Dragons, Nuclear Weapons, and Game of Thrones (thebulletin.org) 86
Slashdot reader Dan Drollette shared this article from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists where a specialist in nuclear security analyzes Game of Thones, citing dragons "as living, fire-breathing metaphors for nuclear weapons."
Despite the fantasy setting, the story teaches a great deal about the inherent dangers that come with managing these game-changing agents, their propensity for accidents, the relative benefits they grant their masters, and the strain these weapons impose upon those wielding them. "Dragons are the nuclear deterrent, and only [Daenerys Targaryen, one of the series' heroines] has them, which in some ways makes her the most powerful person in the world," George R. R. Martin said in 2011. "But is that sufficient? These are the kind of issues I'm trying to explore.
"The United States right now has the ability to destroy the world with our nuclear arsenal, but that doesn't mean we can achieve specific geopolitical goals. Power is more subtle than that. You can have the power to destroy, but it doesn't give you the power to reform, or improve, or build."
It makes for a bleak outlook. Or, as a character repeatedly warns in the first episode: "Winter is coming."
"The United States right now has the ability to destroy the world with our nuclear arsenal, but that doesn't mean we can achieve specific geopolitical goals. Power is more subtle than that. You can have the power to destroy, but it doesn't give you the power to reform, or improve, or build."
It makes for a bleak outlook. Or, as a character repeatedly warns in the first episode: "Winter is coming."
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Slashdot has most definitely not jumped the shark, but it has been throughly teabagged by the dragon.
Slashdot has not only jumped the shark, it's now rotten driftwood washed up on some godforsaken beach in the middle of nowhere.
And sometimes (Score:2)
the curtains are just blue.
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I think it is fair to say "it is popular" without any qualifier. Almost the entire work was written to parallel actual events and situations that played out historically by a professor of medieval history. Though it is worth mentioning that the books vary in subtle but significant ways and the the current and last season aren't based on the works of George R. R. Martin at all only, certain pieces of high level plot elements.
What's a lost dragon called? (Score:4, Interesting)
If dragons are nuclear weapons, does that make the white walker's dragon a broken arrow?
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dragons are not dumb but can be stubborn at times (Score:2)
dragons are not dumb but can be stubborn at times. Undead ones who really know what will happen and if they can be snapped out of it.
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I don't know, first they are Wyverns and second white dragons don't breath fire. The entire thing is preposterous.
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They're both still forms of drake. While the words have a common root, they were disambiguated. European dragons have six limbs (Smaug, Y Ddraig Goch, the one St George clobbered, etc.). There's also a wyverex, which has no legs and two wings.
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A fact I'm sure George R. R. Martin, medieval historian would have schooled them on if he'd been involved.
Re:What's a lost dragon called? (Score:4, Insightful)
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Adult%20White%20Dragon
White dragons have an ice/cold breath weapon, not blue fire. Using his breath weapon on the wall just would have thickened it not destroyed it.
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"What's preposterous is that we believe there is a specific form of a mythical creature."
No there is are specific words with definitions. Whether those words refer to mythical or otherwise fictional elements is beside the point. If we were to discover or create some sort of drake those words could apply to it and convey meaning.
Words and their definitions are all fictional, they are not innate, we made them all up. Reptiles are reptiles because we invented a classification system, invented words and definit
Re:What's a lost dragon called? (Score:5, Interesting)
I really hate that White Walker dragon. Dragons are somewhat magical, but they are real physical animals. To breathe fire they must have some organ that produces flammable liquid/gas. Does the White Walker dragon eat in order to make this substance? It doesn't just appear out of nowhere. And why is it blue instead of red? Blue is a hotter flame than red. Nuclear explosions don't change colors just because the bad guy gets them.
