Nuclear Expert Dr. Emma Belcher On Fallout's Wasteland Accuracy & Mutations

3 days ago 7

Ella Purnell's Lucy holding a Deathclaw egg in Fallout season 2

Grant Hermanns is a TV News Editor, Interview Host and Reviewer for ScreenRant, having joined the team in early 2021. He got his start in the industry with Moviepilot, followed by working at ComingSoon.net. When not indulging in his love of film/TV, Grant is making his way through his gaming backlog and exploring the world of Dungeons & Dragons with friends.

Between its video games and show, the Fallout franchise has offered a darkly humorous and chaotic look at a nuclear wasteland, and expert Dr. Emma Belcher is weighing in on just how accurate the Prime Video adaptation is to real life. Dr. Belcher is the President of Ploughshares, the world's largest foundation dedicated to reducing nuclear weapons around the globe. Having begun as a Public Affairs Officer at the Australian Embassy in Washington, D.C., she has since done everything from serving as a national security and international affairs advisor in Australia's Department of the Prime Minister to speaking on US foreign policy involving nuclear weapons.

Originally created by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky before being developed for the screen by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, the Fallout franchise is largely set centuries after a nuclear war between the US and China left the world a devastated wasteland. The Prime Video adaptation is primarily centered on Ella Purnell's Lucy MacLean as she ventures out into the world from her sheltered upbringing in one of Vault-Tec's sheltered Vaults and learns the dangers of the wasteland.

Also led by Walton Goggins, Aaron Moten, Moisés Arias, Frances Turner and Kyle MacLachlan, the Fallout series has garnered widespread acclaim across its first two seasons for its adaptation of the source games. In her and The Ghoul's journeys through The Wasteland, Lucy encounters a wide range of threats, from such mutated creatures as feral ghouls and Radroaches to lingering radiation in water sources and the fighting factions of survivors.

With season 2 at the halfway point, ScreenRant's Grant Hermanns interviewed Dr. Emma Belcher to discuss depictions of nuclear warfare in media, particularly Fallout. When asked about her preference between more directly realistic portrayals versus something with a touch of fantasy to it like the Prime Video series, the Ploughshares President began by admitting to being "more attracted" to something like Netflix's A House of Dynamite, which she describes as being "real-world" and the sci-fi and fantasy fields "not [being] my genre."

However, Dr. Belcher went on to share "I really like Fallout," finding herself "so intrigued" by the way it depicts The Wasteland and the politics of nuclear warfare. Praising the show for getting audiences "thinking in interesting lateral ways" about the "dangers" of something like The Great War, she went on to point out "the landscape" of The Wasteland as being something surprisingly accurate:

Walton Goggins' Cooper looking worried while in Power Armor in an ashy area in Fallout season 2

Dr. Emma Belcher: When you have nuclear detonations and fallout, the wasteland isn't just completely destroyed, it's uneven. You get some areas that are relatively habitable, and other areas that are clearly dangerous long after the bombs have fallen. The show visually reinforces this by having a stark environmental contrast rather than just a complete uniform apocalypse. That kind of bit of reality, and the research they've done into it, speaks to my desire for not completely fantastical. It's something that is really rooted in science and fact, and hats off to the producers, because that's the kind of thing that's going to draw me.

When asked about how the show's depiction compares to the Fallout games, Dr. Belcher confessed that "it's probably something I should take a look at," which is partly compounded by the fact "I'm not a huge gamer." However, she has heard from those who have played the games that "this nuclear issue is quite present" in Bethesda's source material, which has further piqued her interest to "see how this is treated."

Dr. Belcher went on to share how the Ploughshares team began to "start investing in innovative ways of telling stories about nuclear war" a decade ago, particularly in video games and VR experiences. Finding they "bring in new audiences who haven't been aware before" of the dangers of nuclear warfare, she also says they found it "gets people to feel something."

Another aspect of Fallout that Dr. Belcher found surprising was the way the writers have given "a really nuanced view of human behavior" across their range of characters. Denoting how the mix of Vault Dwellers, Brotherhood of Steel and Caesar's Legion see humanity "portrayed not as just purely savage or purely heroic," she feels this to be an accurate portrayal of how factions would likely form after surviving a nuclear apocalypse:

Dr. Emma Belcher: At times there's cooperation with the Vaults and the settlements, but there's also exploitation, misinformation, and power grabs. You'd have a real mix of people cooperating and helping, but also still competing and fighting over resources. When we look at research on real-world disasters, we find that people often help each other out — but confusion, fear, and competition over resources can really destabilize communities quickly.

Furthermore, Dr. Belcher expressed appreciation for how water "would actually be a dangerous commodity" in a real-world post-apocalyptic setting, much as it is in Fallout's Wasteland, as the "radioactive fallout binds to soil that then washes into rivers and aquafiers." Explaining that radiated contamination "doesn't announce itself," nuclear testing becomes a necessity, much like that of the Pip-Boys Lucy and other Vault Dwellers wear.

