At Defense News Paul McLeary reports that in a recent war game conducted by the US Army, they simulated the aftermath of a collapsed regime in a country that very much resembles North Korea. The simulation concerned how the US military would go about securing the failed state’s nuclear arsenal after the collapse. McLeary writes, in “U.S. Army Learns Hard Lessons in N. Korea-like War Game”: “It took 56 days for the U.S. to flow two divisions’ worth of soldiers into the failed nuclear-armed state of ‘North Brownland’ and as many as 90,000 troops to deal with the country’s nuclear stockpiles, a major U.S. Army war game concluded this winter.”
And in nuke news about the past rather than a speculated future, the Physics Buzz blog unpacks the fallout shelters stocked by the Office of Civil Defense during the Cold War. Geiger counters. Lots of Geiger counters.[1]
[1] On an only semi-related note, I ran across this little gem yesterday: “So this ground bass [sic] of material production continues underneath the new formal structures of the modernist text [. . .], its permanencies ultimately detectable only to the elaborate hermeneutic geiger counters of the political unconscious and the ideology of form” (Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981], 215, emphases mine).
The Hyperarchival Parallax 