[Spoilers] The nuclear disarmament theory's smoking gun?

When I first heard this subreddit's hunt for super-secret content was underway, I thought it was silly, maybe even a little desperate. After dozens and dozens of hours in this massive game, this was exactly what Kojima wanted us to feel, right? This sense of loss, this phantom pain.

But then I watched the CE video for Mission 51. The title, "Phantom Episode" -- it's impossible to read this as anything besides an aggressive confrontation of the audience, and our feeling that the game is incomplete. There's even persistent text in the top-right of the video teasing us that this final mission is unfinished, only "[x]% complete."

And at the end of this episode, we have Kojima (Big Boss) speaking directly to his audience's (Eli) insistence that "It's not over yet." We are Eli, and we want more combat, more content, more Metal Gear. Never Be Game Over. How does Kojima-Boss respond? "That's right -- don't blame yourself. Blame me." And the video ends with a shot of the New York City skyline where the Twin Towers are VERY conspicuously present, calling to mind how this part of post-9/11 Manhattan was known as Ground Zero. It was a time when the World Trade Center's ghost lingered over NYC like a phantom limb, driving the US to acts of desperate revenge, like the use of Guantanamo as a black site for "extraordinary rendition. " The same kind of extraordinary rendition US audiences loved to watch Kiefer Sutherland perform on the bad guys in 24.

Why would Kojima go so far out of his way to remind his audience that MGSV is incomplete, and that a key plotline was so suddenly and unceremoniously dropped?

Now I feel it too. The sense that something is missing, something that should be there, but isn't. It won't stop hurting. I started building an FOB nuke this week because there isn't anything else to for me to do in the game. I was googling how this mechanic works, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but this Guardian interview with Kojima from mid-2014, which contains this telling quote:

...

'“The message is anti-nuclear weapons, but it’s not just about shouting that message at the player. Through the game, the player is motivated to make a base and build up their military centre. But at some point, when it reaches a certain size, the world begins to take notice and, in that sense, you become the threat. Countries begin to attack you. At this point I give the player the option to think about acquiring a nuclear weapon, in order to deter these attacks, a kind of threat. It illustrates the cycle of nuclear weapons, what inspires people and nations to enter into that system. It’s something that you can only really do in video games.”

...

Kojima said that MGSV is about "doing something only possible in videogames" several times throughout the development of the game. We all know that Kojima promised a "big feature" where we'll revisit Camp Omega from Ground Zeroes ("From Zero to Omega"), something else that was only supposed to be possible in videogames. But this is the only place where I've seen this precise language connected to the game's nuclear weapons mechanic, and by extension the hidden nuke-disarmament cutscene.

I'm grasping at straws, like the rest of you, but I think this is the strongest hint yet that the nuclear disarmament theory is the key to the final mystery of this Phantom Game. After all, the repetition of language is key in the Metal Gear series ("Kept you waiting, huh?"), and MGSV in particular. If anything hidden is left to be unlocked in MGSV, all the available evidence points to nuclear disarmament; to a collective effort on our part to achieve Peace.

As soon as my nuke finishes, I'm going to disarm it. I hope you all do the same. What I'm really saying is, my mind has become parasitized by all of you. It makes a man HIDEOus, wouldn't you agreeeeeee?