In a very well written, visceral way, this novel showcases the barbarities that even such a limited nuclear can unleash on a society, like few others I've read. On the other hand it also underscores the hopeful recovery efforts that people are capable of.
For anyone who appreciated those films, I can't imagine them disliking Warday. It's also delivers an unusually powerful emotional punch with its character development, well above the average for apocalypse literature.
One of the frighteningly realistic elements of the storyline is how it describes the nuclear bombardment as "moderate", at least compared to what was intended by the Soviets. However, because a large part of the fallout completely ruins the agricultural capacity of the country, the resulting development of widespread malnutrition turns a later flu epidemic into something truly murderous, causing far more death on top of what the bombs produced.
It's really good. And as far as I can tell, as a layman who reads way too much about this stuff, quite accurate in terms of what the sort of limited strike depicted in the book would do in the short and long term. (I have quibbles, such as what happens to San Antonio and Manhattan, but nothing major.)
Highly recommended to anyone who like the genre.
I'm curious, What were your quibbles with Manhattan and San Antonio?
Edit, and yes, I've read that it was highly praised for realism. The authors really put their effort into making it as close to what things might really be like as possible. No hyperbole or dramatics, just the stark inevitable horror of even limited nuclear war and its effects
It didn’t make sense that San Antonio would be targeted in the limited Soviet strike. It would be pretty far down the list, definitely not in the top 3. I believe Streiber has said as much, and that it was included because of the personal connection, and the reason given in the book (some military headquarters there?) was a weak excuse.
I can’t quite explain it, but it doesn’t feel right to me that Manhattan would be abandoned and salvaged like that. Seems like it would either be too dangerous for people to be there, or it would still be an actual city even if diminished. It seems like another thing done for the narrative and personal connection, to allow him to “return home” while also giving a reason he didn’t still live there.
But again, these are both minor points and really don’t detract from the work at all. San Antonio is little more than a bit of background flavor, and the story makes Manhattan well worth it.
That only a few actually landed was because of problems with Soviet strike capacity and of those few that got through, which ones actually did was mostly a question of random bad luck, so I just assumed that by said bad luck, one of them happened to be for San Antonio, which in a full, thousand-warhead strike, would almost certainly be one of the many targets chosen.
To elaborate a bit on that last point btw, I once saw a predictive map of all likely Soviet nuclear strike targets for a full-blown nuclear war in a military strategy book from the 80s (at the height of both countries' arsenals) that I used to have. It had hundreds of US cities and military installations with little dots over them, often just because they had even modest military or industrial significance. Apparently, if you're going to launch everything and have a lot to launch, might as well be generous with your delivery....
That's how I saw it at least, and at least it seemed like a fairly plausible justification for including San Antonio even though really, he just wanted to.
As for Manhattan, I also had a hard time believing it would be abandoned so totally, but the claim was that the bomb detonated especially dirty if I remember right, and bombs like that really can leave a place too contaminated to live in for many decades. There are atolls in the pacific where this happened from "mismanaged" tests in the 50s.
Either way, glad you (obviously) loved the book as much as it deserves!
“At that time I got a look at the condition of San Antonio. I remember being astonished that this little city had been so terribly devastated on Warday. People had hardly even heard of it in Britain. One would have expected Los Angeles or even Houston before San Antonio. Of course, it has since come out that a good part of the planned Soviet attack didn't go off, so in a sense San Antonio was simply unlucky. The Soviets had given it first-strike priority because of the extensive U.S. Air Force repair and refitting facilities there, and the huge complex of military hospitals, the atomic supplies dump at Medina Base, and the presence of a mechanized army that could have been used to preserve order across the whole of the Southwest as well as seal the Mexican border.”
So the first strike was those three cities, and then the followup total strike didn’t happen, presumably stopped by the US counterstrike.
For Manhattan, it says that the biggest hazard is from chemical pollution from abandoned storage facilities, particularly nearby in New Jersey. Which seems kind of plausible, although I imagine people would be a lot more tolerant of such health hazards in this world. I guess everyone evacuated, and then the fact that you can’t just walk back to Manhattan might keep people from returning.
Using an example of a 350kt airburst on NukeMap[0], the fireball radius is 700m with an area of 1.53 km². The Thermal Radiation Radius with 3rd degree burns is 7.67 km with an area of 185 km². The Light Blast Damage Radius is 13.9 km with an area of 610 km². While the numbers will be different for different yields, the basic ratios will be the same.
This means that your person in the lawn chair is highly unlikely to get to unconscious bliss in 20ms. They are 120 times more likely to enjoy the full experience of 3rd degree burns and ~400 times more likely to get significant injury while still being alive.
It seems far better to take shelter and do all you can to survive intact, and help others. If the situation on the other side is intolerably bad, you'll likely be able to find ways to end your situation far less painfully vs being naked against a nuke blast.
