One Man's War Day Scenario by Dave Laird Written 2000 updated repeatedly since For the moment, I am going to borrow heavily from a fellow writer, someone who I have met at length at several fiction writers conventions, with whom I have discussed the limited nuclear exchange theory. Whitley Streiber is a science fiction writer of considerable expertise, experience and a diversity of books too numerous to mention here. Among some of his most controversial novels one in particular stands out. The novel Warday, published by Warner Books in 1988, suggests a chilling yet scientifically-accurate assessment of what could happen to America with just a simple, limited nuclear exchange. I contacted Warday's co-author, James Kunetka, in 1984 during the research phase of the writing several nuclear war scenariod, including the Fairchild Scenario, which I co-authored with the late Bill Prescott. Once I heard of the plans regarding their book, I immediately read and re-read Warday several times, making note not only of the superb stylization, narrative and the use of fictional demographics charts, something no one has ever done with such great effect. The scenario in the book encompasses more cities and towns than the scenario I am about to discuss. In Warday, Russians bombed military targets only, and then only a partial first wave, at that. They eliminated completely the cities of New York, Washington, D.C., San Antonio, Texas and completely eliminated the missile fields in North and South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. Most of these missile bases have since been deactivated and/or no longer exist as they once did. In all, sixty-seven million, eight hundred thousand direct or indirect casualties occurred as a result of this minimal nuclear exchange. Plus there were innumerable nuclear devices exploded in near-space, thus creating a massive electro-magnetic pulse which destroyed nearly 75% of all computers, electronic ignitions, radio and television systems-in short, anything that had transistors was completely eliminated by this effect. Were you to be standing out of doors, so long as you were not peering upwards into the heavens, were one of these devices to explode directly over your head in near-space, the worst you probably would get, experts say, is a sunburn, and a mild one, at that. However, for over 500 miles in either direction, electronic havoc would be the order of the day. We delude ourselves with computers, for they, like anything else that is transistor-based, can be eliminated with just a few atomic weapons exploded in near outer space. I do not submit that reality ever follows fiction, but there are one or two issues where I feel Warday is chilling in its accuracy: 1. The radiation doseages obtained from government research facilities and used in the creation of Warday are, if anything, conservative. [See notes on post-exchange trauma later in this document] According to officials inside the CDC, were an actual attack similar to that suggested by Warday to occur today, the actual loss of life, including lingering radiation illnesses, would probably exceed eighty-five million people, mostly due to new knowledge of the effects of radiation and the US population expansion since 1988. 2. Warday also raises the issue that, in a nuclear scenario, as much, if not more long-term damage would occur due to hazardous wastes in urban areas than from the nuclear exchange, itself. Most environmental hazardous wastes are contained under very carefully-maintained conditions. However, in the chaos that is certain to follow a nuclear blast of any substance, those hazardous materials will be free to circulate freely in the air, earth and water resources, thus making the land uninhabitable for nearly as long as the half-life of radioactivity, itself. 3. To date, I have not found anyone in the Armed Forces, our nation's intelligence network or a nuclear physicist who can attest to the true nature of the EMP effect caused when nuclear devices explode overhead in near-space. In fact, military authorities generally refuse to even discuss this particular scenario. However, during the Reagan administration, military authorities spent in excess of 7 billion dollars shielding their computers and electronics from just such a threat. That was an UPGRADE. No one knows precisely how much they spent originally in an attempt to prevent EMP damage. This, then, is my vision of how I see the next, and I hope the final, use of nuclear weapons technology within our lifetimes. It will not, as many novels have portrayed it, to be one huge exchange of nuclear arsenals resulting in a long and painful return to some semblance of normalcy for most people in the United States. It will be mercifully short, but even then, it will have catastrophic effects on us all. Let us hope and pray that I am wrong, for whatever reasons. Nuclear Scenario, Updated 1997 Hour 1 Operation Dream Eagle is a series of radar, radio and telemetry listening posts maintained by the United States Coast Guard along the East Coast of the United States, from Maine to Florida. Every day, 24 hours in a row, each of these listening posts carefully monitor not only the marine and air traffic as far as 200 miles out to sea from our nation's shoreline, they also patrol the area in fast Coast