.

So I think it's however you want to approach this particular topic, you can go either way. I want to answer that question, actually, Jason, briefly, because I know we need to wrap up. Just as Tim was saying, there was a, There was that period right after World War II, where very briefly, there was like a five or ten-year period where nuclear weapons were cool in American pop culture. You had people selling tickets to watch some of the test explosions from Las Vegas. You know, the Strategic Air Command had a bunch of movies that were made about them and they were really cool. And there was this very brief window where we weren't really afraid of them. and I feel like Fallout shows you the perils

of what would have happened if that world had continued for another hundred years and how horrible it could have been. And that's what I see when I play that game, is the society that got stuck worshipping the atom and the consequences of that. And to draw it back to Game of Thrones quickly, I think that people that watch the show

may go about the same way when they watch Aria train to be an assassin and you say that's great. Go out and take out our enemies, the phrase, we don't like them. But then when she turns her attention to her sister, you think, oh, wait, maybe we shouldn't have been rooting for her to become potentially a psychopath assassin who could change her face. The same thing with nuclear weapons, that we're happy to see DeNaris burn the bad guys, but then now that she has power, what will she use with these dragons? And if she can't have children and someone else takes over the dragons when she eventually dies of old,

age, what do we do with this? And that's why I enjoy this story and the books, because I think they tell a very strong, sometimes subtle, because given the amount of violence, but a strong anti-war message that forces people to see not just the glory of battle and the cool fantasy tropes you usually see, but the actual reality that it hurts people, real people, some people that are innocent, many people that are innocent, and violence, cycle violence, not really doing much because you just end up causing more in the future, and then the harm that it causes you as a person when you inflict pain on someone else.

I think that's a powerful story, and I'm happy to see Game of Thrones as popular as it is, and hopefully I think people get the message at the end once this show finishes next year and the books come out sometime maybe 20, 27, 20, 28. We'll see. Well, Tim Westmeyer, thank you so much for coming on War College and talking Game of Thrones and nuclear pop culture with us.

Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, listeners, for joining us on what was possibly the geekiest episode of War College of all time. We had a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun to talk about Fallout and Game of Thrones. Please, if you like the show, rate us on iTunes. You can find us on Stitcher. You can find us on Android. You can find us on SoundCloud in wherever premium podcasts are distributed. Please follow us on Twitter at War underscore College. and we've also got a great Facebook page brewing at facebook.com forward slash war college podcast.

We'll be back next Monday.