The fact that they are miniatures takes a moment to notice, but once you know it, you can’t not see them as tiny, a couple of feet on each side at most. They depict a whole host of locations, the mundane and the unusual: an anatomy classroom, an aquarium, a beauty salon, the circulation desk at a library, the inside of a theatre, an Egyptian-themed casino, and — perhaps most ominously — a rusting, water-filled control room.

I find myself asking: what caused these apocalypses? Are they all the same apocalypse, or different, disconnected scenes? There’s no real way to know for sure by looking at the photos alone. Some of them, like the rotunda of a library, feature trees that would presumably take years to grow, so whatever happened occurred some time in the past, although there is not necessarily a lot of consistency across scenes in this respect. There are no signs of post-apocalyptic people, or corpses. In the theatre scene, there are crows or ravens — a sign that some non-plant life has survived.

The one titled “Living Room” appears to be Nix’s own living room, showing the materials she uses when assembling the miniatures (and includes a miniature of a miniature, which must have presented its own strange challenges of scale). It also features an open window, and a lot less damage than you’d expect to be caused by a window being open for years, so perhaps its own apocalypse happened sooner than the trees.

Some of the scenes, like the library circulation desk and the casino, feature extensive structural damage of the kind that either suggests a very long time has passed, or that the apocalyptic event was something that could crack walls and ceilings.

I don’t think these are meant to be a puzzle to be solved, but the whodunnit of an apocalypse is always enjoyable if it is not explicit. This aspect of the art (or, at least, my response to it) reminded me, in a roundabout way, of crime scenes, the frozen tableaus of spaces in “adventure” games, and of Lukas Pope’s masterful deduction game, The Return of the Obra Dinn (2018), which, through an inspired mechanic, requires the player to examine closely a rendered scene frozen at the moment of death for a character and from that deduce their identity, cause of death, and the broader circumstances surrounding it.

What is the appeal of these tiny apocalypses? For me, they are reminiscent of model railroads and other dioramas, which I have generally assumed were motivated by a desire for a God-like control over a little world. It is apparently an ancient impulse: there are millennia-old wooden dioramas that have been found which were created for tombs in Ancient Egypt, meant to replicate the form of Egyptian spaces (a butcher, a granary, etc.) and the people in them (workers, whip-armed foremen, and even scribes/accountants), apparently so that the person who commissioned them and was buried with them would have them in the afterlife.1

So perhaps these are a control fantasy of some form, for the artist and perhaps for the viewer? I say this without judgment — who doesn’t enjoy a control fantasy, every once in a while? Or, perhaps, a miniature apocalypse might be an anti-control fantasy: all the control in the world, and the world is still gone.

Nix and Gerber have made other miniatures on a variety of other themes, including crime scenes, environmental pollution, wildlife scenes, a natural history museum, and even another post-apocalyptic set (entitled “Empire”) that showcases larger cities.

The apocalypse miniatures also evoke the same fascination that one might have with ghost towns. Some of the images, particularly the classroom, remind me of similar photographs from Pripyat, the Ukrainian town that was abandoned after the Chernobyl meltdown contaminated it with radioactive fallout. Which are, of course, a source of perpetual fascination and, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tourism.2

I’ve visited a few American ghost towns (one in New Mexico, and one in New Jersey) where all that remains of places entire communities once lived are concrete foundations, arranged in cryptic grids in what is otherwise a fairly “natural” looking landscape.

I think our fascination with such places goes beyond their eeriness. They are a memento mori on a social scale, reminding us that civilization is possibly a quite temporary thing, and that once human occupation and maintenance stops, nature will reclaim all. They are a symbol of our species’ mortality, and the impermanence of our buildings, things, and the lives that created and sustained them.

Nix has an artists’ statement on her website (for whatever such things are worth) which says, in part:

“The City” imagines what New York City and Brooklyn would look like if suddenly mankind had disappeared. The exact cause for the desertion is left vague. Was it a natural disaster, a virus, global warming, war? A few images hint at the destructive history of the space — a library dome crushed by a tornado or a subway car filled with sand. To me, imagining something so globally catastrophic is both chilling and exciting. I often wonder about my own survival instincts when pondering an empty city.

Because my work features a model and not a real place, it creates a safe space to think about these larger ideas of disaster. Devoid of people, these spaces become meditative and full of possibilities. The details in the buildings seem more pronounced and it is these details that point back to the humans who created them. Not merely structures to protect us from wind and rain, they are examples of man’s creativity, skill and ambition. […] Time and Mother Nature become the great equalizer in these deserted spaces. Grand cultural chambers acquire the same gritty patina as the local laundromat or industrial control room. While somber at first glance, these details reveal the optimism, ambitions, and even humor of the previous inhabitants.

All of which aligns with some of my own thoughts on the images (which were written before I read the above).

The one thing I would add is that the scenes with the animals and plants in them point to another kind of optimism: the idea that whatever misdeeds against itself and the Earth that humanity perpetuates, deliberately or by accident, the planet itself will, in the long run, probably survive. It has seen worse, and we will likely end up just another thin, compacted line in its geological record. At least, until everything is swallowed up by the expanding Sun in a billion years or so.