And the dragon doesn't need to breathe fire in order to be the most devastating weapon the Night King could ever have. Instead of moving at the shambling pace of his undead army, he can fly right around the armies of Westeros coming to fight him and make a new army wherever he goes. There's been a raging war all over the country so there's corpses everywhere, but any graveyard will do (including the one inside Winterfell). He can fly anywhere, drop off a White Walker and seed a new army that will grow larger than any force available to fight it before they can find out where it is and march there to fight. And he'll be off somewhere else doing the same thing again long before you find out where he was. Only another dragon can catch him, but the White Walkers are seemingly immune to fire (unlike the wights) so the living dragons can't hurt him but he can hurt them. Even if the living dragons can hurt him and his dragon, very risky going after him since you can't bring reinforcements with you but he can raise support wherever he goes.
Re: What's a lost dragon called? (Score:1, Funny)
It's *fantasy*. It's not *real*. Relax, take your meds, everything will be fine.
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This is the standard flaw in all undead monsters. They live forever despite not eating to replenish energy lost due to action. You can say it's magic but it applies to zombies too, except in 28 Days Later they are immortal even if they don't eat and somehow even many years later have not rotted away.
In any case, the dragons themselves must be magic because there is no way they could fly with the geometry they have, and they would need to consume so many calories they would be extremely difficult just to kee
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the dragons themselves must be magic because there is no way they could fly with the geometry they have, and they would need to consume so many calories they would be extremely difficult just to keep from starvation in any kind of captivity/pet scenario.
Didn't we see the "dragons eat rancher's cattle" trope in one episode of GoT? My memory is hazy, and I have not yet begun to binge.
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Yes, and the farmer's kid too.
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Does the White Walker dragon eat in order to make this substance? It doesn't just appear out of nowhere. And why is it blue instead of red? Blue is a hotter flame than red.
It's because the living dragons have a hydrogen flame, and the white walker dragon has a methane flame, obviously.
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More like when the Soviets got the Bomb (Score:2)
Also explores security issues (Score:4, Interesting)
A major spoiler here if you've not watched the previous seasons, but taking your dragons deep into the heart of the undead kingdom was exceedingly stupid, basically like having a cavalier attitude to nuclear weapon security and handing over a Fat Man to a rogue nation.
Now the undead have one and they are blazing a path south (though to give them credit, they are not unthinking monsters, they stoped along the way to hang some artwork). Without the dragon the wall guards could have just spent years dropping flaming pitch on the things.
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I thought the same thing, and since it's statistically unlikely you and I are the only ones, the show's writers thought this, too. There has to be some large benefit to the expedition beyond the Wall that we can't see yet.
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Re: Also explores security issues (Score:2)
Or, you know, in war sometimes you have to gamble and they dont always work out
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Dumb question here. I have never seen an episode of GoT, but does the Wall actually succeed in keeping out the caravans?
No, but the landmined sections do very well.
Yes (Score:2)
Yes in fact the wall kept out the wildlings, until they were invited to cross so they could help fight the undead.
The undead would have been hanging out for a long time being burnt to a crisp from above, had they noted a dragon to melt a section of the wall.
So yes, even after building a wall a tank can indeed get through it. But since not everyone has a tank it's still a good idea to build a wall to keep out the vastly greater numbers without tanks.
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the undead have one and they are blazing a path south
Was wondering, though, shouldn't these creatures fear the warmth in the South? Like polar bears fear global warming?
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Are you kidding, in the time it took him to arm his spear and take down the dragon she could have just wiped out the night king if she'd gone on the direct offensive immediately. The whole thing would have been over.
Of course that bit might have failed without her magically teleporting to their location north of the wall from the deep south in minutes.
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A major spoiler here if you've not watched the previous seasons, but taking your dragons deep into the heart of the undead kingdom was exceedingly stupid, basically like having a cavalier attitude to nuclear weapon security and handing over a Fat Man to a rogue nation.
That's what Russia almost did with Cuba, right?
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Dany made several tactical errors with her dragons, but she could be forgiven for them.
Her basic mistake seems to have been to assume that people the ground couldn't do much about attack from the air. Clearly that's not the case. Arrows are common weapons, and it doesn't take much imagination to see the potential for a scaled-up version. But Dany is young and lacks experience of battle, and probably couldn't have predicted that the undead king would have a special magic spear either.
The real blame lies with
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Also why isn't dragon armour a thing?
Weren't you just complaining about how dragons can't reasonably fly already? They surely can't carry enough armor to be useful against a ballista projectile.
