Nuclear War Simulator, an (almost) video game that simulates the end of the world

2019, headquarters of the Environmental Division of the Armed Forces Americans at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. In a meeting room of the Dtra, the agency of the US Department of Defense responsible for countering the mass destruction weaponsthe employees know that the problem will take hours to deal with: the Russian Federation is threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory.

Although, four years since then, the scenario is even scarier, the fact that the Dtra was starting a role-playing game to simulate the consequences of a hypothetical offensive gives an idea of ​​how experts today deal with the use of paraphernalia nuclear power, the most tragic eventuality of all.

Flash forward: 2023, any house in front of a personal computer. The possibility of choice is wide: contemplate the use of a W88, a 455 kiloton thermonuclear warhead transportable on UGM-133 Trident II missiles, up to the devastating Castle Bravo, tested for the first time on March 1, 1954 on Bikini Atoll, with a yield of 15 megatons of Tnt, “at the time the most powerful man-made explosion in historyWikipedia remarks.

Historical anecdotes aside, the simulations that the Dtra usually runs today are available to anyone who wants to try their hand at Nuclear War Simulator.

Don’t call him wargamesWhy it’s not a game; rather it gives an account of what the near apocalypse 60 years ago, with the Cuban missile crisis, that confrontation between US Navy ships and the Soviet submarine that was about to launch a nuclear attack in tropical seas could have been like, if it were not was for Vasili Arkhipov, the young officer who persuaded the captain to reverse his decision to wipe out the Navy units ordering them to go up. Or in 1983, forty years ago, when Stanislav Petrov decided not to believe the machines announcing the arrival of five nuclear warheads launched by the US. “Too few” he had thought. He had been taught in training that if the United States decided to launch a nuclear attack, it would be an action of annihilation. Five bombs weren’t enough. Both made an instinctive decision, “gut”, but the result of intuition and training. Petrov was 44 years old, Arkhipov just 34.

The gigantic “what if”, i.e. what would have happened if those two young people had decided differently, or if their advice had remained unheard: this allows us to verify the virtual universe of Nuclear War Simulator and with great accuracy. Similar to Nukemapbut more complex, Nuclear War Simulator is available on the Steam platform, to have the global nuclear arsenal on your PC and expand it to double any hell.

Bitter, surprising, there is little that is “purely entertaining” in observing what Nuclear War Simulator represents with technical scientific rigour. It is not entertainment, but a tool capable of calculating the impact of madness. Up to making the entire globe unrecognizable on the eve of a mass extinction. But also later.

You go from the simplest mode, which allows you to check the effects of a single detonation and selectable from the warheads available in the arsenals of all the world powers, including Israel, Pakistan and North Korea, up to the creation of scenarios in which you spectators of the ineluctable.

In the middle of, Nuclear War Simulator sports features that make it a calculator of the worst consequences, a research tool not coincidentally also used at Princeton University during a rerun of the nuclear war between the United States and Russia. The icon at the top right is precisely that of a calculator, which gives the figures of the victims and the effects of radiation from the fallout following the explosion of the bomb, for example, over the skies of Beijing, New York or Aviano.

You can intervene on the predefined scenarios, with opposing blocks of powers, to add elements, design and build new weapons, systems and launch bases. Once the picture has been generated, press “Play”: swarms of unmanned or ballistic missiles start (there is everything in the options, from Little Boy, the Hiroshima bomb, to Castle Bravo), which from American bases or NATO installations in Europe emerge on the horizons of St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kaliningrad. The AI ​​functionality, selectable, has artificial intelligence manage attacks and responses. All we have to do is wait, perhaps speeding up time, to – choose the reader – tremble or rejoice at the end of our species.

There is a fact, as some critics would define it, “meta-ludic”: once the red button is pressed, it is no longer possible to stop the escalation. It’s not a secondary feature.

The historical, technical and scientific accuracy that underpins the simulation is typical of other titles (this time, yes) wargames in the catalog of Slitherine, a specialized and growing Italian company. And that is due to the independent developer Ivan Stepanovsupported by Matrix Games, a company focused on developing strategy engines capable of rendering the complexity of the scenarios that fuel and can detonate a nuclear conflict.

Sitting at the PC it is therefore possible to improvise demiurges of evil, with the possibility of distorting, inventing or reinventing the geopolitical balance, resources and alignments.

Anyone who considers the realism dispensed on the screen terrible, should not ignore a crucial visual feature: nuclear Risk is represented on an Earth seen with the horizon of a satellite; the zoom does not reach the ground, the gaze never touches the rubble to show what has been caused even only in the digital coldness. Nuclear War Simulator stops earlier.

Decide – again – the reader whether to interpret the choice as modest, that is, as an admission of the impossibility of representing the disaster all the way, or if, on the contrary, consider it a comfortable distance, a look away.

Nuclear War Simulator it doesn’t hide the effects of the shock wave and the fire bubble, of the fallout, of the radioactive cloud that continues to poison the atmosphere. It accounts for them.

It allows you to create one or more avatars, place them on the map (outdoors, inside a vehicle, a building or sheltered in a bunker) to then observe the consequences of the detonation on their health.

It’s all physical, mathematical, like looking into the eyepiece of a divine microscope without touching earthly pain. At the same time, the simulation does not fail to immerse everything in a sidereal silence: it is the insignificance of our destinies on this planet suspended in the Universe regardless of what Nuclear War Simulatorafter all, it represents. The fact that we have decided to self-destruct, (una)knowing that the pain is not felt beyond the atmosphere. It was precisely Stepanov, the author, who admitted that he wanted to communicate the extent of the nuclear risk, of a competition full of losers but without a winner.

Decide the “player”. He decides if Nuclear War Simulator you celebrate the foolishness of mankind, or if you aim to inform him of what he avoided sixty years ago. And what does he continue to risk today.