The protagonists of Survivalist fiction (I am going to stop putting it in quotes now), at least in the Anglophone tradition, are usually white men, and it is a trope of the genre to posit that the collapse of civilization would mean a return to “traditional” gender roles. In such a scenario, “good” men become valued for their practical skills and potential for violence, while women a relegated to roles of mothers, sex objects, and “justifications” for “protection” against the broader world of “bad” men (who are never in short supply). The harshness of the “new order” after the apocalypse is frequently illustrated with scenes of “unprotected” women who have become relegated to sexual slavery.

One might ask: does it have to be this way? Is there something inherent to the genre that frames gender roles in this way? The people writing such “masculinist” (for lack of a better term) fiction would clearly say yes, because their works are making an explicit argument that theirs is a realistic depiction how the world actually is — that anything other than “traditional” gender roles is only made possible by the very civilization that is wiped away as a premise in these stories.

I was thinking about this question as I was thinking about a book I have read several times, one of my favorite modern novels of post-apocalyptic fiction: Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009). I picked up a copy on a whim at an airport the year it came out, having likely not read any of Atwood’s novels since being assigned The Handmaid’s Tale in high school over a decade before, but having had decided to make a dedicated effort to read more science fiction.

I did not realize that The Year of the Flood was the second book in a trilogy, and was meant to be read after her 2004 book Oryx and Crake.1 Consequently, there are aspects about The Year of the Flood that don’t make a lot of sense, as they explicitly require knowledge of the first book, and plenty of things one will “miss” because they are subtly informed by references to characters in Oryx and Crake, and yet, I still think in some ways that reading The Year of the Flood first, and then reading Oryx and Crake, makes for the better literary and reading experience. The Year of the Flood is post-apocalyptic fiction, and skipping the first book means you skip the actual genesis of the apocalypse in question, and consequently primarily see its effects.2

The Year of the Flood takes place in a nearish “biological cyberpunk” future. Pre-collapse, the society had stratified along hyper-capitalist lines, with corporate workers living in protected compounds, and the rest of humanity living in essentially a global slum. Genetic engineering is the technological wonder of the day, with hybrid animals and plants being developed for corporate profit (pigs that produce human organs for transplants, etc.). Atwood’s social critique is clear in these “pre-apocalyptic” scenes: the capitalist engine of modern society will despoil the environment, concentrate wealth and power into the hands of the few, and reframe all of human existence in ways that extract maximal value (at the cost of extreme immiseration, even for those lucky few who end up employed by the big corpos).

The “apocalyptic event” is, appropriately, biological in nature: a massively fatal pandemic that wipes out most of humanity over an extremely short period of time. During that time, people who undergo extreme isolation seem to survive, but it’s a small number of people who end up doing that.

The main protagonists of The Year of the Flood are Toby and Ren, two women — one older, one younger — whose lives intersect both pre- and post-pandemic. The novel bounces back and forth in time, fleshing out the pre-pandemic backstories of both, and then showing their lives in during the post-apocalypse. Prior to the pandemic, both were members of God’s Gardeners, an ecological religious sect/commune/cult that existed on the margins of the pre-apocalyptic society. God’s Gardeners, run by the enigmatic guru Adam Seven, with the aid of his right-hand man, Zeb, and a cast of other crunchy-granola, neo-hippy oddballs. God’s Gardeners reject the exploitation and technology of their modern world, and advocate a mixture of nature, knowledge, and virtue worship.3 They cultivated skills that had become outdated, like small-scale agriculture and knowledge of natural plants and animals, while also preparing for a prophesied “Waterless Flood” that would, like the original Biblical flood, wipe the current slate clean.

The Gardeners are eventually broken up and spread to the wind, and it is while in hiding and working in the broader world when the pandemic begins. Toby immediately understands this is the Waterless Flood:

Toby went in search of the rifle a few days after the first outbreaks. It was the night after the girls had fled from [her job], leaving their pink smocks behind them.

This was not an ordinary pandemic: it wouldn’t be contained after a few hundred thousand deaths, then obliterated with biotools and bleach. This was the Waterless Flood the Gardeners so often had warned about. It had all the signs: it travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror, and butchery. The lights were going out everywhere, the news was sporadic: systems were failing as their keepers died. It looked like total breakdown, which was why she’d needed the rifle. Rifles were illegal and getting caught with one would have been fatal a week earlier, but now such laws were no longer a factor. […]

When the Waterless Waters rise, Adam One used to say, the people will try to save themselves from drowning. They will clutch at any straw. Be sure you are not that straw, my Friends, for if you are clutched or even touched, you too will drown.

Toby’s illegal rifle had been buried by her years before, in a house she no longer lived, and is the first trial she must pass for her survival. There are many others: the post-apocalyptic world is full of dangerous (bioengineered) animals, Toby must have resources to sustain herself, and there are indeed violent “bad men” out there, including a violent sadist from Toby’s past, and other challenges to be found on a series of post-apocalyptic road trips that Toby must take through the post-Flood world.

Ren’s story is a different one. She is younger than Toby, and they had overlapped at the Gardeners when Ren was only a child. Post-Gardeners, Ren was employed as a sex worker, which ends up inadvertently being why she survives the apocalypse. Ren ends up being saved by another female friend, Amanda. The two of them are victimized by the “bad men” before they link up with Toby.

