The Living Will Envy The Dead (5 page)

There was surprisingly little dispute or debate.  The idea of guarding the town, in effect turning Ingalls into an armed fortress, wasn't what they’d signed up to do, but they’d seen the flashes in the distance and understood the problem.  It was the newcomers who were the main problem – they hadn’t actually drilled with the others, although most of them knew one end of a weapon from the other – but I was sure that Mac and a handful of ex-Sergeants could ride herd on them.  Besides, it was Mac’s baby.  I wasn't going to get in his way.

“Section D will remain with me,” I finished.  That was thirty armed men, all veterans.  I hadn’t chosen them completely at random, but I wasn’t keen on discussing
why
I had chosen them, not yet.  I had already realised what I was going to have to do and…well, call me sentimental if you like, but I didn’t want to involve Mac or the others.  “Any questions?”

There was a brief buzz of conversation.  “What about our children?  What about fallout?  What about school tomorrow?  What about food?  What about…”

I tackled some of the questions as quickly and brutally as I could.  The National Guardsmen would have to keep watching for fallout, but for the moment, we were clear.  Fallout, believe it or not, is actually quite overrated, but it wasn't a joke.  If we had been closer to a city, I’d have been seriously considering an organised evacuation.

“Keep everyone who doesn’t have urgent business outside inside,” I ordered, finally. Rose and Deborah would see to that, in-between watching the food stores.  Even a small amount of protection can keep you safe from radiation, provided that you don’t abuse it.  “Deborah, once the stores are being protected, can you get back here and organise food for the guards?  Use the stuff that will rot faster.  I don’t know how long the power will hold out.”

That was another concern, I realised.  Power.  Ingalls had a coal-fired power plant, but when we ran out of coal, we were going to have to start digging up more.  Virginia was lousy with coal, but it was going to be a drain on our manpower.  And we were going to be fucked if – no,
when
– we ran out of a lot of things.  There was a nuclear plant only a couple of dozen miles away, but what had happened to it?  Was it even still useable, or had the Russians or the Chinese or whoever blasted it?

I watched the posse depart on their mission and sighed.  I’d bent all kinds of laws already and, God knew, I was going to break some outright in the next few hours.  I knew, however, that there would be no help from the government.  A single crisis would be quite bad enough…and, as far as I knew, at least forty nukes had detonated on American soil.  I didn’t know it at the time, but that estimate was out by at least an order of magnitude.

“Time to move,” I said, and led the way to the remaining jeeps.  “We have a jail to visit.”

Well, Uncle Billy had always said I’d go to jail, hadn’t he?

I guess he’d been right all along.

Oh, where are you coming from, soldier, gaunt soldier,

With weapons beyond any reach of my mind,

With weapons so deadly the world must grow older,

And die in its tracks, if it does not turn kind?

-Stephen Vincent Benét

And
lo
, the bombs did fall!

Even as I was realising that Ingalls, to all intents and purposes, was on its own against a suddenly-hostile universe, the bombs were falling all over America.  The Russians had launched hundreds of missiles and sent dozens of bombers towards America, an exchange that lasted nearly a week.  No one could stop after the first missile flew, just as we had predicted long ago, and the devastation mounted rapidly.  The country itself shuddered in pain.

But it wasn't fatal.  More nonsense has been written on the subject of nuclear war than almost anything else, with the possible exception of sex and religion.  People were told, right from the start, that nuclear war would be so bad that no one and nothing would survive, and that the entire world would plunge into nuclear winter, but few knew anything about the true facts of the matter.  The issue wasn't helped by various governments that generally covered up the question, rather than allowing public debate, but they merely left the ground open for their enemies.  Let me try, then, to explain what actually did happen to America during the Final War.

The first thing to understand is that a nuclear weapon is, in some ways, just like any other weapon.  (I’ll pause here to allow the lynch mob to break up.  Back when we were working on war plans, we were surprised to discover that that was true, although we should have known from some of the operating assumptions of NBC training.)  It is not all-powerful, or all-destructive.  Under the right circumstances, a nuclear weapon’s impact can be almost-completely neglected.  The defence programs that various countries, including the United States, launched were intended to limit the effects of nuclear war on their military machines.  The population was very much a secondary concern.

But the basic facts are clear enough.  Take…say, a USAF airfield, flying fast-jets.  They’re damned big places, just to allow them to soak up hits from conventional weapons and keep operating.  The runways are also hard and a nuclear airburst, high over the base, won’t inflict
that
much damage, at least in theory.  In practice, the nukes did cause considerable devastation, but the runways were still useable with a little work.  A mountain fortress, like the famed NORAD in Colorado Springs, has a great deal of natural protection that the Army Corps of Engineers improved upon in all kinds of interesting ways.  The Russians hit it anyway – and no, I don’t know why, seeing it was shut down years ago – and it took them several nukes to inflict serious damage.  A nuke might produce a big bang, but it is not an Invincible Weapon of DOOM!

A nuclear blast has five distinctive components; light, heat, blast, radiation and EMP.  There are reasons for this involving a lot of complicated physics that I won’t bother to go into.  If you want more information, you can find most of it in a good textbook; hell, college kids have built nuclear bombs, although without the nuclear material to set one off.  I’m not entirely sure if I approve of this kind of information being freely available, but no one bothered to ask my opinion.  Luckily, actually manufacturing the nuclear material to make the bomb go BOOM is quite a bit harder than it sounds.

