Reality v Fantasy or Some People’s Priorities

Nuclear War Experts Are Horrified by ‘Fallout 76’

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US Army is updating its missile defense strategy with Russia and China in mind

Nuclear War Experts Are Horrified by ‘Fallout 76’
With the threat of nuclear Armageddon looming, three nuclear war experts think Fallout 76’s new 'nuke loop' goes too far.

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.

In what the developers call “the nuke loop,” Fallout 76 players can hunt down nuclear codes and launch ICBMs at the map. Fallout 76 gives players many incentives to do this—it’s a great way to wipe out a pack of annoying players and it also generates some end game content. Lands irradiated by a fresh nuclear missile will spawn enemies, gear, and plants that don’t otherwise appear in Fallout 76’s version of West Virginia.

https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/zm9549/nuclear-war-expert...

US Army is updating its missile defense strategy with Russia and China in mind

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army is in the throes of updating its air-and-missile defense strategy to align with the Pentagon’s conviction that the military must modernize and overmatch its near-peer adversaries Russia and China.

Missile defense plays an important role in the new National Defense Strategy released earlier this year. The head of the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command, Lt. Gen. James Dickinson, told Defense News at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference that the organization is currently updating the strategy. He also noted that the service’s current investments and road map for missile defense is aligning with the goals set forward in the NDS.

“We’ve got a great defense budget right now,” he said. “The investments we are making right now, that are in line with what that strategy [is], will eventually roll out.”

The last AMD strategy was crafted in 2012. In 2015, the command updated the document, Dickson explained, but since then much has changed, including the NDS, the establishment of a new four-star command — Army Futures Command — tasked to more effectively and rapidly modernize the force, and the formulation and refinement of multidomain operations as a concept.

“We now see threats that we didn’t see necessarily back in 2015 as near peer, and so we’ve had to adjust our strategy or tailor our strategy to make sure that we account for that,” Dickinson said.

https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/ausa/2018/10/16/updated...

I wish those three ‘experts’ would go have a talk with the real problem here. Gamers blowing up crap doesn’t bother me anywhere near as much as the idea that the military is spending money in order to REALLY blow up everything.

It’s funny (in a sick sadistic sort of way) but Russia and China aren’t the ones starting ‘conflicts’ all over the globe. That would be us. We’re the ones arming countries right on their borders. We are the reason that they’re updating their nuclear arsenals. Russia is now surrounded by countries that are allowing NATO (actually the US) to bring in advanced weapons systems. You KNOW what we’d do if they did that to the US. We have a history that many seem to forget or conveniently overlook.

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/cuban-missile-crisis

I get the point that video games can and do desensitize some people to violence. But gamers don’t have the ability to destroy the planet. Those walking freak shows in the Pentagon do. There’s only been one nation to ever use nuclear weapons, and it’s not Russia or China. And, as always, it’s the civilian population that takes the hit. But if nations start slinging around nukes, nothing will survive.

Like I said,I wish those three guys would go talk to the people who can really blow up the world.

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