Guard cutters and long-distance aircraft to insure our nation's safety, to prevent smuggling and to provide yet another layer of safety to all ships at sea. Nonetheless, at 7:00 o'clock PM on September 2, 1997, this network, composed of overlaying resources, fell completely apart within a matter of hours. A huge, looping low pressure center, the remnants of Hurricane Charles, which several weeks before had seriously molested the States of Florida and Georgia, was afoot on the sea once again. After spending most of four days over land, however, Charles had little of its original punch left. Still, there was enough gale-force winds left, that as Charles slowly cruised up the eastern seaboard, wherever it went, the Coast Guard was besieged with distress calls from small craft owners who were too ignorant of the ways of the sea to monitor the weather advisories before setting out to sea for an afternoon of near-offshore fishing. Things got only slightly more complicated when, in the middle of repetitious ongoing search and rescue operations, the Coast Guard also received an emergency distress signal from the Japanese freighter Osaka Maru twenty miles east of the Nantucket Lightship. Their radio operator, Hiro Tatakoshi, explained in badly broken english, that they needed an emergency evacuation for one of their crew who had suffered severe burns in an accident below decks. At that time, there were sixteen Coast Guard cutters assigned to rescue efforts in the area, with fourteen more being held in reserve at New York Harbor, Cape Cod Bay and Woods Hole Massachusetts. Moreover, there were additionally 4 Coast Guard Chinook helicopters on hot standby and three in cold standby sitting on the helipad of the East Moriches Coast Guard Station on the New York helipad, and 20 miles further inland, there were three rescue aircraft on standby at Trenton Air Rescue Center. However, after the remnants of Charles began an area the size of Pennsylvania State, all but the big twin-engine aircraft were grounded for the duration of the evening, due to high winds and near-zero visibility. The Coast Guard Cutter USS Constantine, involved in the rescue of a family of four who were adrift and without power, saw too it that the twenty-eight foot cruiser was taken under tow, and then turned toward the Lightship to effect a rescue of the injured seaman aboard the Osaka Maru. No one saw a thirty foot fishing trawler that materialized out of nowhere, bound toward land. Under these weather conditions, there simply wasn't enough time or resources to bother. The trawler, later identified as the Windchime Supreme out of Massachusetts, only hours before had met a submarine of unknown origin where, for the princely sum of two million dollars cash, it had picked up three men and a wooden box which now was lashed securely in the wheel wheel of the ship. The ship's owner, Harry Tinkleton, had answered a blind advertisement in the New York Times the previous week which promised, and delivered, a handsome sum of money for the use of a boat for a weekend. Harry, faced with certain bankruptcy if he didn't do something and quickly, grasped at the straw he was handed without asking any questions. That was why, on a night that any normal fishing trawler captain would think twice about leaving harbor, Harry went to sea to meet some strangers. That is why he didn't ask questions, as they paid him quickly, one million dollars in unmarked one hundred dollar bills, as soon as they had stepped off the submarine and onto his deck. The US Meridian, a freighter outbound from New York Harbor to Haiti briefly caught glimpse of the Windchime Supreme at a range of ten miles on their radar screen, but even that was short-lived. The ocean spray and spume from the storm created enough ground chatter that only the most sophisticated radar sets were functional. Hell's basket was open, sailors were nervous and no one was monitoring for smugglers. Hour 12 Even the radar operator at Woods Hole thought he saw a brief blip on his screen, he received yet another distress call on the 500 megahertz distress radio frequency, and thus his eyes were averted as the blip once again was hidden by nature. Normally, it would take a ship the size of the Windchime Supreme approximately eight hours to make the trip from the Nantucket Lightship to New York harbor. Calling forth everything that the twin diesels below decks could offer him, Harry Tinkleton considered himself lucky when he was able to tie up at a dock along the East River shortly after noon the next morning. His passengers had remained virtually wordless the entire time they were aboard ship, and frankly Harry was glad to see them away. They were met by two more swarthy men who spoke in a language that Harry didn't recognize. Their mysterious wood-encased package was cheerfully loaded onto a truck and they were gone within fifteen minutes after their arrival. Once he had checked beneath the decking underneath his feet, to make certain that the valise containing all those hundred dollar bills was still in its secret hiding place, Harry put away the gun he had carried all night, lit a fresh cigar, started humming a mindless little tune from somewhere, and turned back the way he came, heading toward Chesapeake Bay and home. He never made it. The two men from