During the Second World War, the Luftwaffe ran a maximum security prisoner of war (POW) camp called "Stalag Luft III," which imprisoned captured Allied air force servicemen. The story of the 1944 escape from Stalag Luft III is one of the most famous stories of the Second World War as described in the firsthand written account and cinematic classic: "The Great Escape." "The Great Escape" is a conceptually clear, traditional war story in which enemies are distinct entities and the goal of POWs is to find a way out of imprisonment. "The Great Escape" might also be said to function as an exemplar of the way war has been defined and understood within the ''old wars'' paradigm. Following Ulrich Beck (2009) ''[t]he 'old' wars of the twentieth century'' were ''symmetrical'' in that they ''pitted states against states and armies against armies'' (147). Transnational terrorism can be said to offer a straightforward way to understand the anything but straightforward ''new wars.'' Herein, Hannah Spector suggests that the ''new wars'' ought to include a kind of logic that is even more uncertain and unpredictable than that of the organized violence often lead by religious extremist ''unofficial commanders and local dictators'' (147) whom Beck puts at the head of the ''new wars'' development. Spector focuses on the environmental hazards of nuclear accidents, leaks, and runoff as unpredictable and inescapable side effects of so-called peaceful uses of atomic power. She also argues that the global failure of the neoliberal state, which is inextricably linked to manufactured world risks, summons a planetary ethics of responsibility. She turns to the site of education for thought and action on the at once philosophical and pragmatic question driving curriculum studies: What knowledge is of most worth? And that driving the cosmopolitan outlook: What modes of escape, if any, exist between or beyond the irresponsible optimism and irresponsible despair correlated, respectively, with modernity's triumphs such as the discovery of nuclear energy and postmodern apathy associated not only with nuclear numbing.