{"id":25283,"date":"2017-09-06T14:06:15","date_gmt":"2017-09-06T19:06:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25283"},"modified":"2017-09-06T14:06:15","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T19:06:15","slug":"end-games-the-apocalyptic-trope-that-swallowed-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25283","title":{"rendered":"End Games: the Apocalyptic Trope That Swallowed the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

End Games: the Apocalyptic Trope That Swallowed the World<\/a>\"\"<\/h3>\n
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Photo by Mikey | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Everywhere you look these days, you see the trope: the \u201cend of the world\u201d is nigh from a nuclear war. You see it in somber headlines, in weighty punditry, even in throwaway jokes in the middle of, say, a TV review: \u201cLooks like the BBC finally has a comedy hit \u2014 just as the world is about to blow up!\u201d Ha ha. The current situation with North Korea is being portrayed as if it\u2019s a reboot of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with two massively armed superpowers on the brink of all-out global conflagration.<\/p>\n

But putting aside the entirely context-less hype and fear-mongering of our media and political elites, even if there were<\/em> some kind of war between the US and North Korea, it would not remotely lead to anything like the \u201cend of the world.\u201d The US has thousands of immediately launchable nuclear weapons; North Korea has, er, none. And even if you believe Pyongyang\u2019s propaganda (and if you swallow it about their nuclear weapons program, why not believe their BS about the happy workers\u2019 paradise they have there?), you\u2019re still left with the fact that North Korea might<\/em> be able to put a weapon on a missile at some point in the future. OK, then they could possibly<\/em> lob this missile (or heck, two or three of them, maybe) in the direction of the United States \u2013 which, we assume, would just stand back and watch this happen, despite having North Korea absolutely blanketed with surveillance and having the ability to destroy any launcher the instant it reared skyward. And then North Korea would be obliterated by a US retaliation.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

End Games: the Apocalyptic Trope That Swallowed the World Photo by Mikey | CC BY 2.0 Everywhere you look these days, you see the trope: the \u201cend of the world\u201d is nigh from a nuclear war. You see it in somber headlines, in weighty punditry, even in throwaway jokes in the middle of, say, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[7264,28,64,15894,13773,2006,581,655,827,862],"class_list":["post-25283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-abc","tag-apocalypse","tag-bbc","tag-chris-floyd","tag-cuban-missile-crisis","tag-north-korea","tag-nuclear-war","tag-propaganda","tag-united-states","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25284,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25283\/revisions\/25284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}