Is The 'Forever Winter' Our Future?

Thoughts on AI, nuclear weapons, and forever wars...

Dr. Christopher Mott is a Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy; an expert in Grand Strategy and Geopolitics; and a former researcher and desk officer at the U.S. Department of State.

When it comes to fictional depictions of a post-nuclear future, Nevil Shute’s 1957 classic novel On the Beach arguably popularized the trend. The story showed the extinction of the human race from a globally omnipresent and ever spreading radiation.

In later years, the made-for-television movies Threads and The Day After shocked Cold War audiences in the 1980s by depicting the nightmare of a post-apocalyptic future in which most people were not in fact killed quickly but rather lingered on in great suffering ; a future which sounds less bleak but was in fact more horrible to depict and contemplate. Help lines were set up by the ABC network on the day of the broadcast of The Day After in order to provide assistance to those traumatized by the events depicted on screen. President Reagan, after being emotionally affected by viewing the program, would use the program as indirect support for his desire for nuclear arms limitations with the Soviet Union.

In the video game The Forever Winter, which is currently still under early access development, a variety of concept artists and designers came together to imagine one of the bleakest potential futures for humanity possible. They did so not just by tapping into the stylistic grotesque of their visual design, but also by upping the societal ante. Just as Threads and The Day After had actually heightened the horror by showing not just the death, but the questionable survival of the human race after the apocalypse, The Forever Winter shows not just the survival of the human race, but the survival of three powerful superstates. After countless mergers and annexations, these superstates bestride the ruins of Earth as post-apocalyptic Leviathans. Still all-powerful, fielding massive means of destruction in order to continue fighting a war that no one remembers the reasons for, the states of the future contest the ruins of a bygone age with a relentless purpose. No one is even sure who is in charge of these states anymore, with the defense-oriented artificial intelligences mindlessly carrying out instructions issued by military scientists now long since dead. The directives were to win the war, and nothing will stop them.

The players in this game are not the leaders and masterminds behind the tyrannical superstates, nor even their lowly foot soldiers, but are instead lowly scavengers. Rats living in the walls of ruined cities who come out to steal equipment and food from the armies that continuously slay each other outside. Being more fragile and having no military organization, their freedom is the only advantage they have. If caught, their corpses are used as fuel or as decor to cover the hulls of the various faction’s tanks and walking power-suits. Yet the scavengers must head out lest their hidden underground base runs out of water.Meanwhile, the militaries will defend their supplies, only letting slip their guard when they collide with each other, fighting the war whose beginning no one remembers, and whose possibility of ending no one can even fathom.

Is this simply the dream of science fiction? A mere cautionary tale? I would contend that the reason the setting of this still-unfinished game has struck such a surprising level of success already is because there is a strange sort of truth in it. The state’s policy being directed by an “artificial intelligence” that lacks the capacity of critical thought is one concern on many minds today, but far more prosaically and immediately we know from recent history that the modern bureaucratic state can effectively behave as its own entity. Too bloated and omnipotent to be effectively checked by mere human oversight.

In the United States the powers of the Legislative Branch have been weakened for generations, leading to an over-mighty executive who can effectively rule by decree. A situation shown by the recent kidnapping of a foreign head of state on what could end up being the plan of an intelligence agency and the whim of a single man. This in addition to the declaration that the President seeks a 50% increase of the defense budget to 1.5 trillion dollars in the next year. The Pentagon and the CIA have opaque budgets and form effective black boxes that citizens cannot even retrospectively interrogate. One cannot help but wonder if a Kwantung Army-type scenario is in our future, where a rogue element of the military or intelligence apparatus simply creates a false flag operation or crisis with another state in order to force a (largely compliant) media to manufacture consent for a new conflict. Fearful of looking weak, the civilian government mostly just goes along for the ride, declaring support until pivoting to complaining about having been lied to if things go south later on.

But in a multipolar world where many countries have nuclear weapons attached to tripwire triggers and military-industrial complexes that are often better funded than most other segments of the state combined, can we really avoid the issue of a kind of imperial Leviathan that operates on autopilot? One that simply acts and reacts based off of the shortest of short term calculations in order to feather some resume or grab some headline? Few would dispute that a state must have national security secrets, but if those secrets are so vast that they are beyond debate and discussion then there is simply no way to have reasoned interrogation over more long term and sustainable directions.

If we want to avoid being sucked into an eternal and perpetual cycle of endless securitization that has the potential to outlast the very world it claims to be defending, then surely the first step to avoiding a forever winter is to curtail the ability of our societies to engage in Forever Wars.