War Day
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We released all five Harpoon-carrying helicopters, and waited the next two hours while they flew within range of the submarines. The moment they released their missiles, we activated our classified weapons aboard ship. Of this total firing, a classified number of missiles reached their targets, but all of the Soviet submarines were impacted. The E-l class boats all sank. The Typhoon-
class boat surfaced dead in the water.
Some hours later we boarded this boat. I recall vividly my ride across the sling between my ship and the sluggishly rolling submarine. She was an enormous vessel. By the time I went aboard, all the Soviet crew were off except the first officer, who had agreed to act as our guide. He spoke fluent English. His name was Ben-kovsky, and he informed us that his unit had been continuously at sea for nearly four years! They were only returning to base because their nuclear fuel was running low. As our missiles home on running reactors, the major damage to this boat, the Teplov, was to the engine room and rear crew compartments. The reactor was out of action but the enclosure was intact, so radiation levels aboard ship were normal. There was a powerful stench of burning electrical insulation in the boat, but the crew had contained the fire. We found American tinned foods, much from the prewar era, including Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Spaghetti Dinner and A&P Brand pork CALIFORNIA DANGERS 215
and beans with bacon, with prices in prewar dollars. The ships had been replenishing themselves by raiding grocery stores and larders in Arctic Canada and Alaska. Our reports from coastal towns had been correct.
We found this ship to be cramped and dangerously constructed, with much evidence of new welding and repairs of all kinds. Many of the electronic instruments were not operational, and never had been. It is not likely that this boat could have done much to defend itself, despite all the publicity its class received before the war. In addition, it was in poor condition and no longer capable of ultra-deep diving. Although it is a very silent-running vessel, the quiet was achieved at the expense of speed and power. By our standards, this boat was hardly seaworthy.
There was much evidence of low morale aboard, and crew members later indicated that there had been six executions for attempted mutiny or desertion.
One system on the ship that was built up to the highest standard was the missile fire-control system. After this boat had been towed to Hawaii and examined, it was determined that its complement of SLBMs was armed and on firing sequence when the boat was disabled. Another minute or so and the missiles would have been away. Evidently our presence had been detected, or, more likely, our incoming Harpoon missiles. The Soviet weapons were targeted against Seattle, Portland, and various communities along the California coast. They included three EMP weapons, which would have once again destroyed all the electronic devices in the United States and created every bit as much disruption as occurred before, not to mention ruining what communications systems your country has so painfully managed to reconstruct since the war.
The ground-targeted missiles would have delivered a total of one hundred megatons to their targets, and killed outright nine million of the area population of twenty-two million. Residual radiation would have caused severe contamination throughout California.
After an encounter like that, we sub-poppers of the Royal Navy feel that we are doing a job vital to the security of the world.
Poll
itie Grand Old Feud—Do We Still
Believe in It?
First 'twas the Hatfields, and first 'twas the
McCoys. Or maybe 'twas the other way around.
—Traditional Tale
Looking back, it does not seem strange or even improbable that the United States and the USSR were rivals. Even without the ideological differences, geopolitics would seem to have made it inevitable.
But what does seem strange is the way the rivalry became so formalistic toward the end, almost a kind of ritual, which continued along its traditional lines despite the enormous changes in the two countries and the world around them.
It is not possible to assess blame; both sides were at fault, and both sides were trapped. Nobody knows what normal relations between the United States and the USSR would have meant because they never had normal relations, not at any time in their history. They either hated one another beyond reason or pretended to unrealistic friendship, such as during the Second World War or the "Detente" period of the seventies.
With hindsight, we can see that they should have been neither mortal enemies nor fast friends. Some things about them suggested partnership, and others suggested competition, but nothing suggested the murderous war that occurred.
Do we think that the old rivalry will be rekindled in the future?
The polls say no. Perhaps the war has finally put the seal on the anguish of the old superpowers. Perhaps.
216
CALIFORNIA DANGERS 217
Do you believe that the Soviet Union will emerge once again as a world power?
1993 1992
A G R E E 2 7 % 3 0 %
D I S A G R E E 68 66
NO O P I N I O N 5 4
Should the Soviet Union emerge again as a world power, do you believe that it will start another war?
A G R E E 2 1 %
D I S A G R E E 72
N O O P I N I O N 7
Do you believe that an unfair portion of international war relief is being sent to the Soviet Union?
A G R E E 6 1 %
D I S A G R E E 2 9
N O O P I N I O N 1 0
Do you believe that the United States should attempt to rearm itself militarily?
1993 1992 1991
A G R E E 4 9 % 4 1 % 3 9 %
D I S A G R E E 44 53 54
NO O P I N I O N 7 6 7
Some interesting differences appeared in response to the preceding question among age groups:
A G R E E D I S A G R E E N O O P I N I O N
Ages 1 8 - 2 5 4 0 % 5 3 % 7 %
2 5 - 3 5 46 51 3
3 5 - 4 5 45 49 6
4 5 - 5 5 4 9 4 6 . 5
55 and over 38 55 7
PART THREE
Across America
I remember laundromats at night all lit up with
nobody in them.