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Only in the sense that they can't fly by the normal laws of physics, only by magic. They clearly are magic, given that their "mother" became fire-proof (but not her clothes, natch).
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They also like to censor Game of Thrones.
Chinese Dragons are not REAL Dragons! (Score:2)
Chinese Dragons are not REAL Dragons!
No, that's Godzilla (Score:2)
GoT is just dumb slasher porn with no "deep meaning".
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How about going outdoors, or interacting with your family or community?
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Sex, sports, safari, planting trees, reading the Feynman lectures, whatever.
This same tired tripe was tried on LOTR: (Score:5, Insightful)
At one time someone tried to imply that Tolkien's books were about the Cold War and that the rings were nuclear weapons. Tolkien was having none of it and pointed out how the story would have to be different to mirror that.
This is even more of a stretch.
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Re:This same tired tripe was tried on LOTR: (Score:5, Insightful)
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At one time someone tried to imply that Tolkien's books were about the Cold War and that the rings were nuclear weapons. Tolkien was having none of it and pointed out how the story would have to be different to mirror that.
This is even more of a stretch.
Really? The Cold War? Tolkien started writing about Middle-Earth during WWI, through WWII. One allegory for the ring is the bomb that ended WWII. The books seem to be filled with allegory, but I never figured the Cold War, too.
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They're filming the new LOTR TV series in Scotland, so nuclear rings are not ok.
The United States right now? (Score:1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Some got very near to testing.
Almost, but not quite. Dragons are Comets. (Score:1)
a specialist in nuclear security analyzes Game of Thones, citing dragons "as living, fire-breathing metaphors for nuclear weapons."
Dragons in Mythology are comets with long illuminated trails. Sometimes comets break up having multi-cores, and these are a hydra or a Serpent of the Sky famously one in the past had Seven Eyes. This is what much symbolism is all about. Like in the Renaissance secrets are still kept from the public and so occultists hide messages in art still today to bypass oppression. In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is Rome, Juliet is the Comet that destroys Rome, hence the Great Tragedy. Re-watch that and take note of th
Dumb (Score:2)
Quite possibly the dumbest thing I've seen on the internet in a while.
Setting aside their naked effort to garner clicks by mentioning dragons, the analysis is puerile as well a backwards: rehashed sophomoric arguments from the cold war era, framed by a necessity to hew to the simile, rather than trying to glean useful insights through metaphor.
Much of the article discusses the issues of uni polarism (ie GoTs situation) which hasn't been relevant since what, 1947? and never will be again.
Bombers (Score:1)
No, Dragons aren't Nuclear Weapons. Dragons are flying fortresses with napalm bombs. Nuclear weapons aren't merely raining fire from the sky. They nearly obliterate everything within a given radius and cast invisible radius over an even larger one. More importantly, ICBMs can rapidly launch multiple warheads at a speed that makes dragons (or planes) look like snails. Only in the sense that nuclear weapons are the "ultimate" weapon is there any sort of real comparison. Otherwise, it's a pretty horrible
Oi vey. (Score:2)
Apparently these people have their noses so far up their own backsides that they don't think "Deterrence" is a goal in and of itself.
They apparently think that guns/nukes are little Evil generators that are responsible for Everything Bad in human history. And if they'd never existed, the world would be this felicitous land of fairies and unicorns.
NEWSFLASH!
PEOPLE ARE ASSHOLES!
This means that they're only as good as they NEED to be to keep the world from killing them outright.
Could we be as effective in sto
Bad analogy. (Score:2)
This is not just a bad analogy; it's a horrible, morally bankrupt analogy.
There are two important things to consider about nuclear weapons: 1) They inevitably result in enormous collateral damage to noncombatants, including children; 2) they cause environmental damage that affects everyone on the planet, including the ones who used the nuclear weapons.
I think there is a strong case to be made that nuclear weapons violate basic laws of war, in the same manner that biological weapons do. (Go ahead, fight me.
Desperate reach... (Score:1)
Elephants would be a wiser choice (Score:2)
They're the M1 of that world.