Could the Fallout franchise be taken as a warning against thermonuclear war?

So I was watching The Atomic Cafe earlier today. I love old propaganda films mostly because some of them are so full of it that I have to avoid drinking anything while watching them because I might spit it all over everywhere in a fit of laughter. Kind of like the other day when I was eating soup and a MittvMitt.com commercial came on for the DNC. I almost spit soup all over my apartment and then proceeded to laugh my ass off.

Anyway that's besides the point right now. While watching The Atomic Cafe I started to think about how the Fallout franchise "mirrors" it. The Atomic Cafe holds the mirror of truth up to the United States. It shows us how utterly ridiculous we acted at the beginning of the Atomic Age. Part of the reason why I love studying the Atomic Age is because of how ridiculous our reaction to it was. We acted like complete morons in the face of catastrophe and I often feel like we're still acting like this. Especially during the 90s when we were so happy about the Cold War being over that we began to severely under fund our local, state, and federal civil defense and emergency management agencies. (Any pre-9/11 airport goers remember how lax security was?) We're still doing it too! My boyfriend works in emergency management and I have to say for the kinds of hours they pull and the nature of the work that they carry out and the BULLSHIT that they have to deal with, they should probably be paid more than anyone.

Boyfriend: "I really hate how stupid people are when it comes to their own safety. We tell them NOT to do something and then after a natural or man-made disaster they act like it's our fault. Then we have to clean it up! WE TOLD YOU NOT TO DO THAT! WHAT DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND ABOUT THAT?! But of course it's our fault." -_-

Me *thoughtful*: "So basically you're everyone's mom?"

Boyfriend: 

Me:

So I would like to take a moment to think about the Fallout franchise from the viewpoint of an emergency manager, of which I am not. I am a historian/librarian/information scientist, NOT an emergency manager, but when you spend most of your time with one, you start thinking about the world from their view point. So I'm starting to look at my favorite video game from a different view point. 

Some lessons and warnings:

1. Don't piss off the Chinese/Russians/Any country with enough nukes to seriously hurt us.

2. Do not worship false idols (sounds like the Commandments huh?). By false idols, I mean the atom. From what I can tell in the world of Fallout, before the Great War, the people "worshiped" the atom and even idolized it. Well look at where that got them. And then the Children of Atom do it again! WTH?!

3. Be prepared.

4. Don't take clean water for granted.

5. If you want everything to look like crap, drop a bomb on it, and refuse to clean it up even 200 years later. (Just because everything has been destroyed by a nuclear bomb doesn't mean that you can't tidy up once in a while! Moira gets this! Even though she's a pain in the ass...)

6. Atoms should be used for peaceful purposes. And I am NOT a stupid hippie. Hippies suck.

An Introduction: I just ruined Fallout New Vegas for myself.

This is my first time writing a blog on my own. I don't normally like to publish my rantings but lately, well I need to find some other way to waste my time so why not write a blog! My life is too super nerdy to keep to myself and there are plenty of things that bug me so why not write about them? So allow me to introduce myself first.


I am a twenty-two year old female and I have a bachelor's degree in History. I am currently working on my Master in Library and Information Sciences although history is my first love. As an undergrad I studied civil defense in the Atomic Age (1945 to present) and I am still working on it as I write this even though my undergrad degree is hanging on my wall at home. I plan on getting enough together to try to publish in the next ten years or whenever I get around to it. I need to stop playing around first.


I read all the time and I try to write about what I'm reading. Many people have told me that they're jealous of my ability to write and they ask how I do it. Honestly, I have no tips for making your own writing better. I have been writing for as long as I can remember and I guess I just got better and better over the years. Writing comes naturally to me and I will not try to explain what is natural. If I were an English teacher then I would and things would get really boring really quickly. 


Besides reading I play video games. Video games are my other escape from life and they make me feel good. A lot of people think they're stupid, but if you give them a controller after a bad day at work, they start shooting zombies or something and it doesn't seem so stupid anymore. And as for video games making people more violent... I'm not even going to go there. I'll just re-post my favorite comic about how stupid that argument is. It illustrates my opinion on the topic perfectly. You can find it here.


My favorite game series is Fallout and forgive me if I write about it a lot. It's what ignited a lot of my research besides Ray Bradbury's short story There Will Come Soft Rains that I read in eighth grade. (While most people are disturbed by it, some even going so far as to start crying, I was intrigued.) This is where I would like to start the subject of my first blog posting.


Last week, the final Fallout New Vegas DLC was released on XBOX Live and even though I cannot afford to buy groceries for myself I decided to buy this. (Priorities priorities...) I have had a lot to do for school lately, so I have not been able to play it the whole way through yet. For those of you who don't know about Fallout, let me point you in the direction of the wiki because I do not feel like explaining it right now. 


SPOILER ALERT!


So I come home from class last night and I sit down to play because my brain is fried and it's time to take out my frustrations on some mutants. And I'm going along in the game and new monsters are giving me asthma attacks and I'm sucking on my rescue inhaler when I come to a missile silo. "Oh goody!" I think. "A 200+ year old missile silo which has been abandoned! What does this button do?" So of course I press it because that seems like the most logical thing to do. The world was destroyed by a fiery nuclear apocalypse over 200 years ago, what harm could pushing a single button do? Right? Wrong! Pushing a single button can RUIN AN ENTIRE GAME for one civil defense historian like myself!


All of a sudden the alarms start going off and the silo starts to open. The earth rumbles around you. "Oh shi-" is the only thing that came out of my mouth as a huge Titan ICBM rumbles out of the silo and into the air. Not too long after launch it explodes. At first I though: "Wow that's pretty cool" and then my super nerdy powers kicked in and I wanted to kick myself.


Last week I was watching a documentary called "Nuclear 911" and before this I was brushing up on my silo knowledge. The film mentions the Titan missiles. I had read a lot previously about them because they were used and developed heavily during the Cold War. They were one of the first rockets to use liquid fuel, but they were also very finicky. The darn things have to be constantly maintained making them very expensive. The US government actually stopped using them in 2005 for these reasons. So the idea of an abandoned 200+ year old Titan ICBM still working and going off almost without a hitch became completely absurd to me effectively RUINING THE WHOLE GAME FOREVER. 


I honestly do not even know if I should play the rest of the way through since I am so disgusted with the Titan presented in the game. FML MLISN


Feel free to comment. 


(I will not tell you my name as I am trying to keep my record clean. For now you can just call me "Wolf." I don't want this thing to come back and bite me in the butt later. Why then am I writing this? Well, as I said earlier, my life is super nerdy and I want to share.) 


Thanks for reading! I'm going to try to get some work done now...
-Wolf