Anyway…

Let’s get one thing out of the way first.  The Russians did not target the civilian population of the United States.  (Ok, I see another lynch mob coming…)  They targeted vital facilities that happened to be surrounded by civilian populations.  This actually explains some of the odder population densities following the Final War; there were entire clumps of Americans that the Russians decided weren't worth the effect to blast, simply because that would cost them a warhead without any reasonable gain.  They went after political targets, like the White House, military targets, like Camp Pendleton, and economic targets, such as PANTEX and various oil facilities, factories and suchlike.  They had a worse problem than we had.  Their weapons weren’t always reliable.  They actually fired several warheads at critical targets just to make damn sure that at least one of them exploded.  This actually caused other problems, mainly nuclear fratricide, but they didn’t care.  They just wanted to ensure that one of the bombs would detonate.

So the Russians decide that one of the facilities in New York deserves the attention of at least one warhead.  Most people don’t bother to think about this – or didn’t, before the Final War – but there are more reasonable targets in any given area than they appreciate.  New York is – was – a financial centre for the entire world.  Taking it out would cripple whatever remained of our economy and torpedo other nations all around the world.  This would be pretty bad for Russia as well, but at that point they were probably past caring.  Like I said, the final hours were hellish, with all sides just using nukes like firecrackers.  The world had gone insane.

The bomb detonates.  The first effect is light, which moves – as you might expect – at the speed of light.  On an earthly scale, this is effectively instant.  Anyone too close to ground zero and looking in the wrong direction is almost certainly blinded.  Anyone further away will see the flash first and, as we were taught in NBC survival courses, have a chance to take cover.  We thought, for terrifying hours during the Iraq War, that Saddam actually
had
popped a nuke during a particularly nasty sandstorm, but I don’t recall anyone actually panicking.  Anyone a few miles away might just have a chance to survive…

And then comes the heat.  Anything flammable is set on fire, almost instantly, for quite some distance.  That’s quite a bit.  Take a look around and see how much in your room can burn.  Wood, clothes, floors and carpets, books…and, worst of all, cars.  A car with a full tank will go up like a bomb.  Anyone caught inside their car when the bomb detonates, as we believe that far too many people were, is dead.  They won’t stand a chance of escaping before the heat turns their car into a death-trap.  Oh, and people can burn too…

And then comes the blast.  Unlike the heat or light, the blast can be channelled by buildings, or terrain, or whatever else it encounters, causing all kinds of weird effects.  Blast doesn’t move at anything like the speed of light, so someone who had been warned by the flash to take cover has an excellent chance of survival.  On the other hand, anyone who was near ground zero has been blinded, incinerated, and now scattered across miles.  Some buildings will be strong enough to stand up to the blast, others, particularly newer and cheaper buildings, will be knocked down like the houses of the Three Little Pigs.  It’s blast that actually causes the
real
damage, although our hypothetical civilian might disagree.  The concentrated force of a nuke is nothing to laugh at.

Ironically, radiation is actually less of a danger than popular fiction would have it, depending on the exact attack profile.  Most of the radiation produced by the blast will be gone within hours, while most attack patterns rely on using airbursts, which do not suck up so much dust from the ground and throw it into the air, producing fallout.  The idea of fallout as a deadly invisible plague, moving randomly across the landscape, is nonsense.  Fallout is, basically, radioactive dust floating through the air, carried by wind and rain.  It is something that can be handled with a little preparation.

And, finally, EMP, the joker in the deck.  EMP – Electromagnetic Pulse – is extremely bad news for anything electronic, particularly more modern electronics.  Anything exposed to the EMP, or connected to something exposed to the EMP, will be damaged, perhaps destroyed, by the pulse.  The entire United States was held together by its formidable electronic infrastructure.  The Russians targeted the EMP specifically on our infrastructure and fucked it up completely.  Oh, there were entire sections that had been protected and survived, but the network had been thoroughly trashed.  Like I said before, they left out the emergency when they ran the drills…

The irony is that all the ‘duck and cover’ films weren't
that
stupid.  If you weren’t at ground zero, you had an excellent chance of survival.  I reviewed pretty much all of them while I was working for the analysts and most of them had a hard core of common sense that was generally ignored.  Not all of them, however; the British came up with some piece of crap entitled
Protect and Survive
that should really have been called
How to Delude Yourself About the Bomb
.  They were really cheated by their government. 
Protect and Survive
wasn't even good enough for wiping your ass after going to the toilet.

But I digress.  Sorry.

If you’ve read this far, without deciding to join the lynch mob, you’re probably wondering if I’ve lost my mind.  Hell, this sounds almost rosy, compared to what happened, right?  Well, no…

Let’s look at New York as a case study.  New York was targeted by, as far as we can determine, seven warheads, of which five detonated.  We won't know for sure unless we locate an intact copy of the Russian records and, so far, we haven’t recovered anything of the sort.  One of the nukes went off over Manhattan Island in an airburst, while the others came down on the outskirts of the city.  God knows what happened to the two that didn’t detonate, but my guess is that they were caught in the first blasts and were destroyed.  Nukes, unlike dynamite, can’t be triggered by another nuke detonating in close proximity.  Thank Heaven for small mercies.

So New York gets hit, badly.  Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that roughly thirty percent of the population was composed of medical staff, policemen, the city’s government and the remainder of the people who keep a city running.  This is probably ludicrously optimistic, but bear with me a moment.  The nukes detonate and the city’s emergency plans swing smoothly into gear, right?