Pointing out how it's "pretty realistic" to see characters actively avoiding drinking from open sources, Dr. Belcher says that water subsequently becomes "a commodity that could be fought over," praising Fallout's "smart" writing for recognizing it as "a form of power and leverage." She also finds this extends to the way the show depicts "the collapse of infrastructure and pre-war systems" with its future timeline, in which key buildings and cities are "largely degraded" and instead are "replaced by improvised, fragile alternatives."

Dr. Emma Belcher: You've got scarce healthcare, transportation's unreliable, and information is fragmented or mythologized. I think Vault-Tec's legacy highlights how much modern life depends on these interconnected systems, and once those break, it's really slow and uneven to recover. That's a really good depiction of how much we are reliant on these systems in modern societies. Nuclear war wouldn't just destroy the cities, but it would unravel all of these systems that we all depend on daily.

Walton Goggins' The Ghoul looking surprised at something in Fallout season 2

With all of that said, that doesn't mean the Fallout franchise is a one-to-one depiction of a nuclear wasteland. When asked about the mutated beings Lucy and others encounter throughout the series and games, Dr. Belcher calls them "definitely a fantastical element" of the proceedings and one that's "exaggerated for dramatic effect."

Denoting that the "radiation timeline" is generally "compressed" in the show when it comes to radiation sickness and mutation effects, she explains that real-world exposure "causes a wide range of delayed long-term health effects" rather than the transformations seen in the franchise:

Dr. Emma Belcher: Cancers, organ damage, genetic harm — this all unfolds over years. But I think it actually shows that these things do happen. That's what the show gets right, and it's important for people to understand that the nuclear risk isn't just when the blast happens. It's not just that whoever dies, dies. This is long-lasting damage to the environment and to people that can take generations to unfold, so what we are talking about here isn't just whether you get lucky and survive the blast, but the implications for your life and your children's lives down the line.

Ella Purnell's Lucy standing among a group of Caesar's Legion soldiers in Fallout season 2

ScreenRant: Where did your passion for the field of nuclear studies come from, specifically the nuclear deterrence that you and Ploughshares do?

Dr. Emma Belcher: I actually can trace it back to when I was 14 years old, believe it or not. As you can probably tell by my accent, I grew up in Australia, and there was an anti-nuclear activist who was an alumnus of my high school. She came to our school one day to talk about nuclear weapons, and I had never heard of them, so I was both petrified and mortified that we had this explosive power that we'd created as humans — I was fascinated by that logic of mutually assured destruction. "I've got them, you've got them. I threaten you to use them if you attack me and vice versa." And then that means that no one uses them. It was just a mind-blowing yet kind of mortifying thought. A few months after that, the French were testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific. I remember that a lot of Australians were outraged, and that was probably my first protest to my teachers at high school, like, "This is so unfair. How come the French just get to blow up nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, and then the fallout goes into the environment and potentially harms people?" That's what got me into this back when I was 14. Since then, I've just been interested in ethics, the use of force, international relations, Soviet history, Cold War history, and all of that. That's why I'm here today.

ScreenRant: It's such a fascinating field to study. At Ploughshares, you are all very driven to hopefully reduce the nuclear threats globally. How does pop culture's depiction of nuclear war — whether it be Dr. Strangelove, Mad Max, Godzilla, or something modern like Fallout — measure up to your company's goal?

Dr. Emma Belcher: Yeah, one of our goals is to raise awareness about the situation that we are living under because so many people have forgotten since the end of the Cold War. They think, "Nuclear weapons, that's an old threat." But the reality is we never completely got rid of them, and they're coming back with a vengeance now. The problem is that there's not as much awareness or thought about, "What do we do now?" We are looking around and thinking, "How do we deal with the nuclear threat in the modern era, where it's now being coupled with new technologies and artificial intelligence?" We're in this really tough geopolitical moment with tensions between the US, Russia, China, and all the rest. So, we view pop culture as a really helpful tool to really get through to a whole range of people and really show them what's at stake, particularly younger people who didn't grow up during the Cold War doing duck and cover drills. People in the expert community talk about nuclear weapons in an abstract, technical way, and people glaze over or tune out. Pop culture, and particularly Fallout, may not offer solutions or policy answers, but it does something just as important. It makes the consequences of nuclear failure or nuclear war feel personal and lived and enduring, and it just cuts right through the abstraction. We are seeing a lot more of it now, which is great. I think it's a way to have a conversation and say, "Alright, let's separate fear from what we can do about it." Nuclear war is not inevitable. It's highly preventable. We just need to make sure that we are using our agency and doing the right things.

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