There is much more to the book than this overview; I am focusing primarily on the actions of the two women, and the challenges they faced, because this is where the question of “feminist Survivalism” seems to emerge. We might ask of The Year of the Flood a series of questions: Who is surviving, how do they survive, for what do they survive, and what kinds of gender roles and assumptions are illustrated by this survival narrative?

In some ways, Atwood’s The Year of the Flood is “feminist Survivalism” inasmuch as many of the tropes of the “masculinist Survivalism” have simply been replaced with more “feminist” equivalents. The protagonists are white women,4 and they survive largely because of Toby’s long-honed survival skills, which were developed explicitly in a prepper-like context (the Gardeners). Toby’s survival is largely individualist at first, but she later groups up with Ren and others. The women are threatened by “bad men” who incapsulate the worst about masculine aggression (they are psychotic murderers and rapists), and the response to this is by acquiring their own tools of violence (Toby’s rifle).

“Feminism” as a term has meant many things over the last half-century, and many quite different political and philosophical programs fall under its umbrella; too many for me to summarize here. One version of it essentially boils down to creating more “equal opportunity” for women across the spectrum of society. In that sense, Atwood’s The Year of the Flood is “feminist”: it has replaced the men from more standard Survivalist fiction with women who inhabit very similar roles. There are some key differences. Simply making the protagonists women changes the story significantly: it changes from men protecting women to women protecting themselves. And the gender roles available for women have expanded and become more proactive: Toby takes on a role not unlike that of a “mother” with regards to Ren, but she is also has roles as a protector, a doctor, and a teacher.

But this is not a radical re-thinking of the genre, rather than a reframing of the viewpoint. Atwood’s conception of “the world” and its “rules” pre- and post-apocalypse are not so radically different from traditional Survivalist stories, even if she allows women more agency.

I do not mean this as a criticism so much as an observation: Atwood’s “social argument” in The Year of the Flood is clearly that under late-stage capitalism, the roles inhabited by women are very constrained. It is only within God’s Gardeners that women are depicted as having much agency in the pre-apocalypse, and even then, it is not a radical rethinking of those roles, so much as an embrace of a less-technological form of civilization, one that values areas of knowledge (like familiarity with plants and bees and the natural world and so on) that have historically been often coded as “feminine.” And her post-apocalypse is essentially identical to those other models: the collapse of civilization reduces humanity to a Hobbesian state of “the war of all against all,” where masculine violence is the greatest threat posed to other women.

But Atwood does make one more radical intervention: the Crakers, biologically-engineered people who are framed as possible new inheritors of the Earth after the Waterless Flood. They do not feature very heavily in The Year of the Flood, and are more important in both Oryx and Crake and the final book in the trilogy, MaddAddam. Out of a desire to not spoil the books, and because it is not a prominent part of The Year of the Flood, I will only say that they are meant to be “fixed” or “corrected” human beings, a deliberate return to a sort of Edenic, pre-Fall state, a humanity that lives in harmony with both itself and nature. It is also a humanity that has had its gender roles, and even sexual relations and activity, dramatically altered — unlike Homo sapiens sapiens, but like most other primate species, the Crakers go through cycles of estrus, with visible signs of ovulation (again, unlike humans). There are various theories of evolutionary psychology which attribute much of human sexual relations to these kinds of biological attributes, that I am neither an expert in nor desire to get into here. But it seems significant to me that this appears to be part of Atwood’s “answer” to the problems posed by The Year of the Flood: perhaps humans are just “wired this way,” and perhaps one possible “fix” is to imagine humans who are simply not “wired this way.”

Would a more “masculinist” writer of Survivalist fiction, like my favorite whipping boy Dean Ing (whose Pulling Through is just such a perfect representation of the genre that I cannot ever get it out of my head), disagree with Atwood on this point? I suspect not. I suspect that the differences between Atwood’s “feminist Survivalism” and Ing’s “masculinist Survivalism” are not so much that they disagree on the underlying “facts of the matter” about “human nature” or the nature of civilization in an apocalypse.

Where they disagree is perhaps on the value system being either applied or derived from that: for a “masculinist” Survivalist, there is something essentially good about the post-apocalypse, because it is the resetting of an “unnatural” order and a replacement of it with a “natural” one. For Atwood, there is a similar preoccupation with the natural/unnatural, although “naturalness” here is framed primarily in environmental terms, not gender roles. But it does appear that to some degree she would accept that humanity is itself “naturally” doomed to its violence, and that the only sustainable “solution” is perhaps to make a fundamental, biological “edit” to the nature of humanity.

My sense is that The Year of the Flood could be thought of as a sort of second-wave feminist Survivalism, inasmuch as while it certainly identifies and objects to the structural injustices of the world, and challenges many patriarchal assumptions about gender roles and the causes of inequality, it stops short of more radical visions of either society or gender.5 Even the most radical solution, the Crakers, essentially acknowledges the patriarchal argument as biologically “natural,” inasmuch as it suggests that bioengineering could be the way to end patriarchy.

