Why a Post-Nuclear World Would Look Nothing Like “Mad Max”

As portrayed in that episode, everybody watched it, everybody talked about it, and it changed how everybody thought about nuclear war.

I don't remember a thing about the TV event in the title of the previouis episode of "The Americans" (S04E08 "The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears" [4]), but I sure remember seeing "The Day After" in 1983.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(2013_TV_series)

[2] http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/theres-got-be-day-after-america...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Statue_of_Liberty...

Radio Announcer: "Warsaw Pact forces are close to announcing a cease-fire along the German border. There are still no eyewitness accounts to substantiate the rumor that low-kiloton range nuclear weapons were detonated this morning during the conflict, resulting in the reported destruction of Wiesbaden and the outskirts of Frankfur..."

[electronic alarm cuts in]

EBS Announcer: "This is the Emergency Broadcast System. All persons currently in transit in the Kansas City metropolitan area are advised to proceed immediately to the municipal shelter facility in the community or township closest to your current location. While there is no immediate danger to the Kansas City area, the Federal Emergency Management Agency urges you to learn the steps to be taken in the event of a probable attack."

All national leaders should somehow be legally compelled to watch it. We need them to be as scared as possible of nuclear war.

For all the dramatic hand wrangling over finding supplies, the survivors are essentially living in a world of plenty -- enough arms, ammunition, canned food, and supplies for a world population, >50% of which presumably no longer have an interest in such things.

It's the antithesis of all that "we should compromise for the good of all, saving the planet, etc" (because how does that sound fun?).

However.

Farnham's Freehold was just ubermensch porn coupled with some really weird racism. He used more hackneyed "I can do everything" stereotypes than an Ayn Rand novel, which is something he was always guilty of but it really came to a head here. The multiculturalism and openness that was so explicitly prevalent in Starship Troopers, Stranger, and Harsh Mistress (the main character of Starship Troopers is a bisexual South American) vanishes, replaced with this weird fear of black people - "they seem nice, but they'll turn on you when they get the chance" is the message the Joe character imparts.

Just a very weird book.

Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle goes into a bit of the politics and aftermath of a comet striking the Earth. It talks about survival, civil defense, and a few other things that would be spoilers to mention. That said, it has some points that are weirdly racist when viewed decades after publication--if you can look past those, though, it's a solid read.

One Second After by William Forstchen talks about the aftermath of an EMP first-strike on the US. Perhaps the one of the more interesting things is that he does specifically pay attention to both the food and medicine logistics--specifically, what happens when we lack ability to run refrigerators and move around grain. It's a bit cheerful in the end, but a good read.

Warday by Strieber and Kunetka takes place 5 years after a "limited" nuclear exchange with the USSR. The premise of the novel is that a pair of researchers are traveling through the US and interviewing folks, reading documents, and generally piecing together both the initial conflict as well as the efforts to survive and recover. It's a really good bit of speculative fiction, but is pretty depressing.

~

One of the biggest things that makes nuclear war difficult to imagine today is that we have the Internet and cell phones, things which at once are utterly integral to most of the non-rural folks and which are completely vulnerable to any sort of honest nuclear strike. The lack of books, CB radios, and basic practical knowhow and repairable goods brought by the rise of technology and international trade might well yield a situation where a theoretical 2020s United States would have a more difficult time recovering than a 1980s US.

At least as far as the 'net stuff goes, the short story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" by Doctorow is maybe one of the only ones that treats the tech angle seriously in a modern light.

I guess rotting plant matter like trees might provide nutrients for some sort of meager ecosystem composed of fungi and insects for quite some time. Maybe a few small mammals and birds. The book didn't really touch on that, though.

Nuclear war doesn't do much.

I think a meteor or supervolcano is also impossible from the scenes in the film, not having lots of things growing within a month doesn't fit really, but it'd be an interesting discussion.

Obviously this is why it's not mentioned, so people don't get wrapped up in the details about how it happen but the story.

I wouldn't describe personal vehicles in such base terms, it's more that cars, trucks, off-road vehicles, etc are the only form of manufactured goods that are both suitable to the world portrayed in the films and widespread enough to be accessible to everyone.

All complex manufactured goods in such a world would be irreplacable, at least within the lifetime of anyone living in that time period. Radios and other electronics are also widespread and suitable enough to be considered a necessity but they'd be destroyed by the EMP effects of nuclear warfare (hence why every vehicle in Mad Max appears to be from the carburetor/pre-electronics era).

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistuingishable from magic and although the mechanicals of a car are well understood by laymen, their existence carries an air of magic/reverence as they cannot be replicated by the society which possesses them. IMO, the closest comparison is that of a Cargo Cult rather than an extreme extrapolation of existing car culture.

There's a really blatant subtext: about guys blowing shit up, exploiting women, and in general driving the world into total destruction. On its face, it's an exercise in radical feminism.

Except, it isn't. Below that, there is the layer showing that women are equally capable of destruction, and that they in fact need to rely on that destruction to reach "the green place".

And that's flipped on its head again, because that war machine runs on a mixture of fuel and mother's milk. Max is pretty much annointed with it when he uses mother's milk to wash the blood of his face, after a selfless act. There's a huge "war turned into a nurturing thing" there. It's echoed by the fact that part of Furiosa's body is partially mechanized. (Her replacement arm)

Which leads up to what I think is the final message, where the realization strikes that there is no separate, women-only feminist utopia. There is no "women peaceful, men violent" dichotomy. Instead, the world is finally improved by the women reintegrating themselves into the world they left, but on their own terms.

It's pretty much a post-modernist deconstruction of war movies and feminism at the same time. It's incredibly heavy-handed about it - all those things have about the subtlety of a hand grenade as a can opener - but it tackled a topic that was important and little talked about.

That is why it was a good movie. If that message doesn't speak to you, I'm not surprised you didn't like it. You were not the target audience. (Neither were people who like chase-and-blow-stuff-up movies, and they were vocal about the fact they didn't like it)

That doesn't necessarily make it a good movie, but if one liked both the subtext and blowing things up, they had a great time watching it.

Is that such a bad thing?

It had a guy playing electric guitar on top of a giant flamethrower, because that's the kind of movie it was.

Maybe not for everyone, but I thought it managed to do what it was trying to.

I agree a limited exchange might leave people in hardened bunkers alive. But a full exchange, we have sop many weapons[1] it seems entirely that only the luckiest in hardened bunkers would survive and largely they would emerge in a polluted radioactive wasteland.

There are only about 3,000 cities[2] with more than 10,000 people, and only about 19,000 cities in total. We very nearly have a warhead per city, but a city does not need a warhead to hit it to die, irradiating the farmland will kill off everyone just fine. They will have trouble growing food because of pollution levels, radioactivity.

I guess you could call a spontaneous transformation in a barren wastes "climate change" but I think that would be underselling the problem. I also think doing that does a disservice to the modern political about climate change.

[1] http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/nuclear-arsenals/ [2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-towns-counties-and-cities-are...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent

* The total energy of all explosives used in World War Two (including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs) is estimated to have been three megatons of TNT

* The total global nuclear arsenal is about 30,000 nuclear warheads with a destructive capacity of 7,000 megatons or 7 gigatons (7,000 million tons) of TNT

http://www.nucleardarkness.org/nuclear/highvslowyield/

Think about the kind of timescale needed for those War Boys to exist as an entire subculture, or for the Green Place to be populated and well-known before withering up and disappearing. The only way it makes sense to me is to consider it happening over generations - and yet in the first movie, the collapse of society is still only in progress.

Mutually Assured Destruction refers to the combatant countries, after all, not to the human species.

That was a retcon.

Umm, yeah.