the submarine and two more of their compatriots carefully drove the rented truck to a loft near 8th Avenue and Avenue B in the Lower East Side, where they carefully carried the wooden crate inside the building. It was there, far from prying eyes, that they carefully and meticulously began the laborious process of arming the nuclear weapon which they had acquired only weeks before. At four o'clock that afternoon, after checking and re-checking the handwritten set of procedures they had, and with one final prayer with their arms locked together in unison, they pressed the control panel and waited. One tenth of one second later, they were gone, turned simultaneously into so many atoms in the cosmos, as the 4 megaton uranium-enriched nuclear device exploded. In less than a second, it vaporized an area the size of a football field. Entire buildings within two miles that had stood for decades simply dematerialized. Bricks and all, the street outside their warren simply ceased to exist for over two miles in any given direction. Two and one-half miles away, at Saint Peters Church in Greenwich Village, two seconds after the ignition sequence, had human eyes been watching, they would have seen the entire church, made of hand-hewn granite, simply explode into dust with the outbound force of the blast. Half a second later, the blast came back, on its way back to its point of origin, and finished the job it started only half a second before. It left a pile of rubble where once one of man's greatest edifices of worship had once stood. Three miles away, at the massive Commonwealth Edison coal electrical generating station at Fourteen and Avenue B, because of its massive design, the first inkling most of the workmen in the basement had that something was wrong was when every circuit, from Manhattan to Long Island suddenly and completely blew their overloads and one floor above, the giant generators suddenly and inexplicably began winding down, their circuits no longer functional, their massive coils fused by EMP. By the time the last turbine died to a whisper, the majority of the personnel both above and below ground were dead or dying, as most of the south-facing fascade of the venerable old building simply fell inward with the force of the blast. The rest, those fortunate enough to have survived the blast, died whimpering and in agony, over the next few days of radiation poisoning. Eight miles to the north, the vast electronic toteboards and ticker tapes of the New York Stock Exchange simply ceased functioning, leaving the brokers and pit attendants looking at each other, until the south-facing windows cascaded inward in sheets. Those who survived the glass ran outdoors, and within seconds exposed themselves to critical dosages of fallout from the huge billowing brown cloud to the south. Pieces of burning tar, car parts and even more glass fell from the sky uninterrupted for over ten minutes, while people continued to pour forth from damaged buildings. Nearly every skyscraper within twenty miles of the blast lost all of its glass, with most of the occupants in these buildings, although higher in the air than the source of the blast, killed instantly by the heat, the gamma radiation or both. Those lucky enough to survive, perhaps because their offices faced north, found themselves trapped in highrise tombs, as complex elevator controls, lighting and any other types of electronically-supported mechanisms ceased functioning without electricity. It is estimated that 88% of everyone within a ten mile radius of the bomb's location died within 72 hours after the blast. Those who survived the initial searing flash of light and the fires that spontaneously were set off died from exposure to high-level radioactive fallout, as the familiar mushroom cloud, following the southerly breezes, marched north through Manhattan. Even those outside the ten mile radius of death and destruction did not fare so well. Of those between ten and twenty miles from the blast, but who were outside at the time of the blast, 49% died within hours or days from gamma radiation poisoning created milliseconds after the blast took place. The EMP effect, even in such a small confined area, caused the shutdown of the entire New York Public Telephone System throughout most of Manhattan, Long Island and the Boroughs thus further limiting the communications ability of the entire city. Even phone lines that were not effected by the pulse were hopelessly jammed. Police and fire emergency vehicles from the southernmost end of Manhattan through the Boroughs were no longer able to talk with one another due to EMP damage to the critical radio towers and transmission lines. Over 75% of the city's cable television resources were completely immobilzed, due to the proximity of the blast to their uplink/downlink offices on the Lower East Side Beltway. Over 50% of the police cars in Manhattan either did not run at all or had dead radios due to EMP damage. Any vehicle within approximately ten miles to fifteen miles of the blast that was manufactured after 1978, with transistorized ignition systems, simply quit working. Forty-fifth Avenue was jammed with abandoned vehicles for nearly six miles. Nearly all television and radio stations in New York City were silent. A few network affiliate stations as far