Daenerys Targaryen's Dragons Prove the Insanity of 'Usable' Nuclear Weapons

David Axe

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Warning: SPOILER ALERT. 

In a shocking 90 minutes of dragon-inflicted carnage, “The Bells” -- the penultimate episode of HBO’s fantasy epic Game of Thrones -- finally settled a question journalists and foreign-policy experts for years have been trying to answer.

In the world that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and source-material author George R.R. Martin have created, are dragons metaphors for tactical air power? Or are they nuclear weapons?

Yes, it’s silly to look for practical military lessons in a television fantasy whose creators aren’t even trying realistically to depict the world or warfare. But a T.V. show can explore broader themes in ways are that useful for people in the real world.

Broader themes such as the power of weapons of mass destruction and the consequences of using them.

For that’s what dragons are. Fantasy WMDs.

Daenerys Targaryen, one of several claimants to the throne of Martin’s fictional continent of Westeros and the only one with dragons, first deploys the beasts in combat in the 2017 episode “The Spoils of War.” A dragon flies overhead as Dany’s Dothraki cavalry attack a rival Lannister supply convoy.

The dragon’s fiery breath is terrifying … and decisive. The Lannister forces wither.

But it was possible at the time to view the flying, fire-breathing creatures as metaphors for tactical air power rather than as metaphors for nukes.

“Game of Thrones' dragons are a conventional air force, not a nuclear weapon,” Matthew Gault wrote for Vice. “At best, Dany's secret weapons are the military equivalent of an A-10 Warthog—a heavily-equipped close-air-support fighter plane. She's the only person in this fantasy world with an air force and that gives her an advantage, but no one ever won a war on air power alone.”