Between the crumbling of trust in our institutions and escalating global conflict, dystopia feels deeply familiar in today’s world. Though there are people and organizations who are working to keep the globe and our humanity intact, it’s normal for us to think of the worst-case scenarios.
Fallout, a recently released show on Amazon Prime based on the popular video game franchise, is the latest exploration of one of these scenarios: survival after nuclear war.
Fallout takes place in two different periods in the Los Angeles area: the moments before nuclear bombs are dropped across the US, and 200 years later. Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), the show’s protagonist, is a “vault-dweller” — the term for people who live underground in sealed bunkers created by a company called Vault-Tec. Despite their world’s dark past, Lucy and the community of Vault 33 remain optimistic that one day — when the radioactive levels are low enough on the surface — civilization can restart with their help. But when her father, the leader of their vault, gets kidnapped by people from the surface, Lucy leaves her bunker to bring him back.
As she embarks on her quest to find her dad, Lucy finds that the surface is a hostile place. There’s little to no food or clean water, danger exists around every corner in the form of bandits and mutants, and the lone survivors are cynical and distrustful — especially toward Lucy, whose bunkered life seems easy by comparison. As one disgruntled shopkeeper tells Lucy, “The vaults were nothing more than a hole in the ground for rich folks to hide in while the rest of the world burned.”
Indeed, in our real world, there are wealthy people investing in bunkers in case shit hits the fan, including some big names like Mark Zuckerberg. But what about everyone else? That’s a key message in Fallout: Survival isn’t equitable. And while Fallout is a fictional depiction of nuclear war that’s heavy on the sci-fi, nuclear warfare itself is not off the table in reality. There are also plenty of other existential risks that can shape how we live, like future pandemics, a changing climate causing extreme weather and disasters, and harmful artificial intelligence.
What makes nuclear war particularly terrifying is the devastation it can cause in just seconds — the horrifying damage and loss of life from the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly 80 years ago underscore why we should prevent this from ever happening again. Yet, nine countries are still armed with nuclear weapons, with the US and Russia possessing thousands of nuclear warheads.
So I reached out to Seth Baum, the executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, a think tank that analyzes the greatest threats to civilization and develops strategies to reduce these risks. We talked about what the aftermath of a nuclear war could look like in our real world — and also what we should focus on now to prevent this scenario from happening, as well as how we could prepare for it if it does.
“We do actually need to take this seriously, as dark and unpleasant as it is,” Baum said. “It is a very worthwhile thing to be doing because we could really need it. It could be the difference between life and death for a massive number of people.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
After watching Fallout for myself, it feels like an ominous warning. But, of course, it’s also describing an alternate history, and there’s a lot of science fiction in the story. What could an actual post-nuclear world look like for us?
[It] probably would not involve mutants and........