Nuclear War

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room." - from the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I've recently read two books about life after a nuclear war. The first was a classic called Alas, Babylon, written in 1959 by Pat Frank. The second was One Second After written by William R. Forstchen this year. Both follow the efforts of a former soldier to rally his town and pull people together to survive the coming hard times after America is hit by nukes. In both cases the town is outside the fallout zone so radiation is not a primary concern. Instead the enemy is roving bands of bandits and the harshness of nature when people are deprived of electricity and modern devices like cars, refrigeration, and medicine.

But beyond the common background, these books are as different as the island adventure/survival stories of Robinson Crusoe vs Lord of the Flies. In Alas, Babylon (like Crusoe), American ingenuity and virtue wins the day as people work together and rebuild civilization. In "One Second After" like "Lord of the Flies" the baser side of man is seen when push comes to shove. It's dog eat dog (or literally man eat man).

Author William Forstchen wrote a darker book to show how overly dependent Americans have become upon technology. In his book three EMPs (Electromagnetic Pulse bombs) are exploded high over America by persons unknown and everything electronic is fried. Every plane in the air crashes. Every car after 1988 or so is useless (the onboard computer chip is dead). There is no refrigeration and soon no food. Near the end the hero of the book is told he did well with his town's survival ratio of 20% after one year of starvation.

Bottom Line
One thing that stood out from me in these books is how local civilization became with no cars, no radio, no TV, no phone, no computers or Internet. Your world contracts to where you can walk to. Each town becomes an island of independent survival. It reminded me of American in the 1700's. In a history of the American Revolution lecture I'm listening to, the professor constantly talks about the role towns and town legislatures played. The states held a lessor degree of authority and federal government was non-existent until about 1787. Quite a reversal of today's world.