Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Players Unimpressed By Its Tactical Nuke

This Is What Happens When You Call In A Nuke In Modern Warfare 4, And Players Hate It Published Oct 26, 2026, 9:24 AM EDT Josh Coulson is an editor at TheGamer covering breaking news on everything from colorful platformers to the latest Lego sets. Primarily a news writer since 2018, Josh has covered just about every major game from the past decade. Now an editor, their focus has shifted to being the leading affiliate expert at the site, building relationships between TheGamer and global brands including Mattel, Funko, and The Pokemon Company. Sign in to your TheGamer account The tactical nuke has been a part of the Call of Duty games since the original Modern Warfare 2, so for almost 20 years. It’s only right that the killstreak reward be included in the newly released Modern Warfare 4, although the tweaks that have been made to how it functions aren’t sitting well with its players. Calling In A Tactical Nuke In Modern Warfare 4 call-of-duty-modern-warfare-4-campaign-bombing.jpg These are early days for Modern Warfare 4, and since you need to achieve a killstreak of 30 to be in with a chance of using the nuke, you might not have seen it yet. Some have, though, and the cutscene that plays when the reward is activated has quickly gone viral, but not for the right reasons. Once the killstreak is activated, gameplay switches to a cutscene that shows a missile hurtling through the sky. It breaks apart to reveal three warheads that fire off towards the map. The player who called in the strike then hooks onto a contraption that allows a passing aircraft to hoist them up into the air, away from the blast. As you’re towed away by the plane, you look back on a mushroom cloud rising over the map you left behind, flipping your middle finger as you do it. That action is one of the reasons why players aren’t fans of the new nuke, with some replying to the viral clip as “cringey”, noting that no person would ever do that considering they’re looking down on a battlefield where they’ve left their squadmates to die a grizzly death. You're Supposed To Die Too One of the more popular responses to the clip notes that the whole point of calling in a tactical nuke in previous Call of Duty games was that you go up in the blast along with it. It’s the ultimate sacrifice that brings an abrupt end to the round because you kill everyone, including yourself, with no ability to respawn, presumably because, thanks to the nuclear bomb that just dropped, there’s nothing to return to. Modern Warfare’s twist on the tactical nuke feels like it leans a little too heavily on the Call of Duty fans would rather the series left behind. A side effect of the crossover skins and attempts to appeal to the masses when, with each installment selling tens of millions of copies every single year, the masses have been there the entire time. The first time the nuke was a killstreak reward was in 2009’s Modern Warfare 2. Once called in, an alarm would sound, and a countdown would begin. The end was nigh, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The match would end once the bomb dropped, with a flash of bright light, and the team with the player responsible for calling it in would win. The nuke has returned in subsequent Call of Duty games, including Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7. The experience was similar to the one in Modern Warfare 2 in those games, with the added detail of players looking down at their hands and screaming when the bomb dropped. That element appears to have been retained for victims of the strike in Modern Warfare 4. It’s just the perpetrator’s fate that has been changed to the more unpopular one that sees them make an unlikely escape.