UNLOCKED: Coping in the New Age of Nuclear Anxiety

Angry Planet

Matthew Gault

War, Politics, Conflict, Government, History, News

4.3 • 882 Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2022

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Russia is at war with Ukraine and Vladimir Putin is making vague nuclear threats. Both Russian and U.S. officials are, mostly, trying to dial things down. A Russian defense official said they don’t have their hands on the button and the Pentagon said it had canceled the test of a Minuteman missile. And yet … days later the U.S. head of Strategic Command said America needed to modernize its nuclear forces and reminded everyone that the test had been postponed and not canceled.

If all this is leaving you a bit anxious about the possibility of nuclear war, you’re not alone. To be clear, the possibility of nuclear war is still damn low … but that doesn’t always make the anxiety go away. Something that has always helped me deal with the threat of nuclear hellfire … is pop culture.

That’s what we’re gonna talk about today.

Here to help me with that is Jacqueline Bryk. Bryk is an analog Roleplaying Game personality, a nuclear policy dilettante, and a nuke wonk gadfly. She’s the writer of many fine games including the Ten Candles hack, Nuke: “A simple, stark game about slowly dying in a city hit by a nuclear weapon.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Love this podcast.
0:02.0	Support this show through the A-Cast supporter feature.
0:05.0	It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment.
0:09.0	Just click the link in the show description to support now.
0:12.0	Hello there angry planet listeners this is... in the show description to support now.
0:16.0	Hello there, angry planet listeners, this is Matthew. We've got a lot of flood of new listeners in the past 30 days,
0:20.0	and we've been recording a lot of really great episodes that we don't want to put behind the paywall.
0:26.0	And given the situation in Ukraine and this flood of new new listeners, we want to let them know kind of what those premium episodes look like and what we do.
0:35.0	So we're going to release them on the mainstream this month.
0:38.6	I really hope it doesn't upset our sub-stack listeners too much, but this episode in particular is one of the ones that would have normally been behind a paywall, but we thought it would be good to release it here. We're also recording another one that's about the changing
0:56.8	nature of tank combat in land wars and what this war in Ukraine means for that. It's another episode that would have been
1:03.0	paywalled that's going to be going out to everybody. So enjoy if you like what we do here
1:09.5	we're at angry Planet pod.com but without further ado I'll get out of your way and let you
1:15.0	listen to this excellent episode. People live in a world, their own making.
1:37.2	Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. Jason Fields is busy working for a living today.
1:52.0	It's the end of the world as we know it and I'm... is busy working for a living today.
1:53.0	It's the end of the world as we know it, and I'm pretty tired.
1:57.0	Russia is a war with Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is making vague nuclear threats.
2:01.0	Both Russia and U.S. officials are mostly trying to dial things down.
2:05.8	A Russian defense official said that they don't have their hands on the button and the
2:09.8	Pentagon said it had canceled the test of a minute man missile.
2:14.8	And yet, days later, the US head of Strategic Command said America needed to modernize its
	...

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