I'd be interested in any analysis which might have been done of the psychological / social impacts of nuclear war, or the credible threat thereof. What happens to society when great masses of people lose faith in the future?
Our culture is currently living in a state of deep nuclear weapons denial. This is proven by the current presidenti…
I'd be interested in any analysis which might have been done of the psychological / social impacts of nuclear war, or the credible threat thereof. What happens to society when great masses of people lose faith in the future?
Our culture is currently living in a state of deep nuclear weapons denial. This is proven by the current presidential election, where these weapons will barely be mentioned, even though we are selecting a single human being to have sole authority over their use.
What happens when that deep state of denial is suddenly unraveled? How do people react if they come to conclude that a nuclear war might actually happen? Or worse, has actually happened.
If everything we've ever known is about to be over, why go to work? Why follow the law? Why be faithful to your spouse? Why do anything that you don't want to do?
My Dad was a WWII veteran and I recall him telling me when I was a teen that civilization is a thin veneer over the raw state of nature. Puncture the veneer, and my guess is that we're back to the law of the jungle in very short order.
Any idea that the national government would do this or that after a nuclear war seems absurd. Most of the major agencies of the federal government are all bunched up together in Washington DC, which would obviously be target priority #1 for any attacker. The entire city would most likely be vaporized.
Re: social impacts — definitely something that this particular study did not look at, at all. As a National Academy of Sciences study from 1986 on the Medical Implications of Nuclear War noted:
"Perhaps the most serious shortcoming we have found in the works cited above is the lack of social science input. Except for Katz (1982), economic projections are made without even a passing reference to behavioral and institutional considerations. One thing is clear. A nuclear exchange of the magnitude reported in these studies would cause a rapid collapse of the nation's social and economic infrastructure. The speed with which a new system could be erected is an open question, and one which may never be answered."
For psychological impacts, I'm not sure there are great ways to know. There are studies (notably those by Robert Jay Lifton) that looked at the impact of the atomic bombings on the psychology of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors (and were important for the development of PTSD as a diagnostic category). But of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as horrible as they were, are quite localized compared to the total destruction contemplated in these later war scenarios, and were studied at a time in which the US Occupation had taken over the job of stabilizing postwar Japan, charting paths forward, and so on. And they were also attacks on a people who were already in a context of being bombed, as a nation. Would any results there be comparable or generalizable to Cold War (or later) Americans who suddenly found their world destroyed over the course of a matter of hours? I don't know. I don't know if it's possible to know. In fact, I'd rather keep on NOT knowing...
But I will be writing something on the "survivors would envy the dead"/"I'd rather go out in the flash" trope. My sense, as a historian, is that on average the will to survive is pretty strong, even in the face of unimaginable loss. People tend to underestimate it when it is posed in the abstract, or as a hypothetical, and are more resilient in practice, after the immediate shock of change has passed.
The US did put a lot of work into "continuity of government" plans, so that the core federal government could hypothetically survive such an attack. How well that would work, and of what good it would be, I don't know. I have always thought the idea of Congress hiding out in its bunker, nominally pretending to be important and relevant to a ruined nation, somewhat grim and unlikely.
Rebecca Solnit's classic "A Paradise Built in Hell" seems relevant here, although all the disasters discussed in her book were much, much more localized. But the whole "civilization is a thin veneer" is maybe much less accurate than people think! The 1906 San Francisco earthquake/fire took out most of the city, and the governmental response didn't help, but people seemed to cooperate pretty well. And I think there were efforts by the survivors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki (as opposed to outside help) to get organized, though they had very little to work with.
That said, Solnit's final chapters are on a time when this more optimistic angle didn't work, specifically Katrina. Her analysis was basically "Disaster = cooperation; disaster + racism = dystopian hellscape." COVID updated this to "Disaster + low civic trust = hellscape." So I think we know what situation we'd be in today... and going by your comments about survivalists' attitudes towards urban populations, I think we know how it would have played out if the bomb had dropped in the '70s, too.
...Except maybe in rural Oregon, which seems to have dodged the bombs on that map, and was lily-white. Still pretty much is. Does your game factor in race?
The game doesn't factor in race or gender from the perspective of the player character, because I've tried to avoid ascribing too many properties to the player character. Making it possible to play as a certain gender or race and have the world respond differently would be interesting, of course, but would dramatically ratchet up the complexity of things. So as it is, you can basically imagine the player character to be whatever you want them to be, and the world will regard them pretty neutrally, for better or worse.
But things like gender and race can come up with regards to individual survivors, including their interactions with other survivors if they are "recruitable." And it can come up in regards to the stories that non-recruitable survivors tell.
Makes sense. You generally want blank-slate protagonists anyway for player buy-in. But I'll be really interested to see how the game handles it if the player recruits a streetwise, early-era-hip hop rapper and brings him to a 1980s Willamette valley... It'll be a great reason to put "The Message" on the soundtrack, of course.
Thanks much for your response. Regarding psychological /social impacts.....
My generation was born just as the nuclear arms race got underway, were children in the fifties as that race exploded, and were teens at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
We might see one version of the psychological /social impacts of the nuclear era in the hippy movement. As we came in to adulthood much of my generation started talking about dropping out of society, ignoring authority and existing social conventions. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die etc.