I remember rainbow colored grease spots on the
pavement after a rain.
I remember the tobacco smell of my father's
breath.
I remember Jimmy Durante disappearing among
spotlights into giant black space.
—Joe Brainard,
"I Remember"
Jim: Prairie Notebook
When we crossed the border into Nevada, Whitley seemed almost too drained to react, but I felt like breaking out champagne. I contented myself with a quiet sip of water from our bag.
We are now on the western edge of the Great Plains. I wish I could have gone with Captain Hargreaves when he left the train at Ogden, but his world and mine are not the same.
I contented myself with this train's less scenic route. The going was slow and rough through the Rockies. We used old freight tracks for this part of the run. Now we are south of Denver, on our way to connect with the Southwest Limited in La Junta. Next year perhaps the Zephyr will resume its old route across Nebraska and Iowa, but not yet.
The great transcontinental migration passed through this land, and the legendary trains of the Union Pacific and the Western Pacific, their engines gleaming brass and black, their whistles stampeding the astonished buffalo.
That happened barely a hundred years ago. In the time since then, the Rockies have lost perhaps a tenth of an inch of their peaks from the ceaseless wind. Two thousand animal species have become extinct in this land, and the world that extinguished them has slipped through our fingers.
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222 WARDAY
The grandsons of Buffalo Bill and Bat Masterson might well have been alive to see Warday.
We could still get dead drunk on Wild Bill Hickok's whiskey. In a hundred years a well-sealed bottle will have lost n
o more than a shot to evaporation.
Long thoughts of the West. How impossibly fast it was discovered and settled. How quickly it matured and grew old.
My mind drifts away from ghost towns and empty ranches to the present, to my own work. I, who wrote books about atomic weapons, find myself writing one about a trip through atomized America. I've been shouted at by people who felt that writing about weapons glorified them.
Now is now, the rattling train and the night.
And the past is the past. I was sitting in a private dining room at the top of the Exxon Building in Houston when Warday occurred. My purpose was business; I was working on a book about oil exploration. My host had just lifted a cup of coffee to his lips when, from where I was sitting, his face suddenly seemed to glow with blinding, unearthly light. I closed my eyes. He pitched back, screaming.
We had just experienced the bursts going off over San Antonio, more than two hundred miles away.
It took fifteen or so minutes for the sound to reach us—a great, rolling roar that cracked most of the windows on the west side of the building.
My past had just ended. When I saw the cloud I knew at once what had happened.
I was well out of Houston before the fallout started. It was devastating when it came. The San Antonio bombs were at least as filthy with long-term radiation by-products as those that hit New York and Washington. Fission-fusion-fission bombs.
My only thought was to get on the road, away from any inhabited areas. My car radio wouldn't work, but every time I looked west I got all the news I needed. Over the course of the day, that cloud got bigger and darker and closer. And I drove on north, hoping against hope that I wouldn't see another such cloud over Dallas.
I stopped for gas and tried to call my wife in Austin.
There wasn't even a dial tone.
ACROSS AMERICA 223
I couldn't reach my mother in San Antonio, either.
Reporting is a good job; you can put your heart into it. And the effort is worthwhile when you get something like the attached document. It is useful and important, and it took brave men to gather the information it contains. Even though I obtained it in Chicago, it belongs here, before we enter the great Midwestern plains.
The document concerns only the first few weeks. We have added two recent maps that show how the fallout developed at the end of one year, and which counties are still reporting live particles today.
Before the war we knew very little about secondary dissemination. It caused the famine by destroying so much stored wheat in the winter of '88-'89, at a time when farming conditions were chaotic. The loss of the grain supply led to local consumption of vegetables that would normally have been shipped to market, and to a massive meat shortage as feed supplies went to make the unforgettable oat bread that was around by the summer of '89.
It's too bad there are so many live particles still around the North Central States. I wish we could have seen the Dakotas. A trainman put it very vividly when I asked to be ticketed to Rapid City or Minot. He consulted his timetable, then looked up at me.
"Them places are gone," he said.
Documents
on the National Condition
He stood upon that fateful ground,
Cast his lethargic eye around,
And said beneath his breath:
Whatever happens,
We have got
The Maxim gun
And they do not.
—Hillaire Belloc,
"The Modern Traveller"
GENTLY, FROM ABOVE
Before the war, fallout was commonly thought of as a semiperma-nent devastation that would at the very least doom us to death in a matter of days or weeks.
It didn't turn out that way. It was more subtle, and it was worse. Most of us have never experienced fallout directly, at least not in what we now think of as significant quantities. Like so many of the effects of Warday, by itself fallout was for the most part survivable. But when you combined it with the economic dislocations that started with the EMP burst, you had a prescription for disaster in the farm belt, a disaster from which we have by no means recovered.