I do not want to imply that Atwood herself, as a person and author, believes this is the case — The Year of the Flood is clearly a work of fiction first and foremost, and authors, especially in speculative fiction, often present and play with ideas that they would not fully endorse themselves, because they think they are interesting, provocative, or simply make for good stories. But as a work of fiction, The Year of the Flood appears to exemplify and reflect second-wave feminist ideas more so than, say, third-wave feminism, inasmuch as that can refer to stronger challenges to the underlying assumptions about the nature of society and asserted “biological realities.”6

(I also do not want to imply that I do not like The Year of the Flood or that it is not a worthwhile book. I have read it several times, and I’ve enjoyed it every time. To be critical of a work, or a genre, is not necessarily to condemn it, just as to enjoy or appreciate a work or a genre is not the same as agreeing with any arguments made or taken for granted.)

What would third-wave feminist Survivalist fiction look like? I will consider that in a future post in the next few weeks. For now, I will just conclude by saying that I think the answer is fairly clear that there is nothing inherent about Survivalist fiction as a genre that makes it exclusively a vehicle for patriarchal fantasies. For reasons both historical and structural in nature, those kinds of books are clearly overrepresented within the genre. But Atwood’s The Year of the Flood points towards one kind of alternative, although one that is, in many ways, more modest in its differences than it might at first appear.

The first atomic bombs did with a single plane, in a single instant, what would have taken hundreds of bombers loaded with conventional munitions the work of many hours. By 1950, plans had been drawn up by the US Air Force to drop nearly 300 atomic bombs on over 120 Soviet cities within a week of the onset of World War III.

In less than ten years, the bomber forces of the Strategic Air Command had so swollen that it was possible to imagine the complete destruction of the Soviet bloc in a matter of hours. By the 1960s, the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) meant that thermonuclear payloads could be delivered from one side of the globe to the other in around half an hour.

All war is hell, yes, but this is something new to the mid-20th century: being able to order up the deaths of half a billion people in less time than people typically get for a lunch break. And it’s not just that this is a horrible thing to contemplate: by compressing the speed of war so much, it compresses the time in which intelligence might be evaluated, in which judgment might be exercised, in which decisions that might determine the fate of civilization might be made.

In June 1971, a group at the McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company finished a seven-volume classified report at the behest of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency on the “Arms Control Implications of Strategic Offensive Weapons Systems.” Of this report, only one section is declassified and easily available, thanks to the work of the National Security Archive and the late archivist Bill Burr, on the “Technological Feasibility of Launch-on-Warning and Flyout under Attack.”1

The context, as the introduction makes clear, is about the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), which sought to freeze the deployments of strategic nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union, giving a degree of stability to the arms race. The question being studied was about how safe the land-based United States strategic nuclear forces were to a preemptive, surprise attack, if they were essentially “frozen” in their current numbers of deployed missiles, but the missile technology itself was to continue to improve. Could the United States “ride out” a “counterforce” attack — if Soviet nukes were used to try and destroy American nukes — under these conditions?

The study was clear that at the time of its writing, the Soviets did not possess a “counterforce” capability: they simply lacked the power, accuracy, and numbers to reliably not knock out US missile silos or bombers with their existing forces, even if the United States did nothing at all to blunt or mitigate the attack.2 But one could imagine future capabilities, even under SALT, which would increase their counterforce capabilities.3

And so the main focus of the study is really about whether the United States, under current and future conditions, could feasibly adopt a “launch on warning” posture that could be assumed to guard against a counterforce attack. “Launch on warning” (LOW) is one of several different ways a state can regard its approach to nuclear war, each with their own names and acronyms and subtle variations. “Launch on warning” specifically means a strategy in which you try to launch your weapons as soon as you have an indication that a major attack against you is underway. You get the missiles out of the silos, and the bombers in the air, before the enemy’s nuclear weapons start detonating. Then they are considered “safe” — in the sense that they are now engaged in their own counterattack on the enemy, and not vulnerable to them.

My sense is that most people today assume that nuclear forces are always “launch on warning,” but that is not the case. “Launch on warning” assumes you are starting your counterattack before the missiles of the initiating attack have hit their targets. One can wait until the first ones do, which is called “launch under attack,” so that you are sure that the “warning” you detected was not spurious. You can also plan to “ride out” the first attack, and then respond at your leisure. Each of these “postures” require different kinds of planning and technological investments to be feasible.

The study’s authors dismiss the common objection that a LOW posture would be at risk of triggering accidental nuclear war by means of a “false alarm” almost completely out of hand: they claim that the probability of a false alarm for any individual warning system is “negligible,” and that chances that multiple warning systems would have “correlated false alarms at the same time,” looking at different kinds of phenomena, is “infinitesimal.” They also argue that since a true first-strike attack would have nuclear detonations occurring at sensitive targets within minutes of the attack beginning, it would very clear if an attack was real or not.

The real problem with LOW, they argue, is whether the US nuclear forces actually could respond in adequate time. This is where the speed of nuclear war, by early 1970s, becomes an awesome and terrible thing to perceive. The report goes into more detail than I have personally seen before on how much time the US believed it had to process, deliberate, and respond under the conditions of an attack from Soviet ICBMs and SLBMs.

A map of the continental United States included in the report, reproduced above, gives a sense of the magnitude. On it, there are Strategic Air Command (SAC) targets — Minuteman and Titan II missile bases — divided into “regions” based on how long it would take for missile launched from a Soviet submarines in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, and Hudson Bay (Canada).