I wouldn't claim the hippy movement was a particularly coherent response to the nuclear era, and there were other factors involved besides nukes. But perhaps that social revolution provides a hint of how things could unfold.
I'd be interested in any analysis which might have been done of the psychological / social impacts of nuclear war, or the credible threat thereof. What happens to society when great masses of people lose faith in the future?
Our culture is currently living in a state of deep nuclear weapons denial. This is proven by the current presidential election, where these weapons will barely be mentioned, even though we are selecting a single human being to have sole authority over their use.
What happens when that deep state of denial is suddenly unraveled? How do people react if they come to conclude that a nuclear war might actually happen? Or worse, has actually happened.
If everything we've ever known is about to be over, why go to work? Why follow the law? Why be faithful to your spouse? Why do anything that you don't want to do?
My Dad was a WWII veteran and I recall him telling me when I was a teen that civilization is a thin veneer over the raw state of nature. Puncture the veneer, and my guess is that we're back to the law of the jungle in very short order.
Any idea that the national government would do this or that after a nuclear war seems absurd. Most of the major agencies of the federal government are all bunched up together in Washington DC, which would obviously be target priority #1 for any attacker. The entire city would most likely be vaporized.
Re: social impacts — definitely something that this particular study did not look at, at all. As a National Academy of Sciences study from 1986 on the Medical Implications of Nuclear War noted:
"Perhaps the most serious shortcoming we have found in the works cited above is the lack of social science input. Except for Katz (1982), economic projections are made without even a passing reference to behavioral and institutional considerations. One thing is clear. A nuclear exchange of the magnitude reported in these studies would cause a rapid collapse of the nation's social and economic infrastructure. The speed with which a new system could be erected is an open question, and one which may never be answered."
For psychological impacts, I'm not sure there are great ways to know. There are studies (notably those by Robert Jay Lifton) that looked at the impact of the atomic bombings on the psychology of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors (and were important for the development of PTSD as a diagnostic category). But of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as horrible as they were, are quite localized compared to the total destruction contemplated in these later war scenarios, and were studied at a time in which the US Occupation had taken over the job of stabilizing postwar Japan, charting paths forward, and so on. And they were also attacks on a people who were already in a context of being bombed, as a nation. Would any results there be comparable or generalizable to Cold War (or later) Americans who suddenly found their world destroyed over the course of a matter of hours? I don't know. I don't know if it's possible to know. In fact, I'd rather keep on NOT knowing...
But I will be writing something on the "survivors would envy the dead"/"I'd rather go out in the flash" trope. My sense, as a historian, is that on average the will to survive is pretty strong, even in the face of unimaginable loss. People tend to underestimate it when it is posed in the abstract, or as a hypothetical, and are more resilient in practice, after the immediate shock of change has passed.
The US did put a lot of work into "continuity of government" plans, so that the core federal government could hypothetically survive such an attack. How well that would work, and of what good it would be, I don't know. I have always thought the idea of Congress hiding out in its bunker, nominally pretending to be important and relevant to a ruined nation, somewhat grim and unlikely.
Rebecca Solnit's classic "A Paradise Built in Hell" seems relevant here, although all the disasters discussed in her book were much, much more localized. But the whole "civilization is a thin veneer" is maybe much less accurate than people think! The 1906 San Francisco earthquake/fire took out most of the city, and the governmental response didn't help, but people seemed to cooperate pretty well. And I think there were efforts by the survivors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki (as opposed to outside help) to get organized, though they had very little to work with.
That said, Solnit's final chapters are on a time when this more optimistic angle didn't work, specifically Katrina. Her analysis was basically "Disaster = cooperation; disaster + racism = dystopian hellscape." COVID updated this to "Disaster + low civic trust = hellscape." So I think we know what situation we'd be in today... and going by your comments about survivalists' attitudes towards urban populations, I think we know how it would have played out if the bomb had dropped in the '70s, too.
...Except maybe in rural Oregon, which seems to have dodged the bombs on that map, and was lily-white. Still pretty much is. Does your game factor in race?
The game doesn't factor in race or gender from the perspective of the player character, because I've tried to avoid ascribing too many properties to the player character. Making it possible to play as a certain gender or race and have the world respond differently would be interesting, of course, but would dramatically ratchet up the complexity of things. So as it is, you can basically imagine the player character to be whatever you want them to be, and the world will regard them pretty neutrally, for better or worse.
But things like gender and race can come up with regards to individual survivors, including their interactions with other survivors if they are "recruitable." And it can come up in regards to the stories that non-recruitable survivors tell.
Makes sense. You generally want blank-slate protagonists anyway for player buy-in. But I'll be really interested to see how the game handles it if the player recruits a streetwise, early-era-hip hop rapper and brings him to a 1980s Willamette valley... It'll be a great reason to put "The Message" on the soundtrack, of course.
Thanks much for your response. Regarding psychological /social impacts.....
My generation was born just as the nuclear arms race got underway, were children in the fifties as that race exploded, and were teens at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
We might see one version of the psychological /social impacts of the nuclear era in the hippy movement. As we came in to adulthood much of my generation started talking about dropping out of society, ignoring authority and existing social conventions. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die etc.
I wouldn't claim the hippy movement was a particularly coherent response to the nuclear era, and there were other factors involved besides nukes. But perhaps that social revolution provides a hint of how things could unfold.
I don't think it would be worse than covid tbh.