The 'Calamity' of Nuclear War

The idea of initiating a global nuclear war is crazy. It is no less crazy when that real life calculation is acted out by high schoolers on a tennis court, as depicted in a new video, Calamity” by Portland band The Decemberists.

In the video, 12 kids play a round of the game Eschaton, from David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest. I have not read the book. But the game seems designed to bring together the excitement of nuclear war with the fun of high school tennis practice. Hence, as the literati at Wikipedia inform me, the game “requires players to be adept both at game theory and pegging targets with tennis balls.“

The rules seem easy to pick up. The kids pair off into countries or regional alliances. Each team has a population and arsenal of 5-megaton tennis balls. They then take turns lobbing nuclear bombs at each others’ major metropolitan areas, nuclear installations, and command and control centers. I am not sure how the game is scored, but some kid tracks the “military efficiency” of each nuclear strike and its civilian casualties - as if to find a winner in the post-nuclear apocalypse.

The Decemberists’ video turns this nuclear war game – with tens of millions of civilian casualties each lob - into an absurd spectator sport. However, the art of the video is that its absurdity is not far from the truth.

Twenty years after the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia still plan for how to fight each other like it’s 1982.

Pentagon planners are busy right now redrafting plans for how to use the United States’ strategic nuclear warheads – all 1968 of them. They are picking targets, assigning warheads and estimating civilian deaths from the explosions. In the process, they are justifying the retention of thousands of nuclear warheads and rationalizing the potential human costs.

Given that, watching the “war of the end-times” play out with tennis balls in a music video seems less absurd than the actual way the Pentagon thinks about its nuclear arsenal.