Next Gen Journal

By Thomas Grant

A mushroom cloud emerges following a nuclear test (Public Domain)

I am admittedly slow on the uptake regarding new releases of video games, so only recently have I picked up a very popular title released back in the fall of 2008 – Fallout 3. I immediately fell in love with the gorgeous environments, great character designs, and engrossing gameplay that the title has to offer – major props to Bethesda Game Studios for this brilliant title. But perhaps the most intriguing part of Fallout 3 is its world.

The game is set in a post-apocalyptic DC, two hundred years after our nation was annihilated in a nuclear strike by the Chinese. As an avid reader of post-apocalyptic fiction (The Road, anyone?), I found the game to be terrifically frightening.  On top of the horror of the destruction of our great edifices and monuments, and all the lives lost, the game presents a realistic depiction of the atrocities humanity can inflict upon itself when not tamed by the guiding forces of civilization and government. I can confidently say it’s an accurate depiction of what life after the bomb would be like.

And that got me thinking. Just as recently as two decades ago, the world was teetering on the brink of destruction on a scale just like that of Fallout; we sought to avoid a war of annihilation with the Soviets. Only after the fall of the Soviet Union and its subsequent reorganization into the Russian Federation and other successor states was the international community able to allow itself a collective sigh of relief – the immediate danger had passed. The ‘Doomsday Clock’ – the  (admittedly subjective) measure of how close humanity was to its own annihilation, set by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – was set back to 17 minutes to midnight (the point of absolute destruction); this is the greatest distance from midnight it has ever been set to.

So why is it that now, when the clock rests at five minutes to midnight and the world has witnessed a successful detonation of a nuclear weapon by the North Koreans, we don’t seem too worried? Gone is the hysteria of the heights of the Cold War. News of the May 25^th seismic activity (weighing in at 4.7 on the Richter scale), which seemed to prove the North Korean government’s claim of a successful detonation, made the evening broadcasts but was forgotten within a few days.

Over a period of four decades, American diplomats devoted their careers to maintaining peace with the Soviets because we feared our mutual abilities to destroy each other. But now that the Soviet threat is gone, we’ve grown complacent, oblivious to the others that have replaced it. Our modern global situation includes states like India and Pakistan, both imbued with an ancient racial hatred of the other and both armed to the teeth with warheads, sharing a border. Meanwhile, neither of them complies with the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). And now, the North Koreans are building and testing their own weapons of mass destruction, and have threatened to deploy them in response to any U.S. provocation.

So what does the great and mighty United Nations decide to do? In its infinite wisdom, it passed Security Council Resolution 1874, which reads something like this, if memory serves:

Hey North Korea,

That nuke test the other day wasn’t very cool of you guys. We’ve been asking you to cut that stuff out for a while. So now we’re going to check your cargo to make sure there aren’t any nukes in there. And we’re also not going to sell you any more guns , or buy any of your guns, until you chill. So please stop blowing stuff up, and promise us that you’ll stop making nukes. Pretty please!

Cheers,

The UN Security Council

All joking aside, Resolution 1874 takes absolutely no concrete steps toward…well, anything. Its so-called “demand” for the halting of North Korea’s nuclear program isn’t backed by any real force of arms, and everyone knows it. Diplomatic relations with the Communist People’s Republic of China are shaky enough without threatening of their ‘little brother’ state. It’s not a step that the U.S. government is willing to take right now, let alone the notoriously hesitant UN.

North Korea will surely continue its weapons tests. Given the dismal failures of their recent SCUD and ICBM launchings, they’re probably not capable of actually hitting any targets in the United States; hopefully, by the time the North Koreans get their science right, the international community will start to take their threats seriously. But right now, it’s as if no one seems to think they’ll really do it.

Remember: no one thought Hitler would actually invade Poland and France, either.

Personally, I’m going to go ahead and start my stockpiling of Spam and other  vital goods just in case. I mean, really, even if there’s no nuclear holocaust, you can never have too much Spam.

Thomas Grant is the NGJ Business & Tech editor and a student at the University of Notre Dame.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.