There was a time when I knew how the world would end. I grew up in a time when our elementary school would hold nuclear attack drills with the same regularity as they did fire or tornado drills. Regular PSAs on television and radio would remind us to “Duck and Cover!” in the event of a nuclear strike. In college we were dutifully shown the location of our dorm’s fallout shelter and told how to get to it when the seemingly inevitable occurred. In the 1960s and ’70s we knew with a certainty that is hard to describe or even understand now that the world was going to end, and that it would end in fire. I was thinking about this because I’ve been playing through the various DLC for Fallout: New Vegas. The Fallout series of course is set in the aftermath of a global thermonuclear exchange between the US and China. But in the game the war was long ago; 200 years ago in the case of New Vegas. Much of the world is a wasteland but civilization is slowly recovering. (More slowly than I think it should be, but that’s a quibble for a different post.) In New Vegas life in the Mojave Wasteland is tough, but life is going on. In fact, it seems to be a great, exciting place for adventure. The horror that brought this world into existence is almost an afterthought. Almost. Then I started playing Honest Hearts. First nuke hit SLC inside