Each region is assigned a range of flight times for a “nominal trajectory” (normal ballistic missile trajectories) and a “depressed trajectory” (a faster but harder to do option).4 At worst, some targets would have only 230 seconds (3.8 minutes) for a “depressed” SLBM or 340 seconds (5.7 minutes) for a “nominal” SLBM. At best, they would have 850 seconds (14.2 minutes) for a “nominal” SLBM and 740 seconds (12.3 minutes) for a “depressed” one. Putting the times in seconds, rather than minutes, really brings home how compressed these time scales are.

Another table from the same section reports on another aspect of the speed: how soon the United States would be able to detect the missiles of such an attack. It lists the three operational early warning systems available in 1971, plus one that was still going online. The first, Project 474L, better known as the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS, amusingly pronounced the same as bemuse: “to make confused”), was a network of twelve radars in the US, Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and the UK, that could detect Soviet ballistic missiles as they came over the horizon. It was the oldest system, having begun construction in the late 1950s, and was capable of giving warning about Soviet ICBMs between 12 and 15 minutes (700 to 900 seconds) after launch.

The next is Project 440L was the Over-the-Horizon Forward Scatter Radar (OTHF) system, which was based on radars stationed near Soviet and Chinese borders, in Europe and Japan, which were also attuned to ICBM launches. These could detect the launches in under 2 minutes (100 seconds), but it would take another 5 minutes (300 seconds) before the data was processed and received by NORAD.

The next is Project 474N, known as the SLBM Detection and Warning System. This was the only system deployed at the time specifically meant to detect SLBMs, and was made out of converted SAGE bomber-detecting radar stations, and sound very ad hoc (only a 50% chance of detecting a single SLBM launch). If it detected it, it would detect an SLBM launch within 2.5 minutes (150 seconds), and be able to alert NORAD within the next minute (another 50 seconds afterwards).

Lastly, there is the not-fully-operational Boost-Phase Satellite Detection, in which satellites in geosynchronous orbits would constantly be looking for the tell-tale signs of a ballistic missile launch. These first went online in the 1970s, and were the predecessors of what are used today. The report assumed they could detect a launch within about a minute (55 to 75 seconds), and would be able to warn NORAD about 30 seconds afterwards.

All of that warning is good, but for SLBMs, they all cut it pretty close. Imagine that the best of them, the Boost-Phase Satellite Detection, was in place. An SLBM launches. About a minute later and a half later (95 seconds), NORAD gets the alert. If the missile was on a “depressed” trajectory, you now have between 135 seconds (2.3 minutes) and 645 seconds (10.7 minutes) before the detonation, depending on the SAC target. If it is on a “nominal” trajectory, you get between 245 seconds (4 minutes) and 755 seconds (12.6 minutes). That’s not a lot of warning.

But how much warning do you need? That’s what this remarkable diagram of the “National Command-Warning to Response Cycle,” shows, and I can again safely say I’ve never seen something like this from a once-classified report before. It is a fascinating artifact, but requires some careful analysis to make sense of.

It is showing pathways of actions and the times, again in seconds, associated with them. At left we have a nuclear missile being launched. Depending on the weapon and the warning system, there is some amount of time before it is reported. In the above, it assumes that NORAD is getting an alert within 30 seconds, as with the Boost-Phase Satellite Detection option. Another alert is also going to the National Military Command Center (NMCC) in the Pentagon.

In the diagram above, NORAD contacts the Strategic Air Command (SAC) within 30 seconds. They in turn contact all of their bomber bases within 30 seconds, and order the bombers to scramble. It takes 310 seconds (5 minutes) for the bombers to take off, and within another 60 seconds (1 minute) they are a distances from their bases that are considered “safe” inasmuch as a nuclear weapon detonating at their base would not destroy them, and they would now be available for use in a counterattack. So for the bombers to be safe, it requires 460 seconds (7.6 minutes) of warning prior to detonation, which is adequate for some of those warning system times, but not others.

The NMCC then alerts the President and a conference of some kind takes place between the President and his advisors. In the report, they talk about this as the National Command Authority (NCA), which strictly means the President and the Secretary of Defense, but in practice would include whomever else the President wanted to talk to, and obscures the fact that the Secretary of Defense is not strictly necessary. The President would have to decide what to do next. How long with that take? The diagram offers up a potent answer: a question mark.

The bombers did not need any Presidential deliberation to take off; they can be recalled once they are safe, and so their taking off does not require a major decision about how they might be used under those tight conditions. But ICBMs, once launched, can neither be recalled nor disabled.5 So a decision must be made: are the ICBMs going to be launched in counterattack, or not? If they are going to be launched, are they all going to be launched? And if so, where? (Minuteman missiles could, even then, store information about multiple targets, and could be “reprogrammed” in a matter of seconds.)

The report is quite clear on what the question mark means:

In the missile-command loop, major uncertainty in the time required to complete the chain arises from the impossibility of predicting the reaction time of the NCA. It is not really even possible to assign upper and lower bounds to this interval. Even if the NCA is assembled and a response plan is already selected, some time would be required to assimilate the nature of the attack. On the other hand, if the attack is a complete surprise and Washington, D.C. is attacked early in the exchange, just assembling the NCA, or what is left of it, may consume hours.

