Nuclear security

Nuclear War Experts Are Horrified by ‘Fallout 76’

You can nuke your friends and enemies in Bethesda’s upcoming Fallout 76, and people aren’t happy about it. Video games have always trivialized violence, but some fans and critics feel that the inclusion of a nuclear war mechanic is a step too far. Waypoint’s excellent article about this subject pointed out that nuclear war is fundamentally horrifying and shouldn’t become another tool in video game’s power fantasy kit.

Experts on nuclear war tend to agree. “It’s very sanitized,” Jeffrey Lewis—a nuclear expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey—told me in an email. “I find it a little off-putting.”

“ICBMs are not fun. Or funny,” Tom Nichols, professor at the US Navy War College and the author of No Use: Nuclear Weapons and US National Security, said via email.

“Nuclear war wouldn’t be fun and that doesn’t sell well," Martin Pfeiffer, a PhD candidate at the University of New Mexico who studies the way we talk about nuclear war, told me over Twitter.