Warday
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| 1985 paperback edition | |
| Author | Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka |
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| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | nuclear war, Novel |
| Publisher | Holt, Rinehart and Winston |
| Released | 1984 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
Warday is a novel by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, first published in 1984. It is a fictionalized account of two reporters traveling across America after a limited nuclear attack in order to research how the nation had changed after the war. The novel takes the form of a documentary of sorts, and is written in first-person narrative form. The novel includes fictionalized government documents and interviews with individuals to further explain the aftermath of the war.
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[edit] Synopsis
The novel opens with Strieber's account of a nuclear attack on New York City. He is traveling in a bus when he is blinded by a flash of light. The series of warheads detonated with a combined force of 20 megatons of TNT. The explosion rips through the city, flooding the subways with seawater and igniting Brooklyn. Making his way through the wreckage, Strieber reaches his son's school, where he meets with his wife and son. The family stays in the school for two weeks, suffering from radiation sickness. Eventually, when it is safe to escape, Strieber leaves the city with his family.
As revealed in an interview with a former Undersecretary of Defense, in the months before the nuclear attack, the United States was on the verge of developing an advanced anti-ballistic missile system known as "Spiderweb." The system threatened to render almost any Soviet nuclear attack inoperable, utilizing high-energy lasers to destroy warheads as they left their delivery vehicles. (A recent example of this concept is that of the "Star Wars" project proposed by the Reagan administration. More precisely, this program was correctly known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI.) During initial deployment of Spiderweb by the Space Shuttle Enterprise, the Soviets detonate a hunter-killer satellite at the Shuttle and its cargo. The conflict escalates rapidly from this point, beginning with the Soviets detonating a set of 4 large nuclear warheads in a pattern 100,000 feet above the US, causing a massive electromagnetic pulse that cripples computers, electronics, and car ignitions across the country. Immediately after, NORAD detects a series of Soviet satellites deploying warheads. Faced with this, the President (who is aboard NEACP) orders a limited strike on the USSR, which would eliminate Moscow, Leningrad, and the administrative capitals of the Soviet Republics, thereby destroying the Soviet government. In thirty-six minutes, the war is over, with the USSR and USA suffering from nuclear strikes.
In the novel, the cities of Washington DC, New York City, and San Antonio are razed by the nuclear attack. In addition, ICBM missile fields in North Dakota are vaporized as well, although Omaha comes out of the conflict unscathed despite public knowledge that the Soviets had - circa 1982 - over two dozen warheads targeted for the area's military command & control centers. The attack is therefore considered "limited" because only the administrative and critical military centers are destroyed, excluding the majority of other American cities. However, the nation suffers nevertheless. A mutant strain of flu known as the Cincinnati Flu breaks out as an epidemic and takes millions of lives throughout the United States. Also, the dusting of the Midwest and Central Plains by radioactive materials causes a famine that kills additional millions of people. Even after these catastrophes, a constant danger of radiation is present even for those far away from the blasts, as well as a new disease called Non-specific Sclerosing Disease, or NSD.
As well as the human cost, the war left its mark on the economy and politics of the country. Due to the EMP burst, virtually all bank accounts, transactions, and other electronic assets simply vanish. Because of this, money undergoes a rapid deflation, with the cost of buying a home reduced to 800 gold dollars. In addition, electronic machinery and devices are rendered useless, which further limits the economy. Since the federal government was critically reduced due to the bombing, individual states like California and Texas form de facto independent nations, with autonomous military forces and currency. Also, a new Hispanic/Native American nation named Aztlán is brought into existence from the remnants of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and some far southern portions of Texas. Aztlán is a socialist nation despite hints in the novel that geopolitics as a whole has abandoned the concepts considering the cause of the War.
