The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  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.

  Chapter Four

  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?

  Wrong.

  The city has just been trashed. Even under the best-case scenario, pretty much the entire civilian government has been totalled. The hospitals and medical centres have been trashed. Law and order on the streets is nothing more than a memory. The doctors, nurses, medical corpsmen, first-aid trained people and suchlike have just been decimated. They don’t have a single fire; they have fires pretty much everywhere. The streets have been thoroughly blocked by the wreckage of everything between fallen skyscrapers to incinerated cars. The firemen have probably lost their fire engines to the heat. Even if they were protected – and some fire stations are designed to survive such heat – where do they start? The entire fucking city might as well be on fire!

  Back when Mac and I were looking at the emergency plans, we were struck by how much they relied on the Feds, mainly FEMA. I said at the time that that wouldn’t work out very well in practice and I was right. You see, a government is always a massive bureaucratic entity. This was true enough of the American Government and goes double for the European Union and tenfold for a communist state. The more you want from your government, the more power you have to give it, and the more people it has to employ to try to give you what you want. In this case, New York needs help, but New York is one of many places that need help desperately. The sheer scale of the disaster would be disastrous – hah – even if the federal government has been intact and New York had been the only place hit. The Final War saw plenty of cities hit, along with military bases and industrial plants. There would be no help for New York. The Federal Government, to all intents and purposes, no longer existed.

  The President was dead. The Vice President was dead. The Speaker of the House was dead. Congress was pretty much dead…although the Russians probably did us a favour there. The military had been decimated. Most of the best units had been in Europe and had been hammered during the early stages of the exchange. The contingency plans should have been implemented at once, but the people who were supposed to be implementing them were dead, or disabled, or out of contact. The cities and their thousands of suffering inhabitants were on their own.

  And believe me, they were really in trouble. The population could be divided into four categories; dead, seriously injured, slightly injured and unharmed. The dead should have been buried at once, but there was hardly any time to do that, even if the resources and personnel had existed. Their bodies started to decompose and spread diseases. The seriously injured weren't much better off. They couldn’t move, couldn’t help themselves and couldn’t help others. They pretty much died off within the next few days. The lightly injured counted themselves lucky, at first, but the truth was that they were in serious danger themselves. Without proper medical care, wounds became infected and grew life threatening. Broken bones that would have meant a day or two in hospital and a few months in casts suddenly became crippling. The uninjured did what they could, at first, but they were overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the disaster. It was beyond any comprehension.

  And society was beginning to break down. Society works the way it does because it is bound together by a common agreement on the rules. That’s pretty much why social trust is lower when there are large unassimilated masses of immigrants; the immigrants didn’t share the same rules. The shock of the nuclear attack broke down entire sections of American society, knocking us down to bedrock. Me and mine first became the rallying call for thousands of survivors, forgetting anything as simple as common decency in their desperate struggle for survival. Old conventions were breaking everywhere. Ordinary law-abiding citizens scavenged for what they needed to survive, while defending their own families with deadly force, keeping out anyone who wasn’t them. Street gangs indulged in orgies of looting, searching for their own supplies, while thousands died in the streets and the city burned down around them. It was hell on Earth.

  They ask me, now, why the Army didn’t put a stop to it. The theory is simple enough; shoot a few dozen looters and the rest will get the idea. The truth was that the Army was scattered and broken, smashed down to individual units, while the Police were largely killed by the bombs, or facing their own private hells. What’s the difference between an army and an armed mob? Answer; the army is disciplined, but the armed mob is not. They just didn’t have the active manpower to stop the chaos in anywhere, but a handful of places. The remainder were allowed to slip into hell. They had no choice. What else could they have done? There was no longer
anyone governing the entire country.

  Not everywhere fell into hell. Texas got lucky; they had a capable and intelligent Governor who managed to preserve enough of the National Guard to maintain some semblance of order in Austin. San Francisco went the other way. Their Mayor was a Badger – a term I’ll introduce to you later – who was lynched. I guess he didn’t realise that the laws of the land had been replaced with the law of the jungle. Canada lost a pair of cities, but the vast majority of the land was untouched by the nukes, while Portland had a former history professor who somehow – don’t ask me how – managed to hold part of society together. It probably helped that Portland wasn't targeted specifically by the Russians and suffered barely any damage at all, in the short term. There are all kinds of strange stories about the exchange and its aftermath, including some that are flat-out unbelievable…

  But that’s not important at the moment. The modern city holds far – far – more people than it can hope to feed. Even with a good half of the population dead, the cities still needed food brought in from outside…and it wasn't coming. The road, rail and air links had been destroyed. There was very little left in the cities after the bombs, fires and looting, although some people managed to survive for quite some time on stored food, even including pet food. I know it sounds disgusting – hell, it is disgusting – but it was a choice between that or starving. Some people managed to locate stores of food for supermarkets that had survived while waiting to go on the shelves and ended up lords of the ruined cities. We encountered several of those gangs later. They were nasty bastards. Most people shouldn’t have power for their own good. The experience destroyed them.