The uncertainty bars here are so extreme relative to the short times of the missile flights that it almost makes the entire exercise feel a bit pointless. Which the report authors somewhat acknowledge, and so instead just brush this unknown quantity to the side to concentrate on what the “known time delays” were.

Once the President has decided to launch the missiles, they communicate that order to the “CINC’s [Commanders in Chiefs] of the Various Forces.” There is undoubtedly some complexity missing here, but it isn’t important: the order to strike has gone out. One pathway for this order goes to the ballistic submarine fleet communications, who send orders to launch to US submarines. No times are indicated for this, presumably because the ballistic submarines are not threatened by the incoming attack.6

The other route goes through SAC again, who can communicate orders to their now-safe bombers (no time is indicated, presumably again because they are, by definition, no longer threatened), and their missile squadrons. Here we have some times: the Launch Command Centers (LCCs) of the Minuteman bases will get those orders within 240 seconds (2 minutes) of the President issuing them. It then takes another 660 seconds (11 minutes) before the launch facility (LF) launches the missile. Then it takes another 175 seconds (3 minutes) before the missiles are “safe,” where “safe” here means they are beyond the cut-off of their third rocket stage, and thus probably outside of the range of any possible attempt by an incoming missile to disable them either by hitting their silos or causing an explosion nearby that they might have to pass through.7 So that means it would take 18 minutes (1,075 seconds) from a “launch” order by the President before the missiles were “safe.”

That’s a lot of time, relative to the other times mentioned, particularly when all of that time is prefaced by the fact that the President would have to make a decision to launch before that moment, and that this decision might take minutes to hours to make, depending on the circumstances.

The report authors note that “the most important and most surprising” part of that 18 minute “delay” is the 11 minutes (660 seconds) required by the launch control crew “to receive, decode, authenticate and execute the launch command.” It does not in fact take 11 minutes for all of that to take place.

This time delay is not a minimum or even the average of all launch crews but rather it is an interval which has been established by Air Force doctrine to insure that no crew attempts to launch before all crews have completed their prelaunch functions.

There are two reasons why this interval is determined by the slowest crew. The first results from a fail-safe mechanism built into the Minuteman control. Within each squadron (50 missiles and 5 launch control centers [LCC]) the LCC’s are interconnected so that any LCC can cancel a launch command issued by any other LCC. Thus, if even one crew in a squadron has not completed processing of the launch command it can (and must) cancel any other crew’s command. The second reason results from the requirement-for a common time reference for all the missiles. This common reference is required in order that the coordination built into the missile targeting can be accomplished; this, in turn, is required to avoid fratricide at multiply-targeted aimpoints and to insure proper sequencing of RV’s which are attacking defense units, etc.

It is understood that at one time this interval was fixed at six minutes but some crews were incapable of meeting this standard. The 11-minute delay in the launch control center, together with the four minutes required to process code and transmit the launch command, mean that 15 minutes are required to get Minuteman out of their holes after the decision to launch is made.

If one could reduce that time to 6 minutes, that means you “only” need 11 minutes to launch the missiles, and thus “only” 13 minutes before they are “safely” on their way to their Soviet targets. How important is five minutes? In the scenarios imagined above, maybe a lot! But also maybe not at all, as those missiles depend on the order being given in the first place.8

The study authors conclude that it may not be possible to protect Minuteman missiles from certain types of SLBM attacks, although whether the Soviets would use those kinds of attacks at all was unclear. One can see that the additional time granted by satellite detection really is somewhat mandatory for any kind of “launch on warning” scenario with ICBMs, but even then, it is going to compress the deliberation time to a small number of minutes, if you think that launching those ICBMs is the most important thing to optimize for. If you don’t, well, then you have more time: your bombers and submarines are under different time pressures.

The authors of the study do not let the technical difficulties get them too down. The goal of “launch on warning” is not to start a nuclear war, but to deter one. And so the question for them is not entirely “can we do this,” but “are the margins of our ability to do this close enough that a Soviet planner would find it not worth the risk,” essentially. Or, as they put it:

Throughout the study an attempt was made to maintain the viewpoint of a Soviet planner. Because deterrence is so much a product of perceived rather than actual capability, the credibility of LOW or flyout capability to an outside observer is perhaps more important than their actual feasibility.

Which I think is an important point, even today. If you want to justify this work at all, the real goal cannot be mass slaughter, but its prevention. One does not require guarantees for that to be the case, because no sane leader would be willing to risk their entire nation on the hope that maybe you won’t be able to get your missiles off the ground fast-enough. Of course, this statement requires a sane leader, among other things.

There is one last part of the study that I want to highlight: all of those times of flight above are optimistic, because they are all times of flight to missile silos. They are not when nuclear war would commence: the first detonations would likely take place before these times, and with essentially no warning:

To some degree, LOW is a misnomer because undoubtly there will be bursts on coastal, time-sensitive targets long before the Minuteman [missiles] can get away. In particular, the enemy is certain to attempt to disrupt the NCA by destroying Washington, D.C. This can be accomplished with little or no warning and would tend to confuse the command and control process. Thus, the decision to launch Minuteman may be made after physical damage has been sustained to the U.S. from nuclear bursts.