The famine came about because of the negative synergy of fallout that contaminated stored grains and cropland in late '88 and
'89, and the economic chaos that led to the breakdown of the system of farm subsidy and capitalization.
A further synergistic effect occurred when the Cincinnati Flu broke out It was a rough flu, but it would have been tenth-page news in 1985. Because we were already weak from malnutrition, and low-level radiation caused some immune-response suppression in many of us, the flu cut through the American population like a scythe.
So, for most of us, the drift from the sky has meant hunger and 224
ACROSS AMERICA 225
influenza, not the wasting of radiation sickness. How delighted I would have been before the war to find out that direct fallout wasn't a very serious threat. My own war fantasies often took the form of desperate escapes from the blowing dust.
Funny, that it was so much more benign than we thought, and so much more lethal, both at the same time.
226 WARDAY
DECLASSIFIED 5/16/93
SUMMARY REPORT ON EARLY DOMESTIC FALLOUT
JANUARY 5, 1989
EMERGENCY TASK FORCE ON DOMESTIC FALLOUT
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
INTRODUCTION
The Emergency Task Force on Domestic Fallout was created on December 15, 1988, as an interdepartmental unit to gather, assess, and monitor the radioactive fallout produced by the October 28, 1988, Soviet surprise attack against the United States. Data are presently being collected by field-based units within the Department, as well as from military and local government sources. This report is concerned only with the early fallout produced by the October attack, that is, the fallout produced and deposited within the first few days after the attack.
As a result of the Soviet attack, many monitoring facilities in the attack zones were either destroyed or disabled. Manned ground monitoring stations have been established on an emergency basis near bombed zones where human safety could be assured. Extensive remote/robot stations have been placed by helicopter or air-dropped into highly radioactive areas.
The purpose of this network has been to chart the extent and course of atmospheric fallout. A list of active major data collection stations appears in Attachment One.
For background purposes, each attack zone is briefly described in terms of target nature, weapon yield, etc. An abbreviated description of the causes and nature of radioactive fallout appears in Attachment Two.
This is a summary report only. Full details, as they are presently available, appear in other DOE documentation.
PARAMETERS
Radioactive fallout is an aftereffect of a nuclear detonation. Its nature, intensity, and range are results of weapon type (fission, fusion, or mixture), burst height (ground- or airburst), yield of weapon (usually calculated in megatons), and wind and other meteorological conditions. Brief coverage of these variables is presented in this report.
GENERALIZED OBSERVATIONS
For comparison purposes, the October 1988 Soviet strike may be considered two attacks: one against U.S. urban centers and another against under-
ACROSS AMERICA 227
ground missile installations. As a consequence, the Soviets employed different attack strategies, which in turn produced different fallout patterns.
The attacks against urban centers utilized air and ground detonations, which resulted in both local fallout and broad distribution through the upper atmosphere. The attacks against missile silos produced intense ground-level radiation and severe long-range fallout. In both attacks, however, the multiplicity of warheads combined to produce aggravated fallout conditions.
The nature and extent of the attack and the prevailing winds produced in each case a unique fallout distribution. Some generalized, or averaged, comparisons can be drawn, however. In the case of th
e attacks on urban centers, it can be estimated that the following unit-time fallout conditions occurred similarly for all three attacks:
DOWNWIND DISTANCE DOSE RATE IN
FROM GROUND ZERO ROENTGENS/HOUR
50 MILES 1600 R/HR
100 MILES 360 R/HR
200 MILES 125 R/HR
300 MILES 55 R/HR
400 MILES 20 R/HR
500 MILES 6 R/HR
At the end of the first week, it is estimated that the dose rate for these distances was as follows:
50 MILES 3400 R/HR
100 MILES 2700 R/HR
200 MILES 405 R/HR
300 MILES 144 R/HR
400 MILES 42 R/HR
500 MILES 12 R/HR
In the case of the ground attack on missile silos, the following conditions are estimated:
DOWNWIND DISTANCE
DOSE RATE IN
FROM GROUND ZERO
ROENTGENS/HOUR
50 MILES
1400 R/HR
100 MILES
320 R/HR
200 MILES
75 R/HR
300 MILES
30 R/HR
400 MILES
8 R/HR
500 MILES
1.2 R/HR
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WARDAY
Dosage rates for the end of the first week are estimated to have been as follows:
50 MILES
2 2 0 0 R/HR
100 MILES
270 R/HR
200 MILES
68 R/HR
300 MILES
16 R/HR
400 MILES
3.2 R/HR
500 MILES
.8 R/HR
These are averaged estimates only, which have been scaled according to previously known fallout characteristics and limited current data. Complete analysis will not be available for some time, although local government and military authorities have been advised about fallout hazards and subsequent medical/health consequences.