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From: cramer@kontron.UUCP (Clayton Cramer)
Newsgroups: net.books
Subject: Re: _War Day_ Any opinions?
Message-ID: <146@kontron.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 3-May-85 01:16:22 EDT
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Posted: Fri May  3 01:16:22 1985
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> > Has anyone read the book _War Day_, by  Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka?
> > What did you think of it?
> 
> I have just started _Warday_ and am finding it to be pretty easy reading and
> very gripping. Contrary to some of the offhand remarks made in this
> newsgroup about the book, though, I think the scenario is plausible.
> 
> Someone expressed doubts that the war would only affect three cities, and
> assumed from this that only three *bombs* were involved. Not at all. There
> are several references in the early chapters to "the New York Pattern",
> which refers to the fact that the city was blasted with several simultaneous
> devices. In fact, I also recall that there are a few references to
> high-altitude detonations specifically to create the EMT storm.
> 
> I am only up to the very first part of the trek that the two heroes will be
> making, but so far, this war seems eerily real. The most stark scene I have
> ever read is the blast over Queens as experienced in Manhattan. It doesn't
> seem at all improbable that instead of the global thermonuclear destruction
> that just about everyone expects we'll have instead a limited atomic war.
> 
> In my opinion, "plausibility" really doesn't even matter; apparently one of
> the themes of the book is going to be the fragility of our complex society.
> You can't demonstrate that with all-out holocaust ala' _The Day After_.
> 
> -- 
> 
> 			       Ensign Benson
> 			       -Space Cadet-
> 
> -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- The Digital Circus -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

I picked up _War Day_ in the checkout line at the supermarket --- these
sort of books interest me a great deal, mostly because of how wildly
inaccurate most of them are on the subject of nuclear weapons and
*especially* fallout effects.  The list of large scale mutations and
congenital defects resulting from the war was sickening, but utterly
implausible.

Most people don't realize that, while the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts
resulted in a lot of stillbirths, there were no more malformed children
than normal.  It turns out that most people close enough to a nuclear
explosion to experience the *primary* radiation dose are dead from 
blast and fire.  Some of the experiments involving radiation exposure
such as might be expected from fallout (one of the more overrated
hazards of nuclear war) suggest that widespread congenital defects or
mutations are pretty unlikely.  You see, about 2/3 of all conceptions
*right now* result in spontaneous abortion, usually so early that the
mother doesn't even realize she's pregnant.  In the aftermath of a major
nuclear war there would likely be a dramatic increase in these
(Thank God) spontaneous abortions of the severely malformed embryos
resulting from high radiation doses, and likely a large number of
stillbirths, but the sort of thing I've seen described in _War Day_
and a few other books, is pretty far-fetched.