The one thing I didn’t really note in that article was how it’s kinda rude for the Wolfenstein developers to be appropriating the trauma of the Japanese. That little irony just slipped right past me. But I totally missed the irony of the Manhattan bombing and the Roswell bombing – in the final paragraph I even start talking about ‘the bomb’ right underneath a picture of BJ holding, you guessed it, the nuke that he’s taking to Roswell. I also suggested that the game is trying to link Nazi Germany with contemporary America, noting, for instance, the out of order pinball table bearing Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan.
I was focused on a general summary of the game, as well as suggesting Hiroshima instead of Manhattan as an interesting place to explore. Now, this is something I didn’t really focus on in my original article about the bomb. And somehow, after writing Grace’s monologue about the horrors of the bomb, nobody on the team was like ‘hey do you think Grace should be a little less keen to detonate another nuclear weapon?’ According to Wikipedia, radiation after the Chernobyl meltdown spread across an area of 162,160 square kilometers, with radioactive particles discovered as much as 1100km away at another power plant in fucking Sweden. Let me say this again: BJ nukes America, right after going to Manhattan and seeing firsthand the effects of the previous nuke. We’re not only talking Hiroshima here, right, we’re also talking Chernobyl. During the meeting with Spesh, BJ is told to put the warhead inside the reactor so that the Nazis won’t be able to track it down and disarm it. Plus, keep in mind that BJ put the nuclear warhead inside a nuclear reactor. That’s not accounting for the third degree burns suffered by everyone in a 2km radius, or the radiation further spread by nuclear fallout.
How far away would the population reasonably have gone? When the nuke does go off, everyone within half a kilometre radius of detonation would be obliterated, and everyone within a 1.34km radius would get radiation poisoning, with resulting mortality at 50-90%. That’s… okay, I guess, but it’s a bit limp. The game makes a little effort to show that the population are being evacuated: when you put the bomb into the reactor, Spesh tells you over your headset that one of his people rang the tornado alarm and everyone’s evacuating the city. But what’s the blast radius of that nuke? How much damage does it do to the actual city of Roswell? How far does the radiation go? Wolfenstein 2 is set in 1961, and according to US census data, the population of Roswell in 1960 was a little under 40,000. Ostensibly it’s supposed to be a major act of resistance against the Nazi overlords, and maybe you even actually killed a bunch of them – probably the lower-level officers who weren’t able to escape via space rocket.
That’s a thing that happens in Wolfenstein 2. But then the Roswell levels also revolve around BJ taking a nuke to Roswell and detonating it. It’s built up as this massive insane thing that killed millions. Tangent, I know, but just a thought.Īnyway: so yeah, there’s all this stuff throughout the Manhattan levels about how the bomb was awful, and millions of people died, and it’s a massive scar on the psyche and geography of America. And – just for a moment, can you imagine if Grace was a Japanese American giving that monologue? That would be a fucking massive commentary on the really complex elements of American history that Wolfenstein 2 is trying to deal with. And your introduction to Grace’s character includes her monologue on the horrors of the nuke and the resulting burns all over her arm and so on. Obviously the game has the whole Manhattan sequence, where you go to Manhattan and the twist is that the Nazis nuked New York because it’s an alt-history and they didn’t want to include Hiroshima because that would be too real or something. So – the more you dig into this move, the more it seems just like a totally incoherent decision. It really only hit me on this playthrough, uh, but you straight up nuke America. You sneak into the base, pop a nuke in the reactor, and fuck off before it all blows up. So one of the big segments in the game sees you go to Roswell, where there’s a massive Nazi command unit. Okay I said last week that we’d talk more about the nuking of Roswell, and now it’s next week and we’re talking about Roswell.
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