Warday

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Warday

1985 paperback edition
Author Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Nuclear war, Novel
Publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Publication date 1984
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages 374 pp
ISBN ISBN 0030707315

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 five years 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.

Contents

[edit] Plot summary

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, igniting Brooklyn. Another series of warheads are detonated at sea, creating tsunami that flood the subway system. 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 deploying an advanced anti-ballistic missile system known as "Spiderweb". The system threatened to negate almost any potential Soviet nuclear attack, utilizing an orbiting particle beam to destroy warheads as they left their delivery vehicles (clearly an allusion to the hotly debated Strategic Defense Initiative proposed by the Reagan administration, colloquially known as "Star Wars"). Panicked by the threat of an American military operating without fear of reprisal, during initial deployment of Spiderweb by the Space Shuttle Enterprise the Soviets destroy the Shuttle and its cargo using a hunter-killer satellite. The conflict escalates rapidly from this point, beginning with the Soviets detonating a set of four large nuclear warheads 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 to eliminate Moscow, Leningrad, and the administrative capitals of the Soviet Republics, thereby destroying the Soviet government. In thirty-six minutes, the war is over. Only the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are directly affected by the blasts.

The cities of Washington, D.C., San Antonio and the Brooklyn borough of New York City suffer direct hits and are completely razed. In addition, ICBM missile fields - and the surrounding countryside - in North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming are vaporized (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. The remaining part of New York City is evacuated and eventually allowed to fall into ruin. The dusting of the Midwest and Central Plains by radioactive materials causes a famine that kills millions of people. Also, less than a year after the war, a new strain of influenza known as the Cincinnati Flu quickly reaches epidemic levels, taking additional millions of lives throughout the United States. 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 electromagnetic pulses from the bomb blasts, virtually all bank accounts, transactions, and other electronic assets--including those in Canada--simply vanish. Because of this, money undergoes a rapid deflation: the cost of a home is 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 through a violent revolution and, apparent, ethnic cleansing of the Anglo population of El Paso, far western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. Aztlán is portrayed as a socialist nation.

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 witch healers and the Destructuralists, who push for a complete dismantling 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 reduce the United States to a Third World nation, with a dependency on them. It is revealed early on that the United States has become very dependent on the UK and Japan for aid and support. In the world of the book the British Relief, an aid organization that has backing from British military units stationed in the US has a major role in governing the country even to the point of occupying some areas. In the section set in Aztlan there allusions to a major Japanese military presence there which would be the main reason that Texas had been prevented from reasserting control there. There are also several mentions of worry that Japan and the UK will enter into a Cold War.Another anecdote in the book about how far the US has fallen is when its casually mentioned that the US had sold Alaska to the Canadians. It is also alluded to that, with the exception of Japan and Western Europe, and perhaps other first world nations, the rest of the world has fared very badly with the sundering of the global economy by the war. It is also mentioned that the USSR had been far more badly damaged than the US.

A major portion of the book deals with developments in California and the other Pacific Coast states which escaped the war unscathed and have since sealed themselves off to refugees from the rest of the US. Those who succeed in entering California are treated very harshly as "illegal immigrants," in some ways reminiscent of the way California dealt with migrants during the Dust Bowl. 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. However, in light of the severe disruptions of the US financial and stock trading systems which resulted from the September 11, 2001 attacks, Warday could be seen as an accurate predictor of how the US economy would be crippled by even a single nuclear detonation on New York City or even Washington, D.C.

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.

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 could 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 Strieber 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.

The Streiber book Wolf of Shadows may have been dealing with the same storyline/universe as Warday.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Whitley Strieber
Novels: The Wolfen (1978) | The Hunger (1981) | Black Magic (1982) | The Night Church (1983) | Warday (1984) | Wolf of Shadows (1985) | Nature's End (1986) | Cat Magic (1986) | Communion (1987) | Transformation (1988) | Majestic (1989) | Billy (1990) | The Wild (1991) | Unholy Fire (1992) | The Forbidden Zone (1993) | Breakthrough: The Next Step (1995) | The Secret School (1996) | Confirmation: The Hard Evidence of Aliens Among Us (1998) | The Coming Global Superstorm (2000) | The Key (2001) | The Last Vampire (2001) | The Path (2002) | Lilith's Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (2002) | The Day After Tomorrow (2004) | The Grays (2006) | 2012: The War for Souls (2007)
Films
Wolfen (1981) | The Hunger (1983) | Communion (1989) | The Day After Tomorrow (2004) | The Grays (2008) | 2012: The War for Souls (2010)