out as White Plains, New York, were the first to actually broadcast live footage of the atomic cloud and the death and destruction to CNN in Atlanta. Although the New York Times newspaper offices in downtown Manhattan were too severely damaged and radioactive to go to press, but using one of their Borough printing presses, they were still able to print an eight page special edition regarding the terrorist attack which was circulated and sold out within minutes. Shortly thereafter, it too, succumbed to the ravages of EMP damage and the threat of radioactive fallout, and was heard from no more. Many of the news carriers who delivered this last edition of The Times died horrible deaths, some while they were still attempting to deliver their newspapers. Three of the city's main hospitals were completely overwhelmed with those seeking emergency medical first aid, despite the fact that without their high-tech electronics, few of them were capable of operating at anything near peak efficiency. By nine o'clock that night, Saint Vincent's, closest to the blast, was forced to abandon their building entirely due to radiation illness among their staff who were still attempting to render first aid until they no longer could stand unassisted. According to several sources, 98% of the St.Vincent personnel died within 72 hours. By nightfall, you could see little to nothing of the center of New York unless you were close enough to feel the flames that continued to burn untended from 2nd and St James Place to twenty-third and Forty-fifth Avenue in Manhattan. That is because the low pressure center, which originally was the central core of Hurricane Charles finished what the terrorists started. As low pressure built in over the New York Area, the radioactive cloud traveled silently, with a dense bank of fog hugging close to the ground. People as far north as seventy miles never saw the cloud coming their way in time to take evasive action. Few will forget the image of the President of the United States as he addressed the nation that night from the relative security of the underground bunker at an undisclosed place outside Washington, D.C. . As he spoke, CNN Atlanta broadcast those fleeting images of the incredible damage done to Manhattan and Long Island, for that afternoon, two CNN photographers flew over the blast area in a tiny Cessna plane, photographing the two mile dead zone surrounding the blast site, the endless fires as far as ten miles away and the massive cloud, now nearly one hundred miles out over the Newfoundland Banks. Unfortunately, they were exposed to sufficient radioactive fallout that they were hospitalized in New Jersey for upwards of six months. Neither were capable of working in their profession again. In the days and weeks that followed, without the New York Stock Exchange, both the Chicago and Kansas City exchanges closed their doors, pending an evaluation of the actual cost damage done to the nation as a whole. A few major corporations whose stock once was sold for billions of dollars annually simply didn't exist anymore. The Chicago Exchange opened to trading seven days later, but shut its doors after panic buying and selling created a civil riot. NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox Network were but mere shadows of their former selves, since their headquarters were either demolished completely or toxic to the touch. However, four camera crews, two from CNN and one each from NBC and Fox, each won Pulitzer Prizes for photo-journalism for their heroic efforts to film the devastation within hours of the blast. Fortunately, all four crews were attending a meeting in the basement of the Hyatt-Regency Hotel in the upper 50's at the time of the blast, and thus their precious cameras were spared the EMP damage which affected so many other news media teams. It would be nearly a year before the eighteen banks in the Gold District of Manhattan would be able to access the cash, gold and securities resources still safely stored in their underground vaults. Even then, it cost each of them in excess of seven million dollars apiece for properly shielded equipment and personnel to effect opening the vaults without electricity. All but six of the original eighteen financial institutions, many of which had been in continuous business since before the Great Depression, liquidated or filed bankruptcy and forever closed their doors for business. A mass funeral of sorts was held two weeks after the blast for the estimated 49 million dead. The following evening Baghdad time, fifteen cruise missiles from the USS Constellation completely destroyed the ancient city of Baghdad in a nuclear holocaust. According to scientists, had there been humans on the planet Mars, they could have seen the explosion with the naked eye. Where the City of Baghdad once stood, today there is a four mile wide hole in the ground full of what appears to be fused glass. Those who have over flown the site at night swear that it still glows with an unearthly fire, and that it forever changed their lives. May we NEVER have to live through this scenario. Still the odds are tremendously in favor of the fact that at some point in our future history, either through acts of terrorism or through acts of declared wars, we will encounter such a situation. God save us all.