All of which is an important reminder that these elegant systems of reason, these plans and these to-the-second timing intervals, all have a bit of fiction to them. They are all imaginative constructions and control fantasies, ones which assume that things will work as planned despite the fact that the conditions involved would not just be chaotic, but utterly unprecedented. It is this tension between apparent precision and the daunting question marks that makes this report such a fascinating artifact of thought.

How many tens of seconds did it take for you to get to this point in this blog post? How many apocalypses — how many modern holocausts — could be fit into that time interval? How can one conceive of so much destruction taking place over such little time? How can one really conceive of such future possibilities being, even today, potentially only minutes away?

I spoke with an old SAC officer yesterday who was serving around the time of this report, and in response to a similar question about how one tries to make sense of this sort of thing, particularly while working within such a system, his answer was frank and direct: “the way you do it, is that you try not to think about it.”

Now I, for one, knew the answer to that question, because I am quite steeped in the literature of “radiation emergencies.” I immediately recognized this message, particularly the little “mantra” of “Get inside, Stay inside, Stay tuned,” as an outgrowth of what is essentially a modern American Civil Defense effort to mitigate the effects of a nuclear weapon detonated by a terrorist organization.

This work, begun in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and continued through at least the 2010s, was conducted by very earnest officials, bureaucrats, and scientists working for a range of US government agencies (e.g. Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Center for Disease Control, to just name federal-level agencies) and US national laboratories (notably Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, but others as well). I feel the need, before I get into more substantive analysis and critique, to point out that all of the people I have met who work on this subject are intelligent, well-meaning, hard-working, and as far as I could tell totally devoid of any sinister motives. If you want to believe that this stuff is all scaremongering to encourage certain kinds of political results, that’s your prerogative, but I’ve never seen any evidence of that.

We’ll come back to their motivations and “message,” but first, let’s look a little closer at these particular public service announcements (PSAs). What I found so odd about them was, in part, that I seemed to be the only person who would notice them. When I would point them out to others, even colleagues who worked in the same general field, they would express surprise. They were actually quite common, once you started to look for them… which, apparently, very few people did.1

I was struck first of all by the aesthetics:

• purple and yellow — two complementary colors, which in theory should be eye-catching but in my experience is not, perhaps because such combinations are over-associated with sports teams in the US context

• Arial typeface — it’s not even government-issue Helvetica (the tilt of the “t” and the descender of the “a” give it away), the universal typeface to signal “you can trust us, we’re official”

• what could generously be called amateur layout (lopsided vertical spacing, etc.)

• the three clip-art icons with the “mantra” (I have to wonder how many people have AM/FM radios with antenna in their living rooms these days)

• a URL link to the CDC that is listed as a “source” (odd choice), another label that says the sign was “purchased through funds” from DHS, and, presumably, in the verrrry lower right, the logo of who may have purchased the signage (that’s the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection)

And, of course, the announcement that “SEPTEMBER IS NATIONAL PREPAREDNESS MONTH.” Which I think that would come as a surprise to basically everybody who doesn’t work for an emergency response agency, and maybe a good chunk of those people as well.

“National Preparedness Month” was created in 2004 and is sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). News articles from the time make it clear that this was at least perceived as being part of the War on Terror, and that September was chosen because of the anniversaries of the 9/11 attacks, and there was speculation that it had been announced to rally the flag before the November 2004 Presidential election.2 Like so many things from the War on Terror, National Preparedness Month, has stuck around, now for over 20 years, unmoored from its origins.3

Once I started noticing the signs, I saw them everywhere. Above is another one that I saw, posted in the window of a pharmacy, where it stayed for a long time. (I sort of wanted to go inside and ask if they’d give it to me whenever they wanted to take it down, but I never got around to it. I’m not sure what I would have done with it, anyway.) The one above provides more information than the one on the back of the bus, explaining a few things, like, “If a radiation emergency occurs, people can take actions to protect themselves, their loved ones, and their pets.” That’s a lot more direct than the question posed by the bus, but it still doesn’t define what a “radiation emergency” actually is. It also gives more details about how to “get inside, stay inside, stay tuned,” but it, again, doesn’t explain why you would be doing this.

The question “Do you know what to do in a radiation emergency?” presumes that people know what a “radiation emergency” even is. Given the general unfamiliarity with radiation and radioactivity, and the dread and confusion associated with both terms, that seems like quite an assumption to make even if the term in question wasn’t a bit of bureaucratic jargon.

So what is a “radiation emergency”? CDC website linked to for both of the posters did not, on its main page, actually define the term. One could click through, though, to a “Types of Radiation Emergencies” page, which gave a few examples:

• “the explosion of a nuclear weapon or improvised nuclear device,” the latter being jargon for a terrorist’s nuclear weapon

• a “dirty bomb or “radiological dispersal device” — a weapon that uses conventional explosives to distribute radioactive material

• a “radiological exposure device” — a radioactive source that is hidden to expose people covertly

• a “nuclear power plant accident”

• a “transportation accident” involving radioactive materials

• an “occupational accident” involving a mishap at any kind of facility that handles radioactive materials

Which are all quite different in terms of their exposure potentials and pathways, but, I think more interestingly, are also threats with very different “political” implications: who is to blame if one of these “radiation emergencies” occurs, and what that says about the world we live in, and how much fear one ought to have.