Culturally, the United States undergoes several radical changes. For one, the Catholic and Episcopal churches reunite in a spirit of reconciliation after the disaster, and assisted suicide in the face of painful terminal illness is accepted and sanctioned by religious leaders including the current Holy See. In addition, new factions emerge, such as witchcraft healing and the Deconstructionalists, who push for a complete disemblement of any form of civic authority. In addition to this, foreign companies and nations see America as a ripe market to sell electronics, machinery, and investments. Some who are interviewed see this as an attempt by foreign powers to keep the United States a Second-World nation, with a dependency on them.
A major portion of the book deals with the behaviour of California and the other West Coast states which escaped the war unscathed and which seal themselves off to refugees from the rest of the US. Those still succeeding in entering California are treated very harshly as "illegal immigrants".
The book's two protagonists, who smuggle themselves from ravaged Texas into California, are caught and narrowly escape spending long prison terms on charges of illegal entry, their journalistic credentials notwithstanding.
Although actually published in 1984, the novel purports to be a journalistic account written in 1993, five years after the war, which takes place in late October, 1988. The novel contains a fictional copyright page bearing the date 1993.
[edit] Differences from other post-nuclear holocaust novels
As opposed to the majority of other novels dealing with the aftermath of nuclear wars, Warday does not presume that civilization will fall in the event of such an attack, or even that local and national governments will fail. Indeed, the authors make a point of postulating a "limited" nuclear attack, in which only "key military and infrastructure" targets would be destroyed (as opposed to total destruction of all major cities). Even after such a relatively mild blow, the United States' economy, political structure, and society is changed irrevocably by the attacks.
The novel was hailed by Senators Edward Kennedy and Mark Hatfield as being a remarkably accurate and realistic depiction of a nuclear war's aftermath, although some have said that the book is much too pessimistic about the ability of the United States to recover from such an attack. By contrast, in light of the events of September 11th, 2001 and the brief disruptions of the US financial and stock trading systems, Warday may now be seen as an accurate predictor of how the US economy would be severely crippled by even a single nuclear detonation on New York City or even Washington DC.
The pattern of the nuclear exchange postulated in the book seems remarkably similar to that appearing in Robert A. Heinlein's 1957 novel The Door into Summer. In that book, too, Washington D.C., New York and a few other locations are destroyed but most of the country avoids being bombed and refugees stream into California which remained intact. Warday also differs from The Door Into Summer in the focus of the plot. In Heinlein's book the war leaves no severe lasting effects: the country quickly recovers, the refugees find a ready welcome in California which has no difficulty in absorbing them, and there is no mention of any lasting medical problems from radiation. In fact, after the first few pages the nuclear war recedes completely into the background, with the plot turning to the protagonist's tangled love life and the conspiracy of his crooked partner to steal his inventions. By contrast, the effects of the war are perpetually felt throughout Warday, and while the interpersonal sub-plots exist, they take a back seat to just how the war has affected the American Way of Life from as many aspects as possible within the confinements of a reasonable-sized novel.
Implicitly, Heinlein - an outspoken Cold War hawk - seemed to imply that such a "limited" exchange would be an acceptable price for getting rid of Communism once and for all. The writers of "Warday" may have consciously borrowed Heinlein's basic scenario in order to show how horrible the results would actually be. In fact, Kunetka has gone on record that Heinlein's novel was something of an inspiration for how he and Streiber wanted to do Warday, but both he and Streiber have also stressed that the real inspiration for the tone of the book came from legendary CBS journalist Charles Kuralt's On The Road series of features he produced and narrated for the network.
[edit] Sequels
During the book tour surrounding the release of Warday, both Streiber & Kunetka hinted that they were planning a sequel in which the two would venture overseas and reveal how Western Europe, Africa, China, Japan, and the remnants of the Soviet Union fared ten years after the limited exchange. However, both writers instead released Nature's End, and then ceased writing together for reasons neither have explained. In the years since Nature's End was released, Streiber's switch in focus towards his Communion series of UFO novels, along with his collaborations with Art Bell, has resulted in the indefinite shelving of this project.
[edit] External links
- Emptyworld.com's article for Warday
- People Magazine 20 April 1984 Article on Warday