As I understand it the main reason there isn't instant disintegration out to hundreds or thousands of meters is that as soon as enough initial gamma and X-rays turn surrounding material into plasma most of the energy released goes into fireball formation because the plasma is virtually opaque to all EM and the fireball grows in volume as a plasma until expansion reaches equilibrium with compressed surrounding air, everything at the plasma/gas interface is incandescent and radiates as a black body of ~10,000C which transfers a lot of heat but not sufficient to atomize many centimeters thick objects unless they are very close.
Portions of the towers that suspended initial nuclear tests survived, for example.
But I agree thats hardly a mindset of typical US redneck prepper. Although most of them live in rural areas and at least some hunting skills are sort of essential to cut costs.
That's the first time I have heard of marauding post-apocalyptic biker gangs being called "costs"!
If Sarah Connor's dreams taught me anything, it's that there's an optimal middle ground to be had here.
You don't want to be exposed to the flash nor the heat pulse seconds later, because it's pretty much instant blindness followed by your skin melting off.
What you do want is the blast wave that sends large objects plus the pulverized debris with it in your direction, so you probably just get crushed instantly.
I'd only recommend the lawn chair part if you've got a protective suit and flash blinders, in which case the real question is what you're drinking and/or smoking at the time.
I don't share your fatalism, but I can't criticize it. It is an understandable position. With that said, if your desire is truly to remove yourself from existence in the aftermath of such an event it is better to have some plan to do so already laid in. The majority of immediate casualties will not be deaths, you are very likely to regret relying on the weapons.
That would also grant you the chance to reconsider whether the resulting world is actually not worth living it -- or at very least to confirm that it is in fact so bleak.
That's all fine and dandy if you only have yourself to think about...
You jest, but imagine lining up your four year old to die (you may be childless, so that might be hard for you).
I think the argument a few posts up was that this is the humane way out, rather than dragging themselves or their loved ones through the burns, trauma, radiation poisoning, starvation, and/or depredation that they assume comes next. Having loved ones is not a counterpoint to this sort of thinking.
I can't necessarily imagine making these decisions, but it is not unprecedented that parents would do so for themselves and their children. It's happened with much less trigger than a nuclear holocaust.
Another problem with that argument is that you'd actually be able to position yourself to be vaporized, when I don't think anyone could know what would be targeted with that level of certainty (beyond a couple things like the White House, Pentagon, etc).
Like maybe by setting up some lawn chairs on a roof, you just signed you and your family up for extra burns and trauma because you assumed they'd target downtown, but they actually only targeted the airport so you're miles away from the vaporization zone.
After that you'll become less and less ok as you start having to deal with increasingly intense challenges to your continued survival.
The real problem is what happens over the next 3 to 12 months, since global trade and agriculture would fall apart.
Most projections of casualties from nuclear war have much higher fatalities from famine then bombardment.
It may sound bizarre, but I don’t believe in an afterlife so I might as well lean into something to give me inspiration. The idea that I exist because my extremely distant ancestors survived every mass extinction gives me a sense of wonder.
Life is already a miserable ordeal for far too many people.
And then in 100 years they'll curse you and tear down those statues because they found out you ate the last kangaroo in order to survive.
No chance that had anything to do with the panic attack I had when Putin put his nuclear troops on high alert after invading Ukraine. No sir, not at all.
The problem is the person coming after him - if he will be an extremist nutjob, everything is possible even if only 5% or 10% of soviet missiles still work.
Hiroshima in 1957, about a mile from the epicenter of the nuclear strike: https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,...
This is destruction on a scale that has not been seen in the likes of civilization outside the bronze age collapse.
The fact is there is going to be no one coming to help replace burned up hoes and shovels.
Threads and the Day after weren't a snapshot of one single city - they were a snapshot of what would be happening everywhere else at the same time.
Why?
Why would it be happening everywhere - in South America, Africa, Asia, and many other places - at the same time?
South America and Africa would probably get off pretty lightly. And then they'd experience the worst economic depression that has ever been seen due to the complete collapse of global trade. They're not going to be up for the job of rescuing entire continents.
I spent time in 35 African countries getting as remote as possible. The vast major Of remote peoples lives would not change at all if entire continents were completely destroyed (unless they cop the fallout, or the ash causes crops to fail).
"How is anyone supposed to take that seriously? Is that how Cologne, Dresden, Würzburg and Pforzheim, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked a decade after they had been destroyed in Allied bombing raids? The truth is that even after infrastructure gets bombed back to the Middle Ages, life remains surprisingly normal, and people quickly rebuild."
That's what I was responding to.
If the risk was a war involving bombs like Little Boy then there wouldn't be much to worry about beyond localised disaster. The issue is the weapons that are 2-3 orders of magnitude more powerful.
And you're referring to Germany, which that took casualties approaching something close to 10% of its population during WWII - so you're eyeballing a scenario where a country just lost 10% [0] of its population and saying it looks fine to you. That seems a weak argument that the damage is nothing we need to worry about. We can argue over whether nukes are going to kill 100%, 50%, 10%, etc of the population but frankly I don't see where you would want to go with that.
[0] Not from bombing, obviously, but the situation you're talking about is nonetheless one where Germany just suffered massive losses and you're saying you can't see that in a photograph after the cities were rebuilt so no worries if something worse happens.