I suspect the vagueness of “radiation emergency” is less about the variety of exposure pathways having the same common remedy (“shelter in place” is the default recommendation for basically all man-made and natural disasters), but rather to avoid addressing these political implications.

To see the difference, imagine that instead of asking “Do you know what to do in a radiation emergency?”, the bus sign instead asked one of the following questions:

• Do you know what to do if a terrorist sets of a nuclear weapon nearby?

• Do you know what to do if Indian Point has a nuclear meltdown?

• Do you know what to do if a “dirty bomb” is detonated nearby?

• Do you know what to do if another nuclear-armed country launches an ICBM at New York City?

These are much scarier questions than the “radiation emergency” one, much more political, much more inflammatory. And yet they are in fact meant to be the same question!

The reasoning behind the “get inside, stay inside, stay tuned” guidance is articulated in several government reports, and I am fairly sure that it was developed specifically as a recommendation for dealing with the literal fallout from a nuclear terrorist attack. It is not present in the earliest version of the CDC page on “radiation emergencies” saved by Archive.org in 2007. An early version of it appears in a FEMA-interagency report, “Planning Guidance for Response to a Nuclear Detonation” (2nd edn., 2010), and is notably a less-snappy: “Go deep inside, stay inside, stay tuned to television and radio broadcasts for important updates.” The snappier “mantra” first appeared on the CDC’s website in August 2013.

The 2010 FEMA planning guidance document, and many other reports subsequent to it, explained the rationale behind the recommendation as such:

The most effective life-saving opportunities for response officials in the first 60 minutes following a nuclear explosion will be the decision to safely shelter people in possible fallout areas. Because of the unique nature of radiation dangers associated with a nuclear explosion, the most lives will be saved in the first 60 minutes through sheltering in place.

The situation, which the above graphic (taken from a 2011 report focusing on the effects of a nuclear terrorist detonation in Washington, DC) helps to illustrate, is that if a relatively low-yield (10 kt) weapon were to go off in the heart of a major metropolitan area, there would of course be disastrous consequences immediately in the area affected by its immediate effects (blast overpressure, heat, acute ionizing radiation). But it would also produce a substantial plume of fallout that would be blown with the wind. Because of the low-yield of the singular weapon, that plume would not be as large or as intense as the fallout plumes from multi-megaton thermonuclear weapons of the Cold War, but it would still potentially cover areas potentially hundreds of thousands of people (or millions, if we are talking about the New York City metro area).

Most of these people would not have been killed or injured by the initial detonation, because they are at a significant distance from it. But they are “potential” casualties, if they then allow themselves to be exposed to significant levels of radiation from the nuclear fallout, which will be most intense a few hours after the detonation. In the terms of the 2011 report, they are “preventable fallout casualties”: it is possible to prevent them from becoming dead or injured by the radiation. The 2011 report used detailed simulations to conclude that in the case of DC, the “preventable fallout casualties” added up to around 130,000 people, of which 82,000 would be killed and 48,000 injured if they did not take steps to mitigate their risk.

My rough NUKEMAP casualty estimates suggest that the immediate effects of such nuclear attack on DC would be on the order of 140,000 people (54,000 fatalities and 86,000 injuries), and that does not take into account potential fallout casualties. So we are talking about whether we can avoid approximately 50% of the casualties (and 60% of the fatalities) by people taking the “correct” path of action: sheltering in place for at least several hours.

Would people do that? That’s the real question, and the worry of those who did these studies. “Get inside, stay inside” is the real heart of the guidance. The fear was, and still is, that most people’s reaction to a nuclear weapon going off near them would be to (very understandably) attempt to flee the city, probably after first going pick up their kids/pets/loved ones. And in most American cities, this would be done with automobiles. So the consequence of this are roads that are clogged with people stuck in cars, cars which offer essentially no protection from fallout radiation.

In an ideal world, you might evacuate most people from the path of the fallout plume, presuming you were tracking it in real-time. In the real world, doing that might be quite difficult in the aftermath of a nuclear detonation, and while US government planners have perennially fantasized about perfectly-executed civilian evacuations, I think it was clear to many people involved in these later studies that betting the lives of tens of thousands of people on their good traffic judgment was probably not that wise.4

And so while one could give much more detailed guidance about what to do in the event of a nuclear detonation, the basic idea crystallized that the easiest thing for people to do would be to just “get inside and stay inside,” at least for the first, most dangerous hours. (“Stay tuned” gets you the benefit of people not leaving until told, and perhaps, if people are actually listening to you, you can evacuate the select number of people who are in the worst-hit areas.)

Of course, these studies did recognize that this is staying inside is not what people are likely to do, and that explaining it to them and getting compliance in the first hours after a nuclear attack is likely to be pretty ineffective. And so the whole point of this kind of PSA messaging is to prepare them to act in a safer-but-less-intuitive way before the event itself happens.

As an interesting side: I was told by someone who worked on this campaign that their internal research had shown that people were much more receptive to these messages if pets were mentioned and included in the messaging. Which is apparently why you can always find a doomsday pupper hidden away in these messages. While I have my doubts as to whether clipart with a dog makes that much of a difference, particularly when part of posters that seem to be actually trying not to be seen or understood, but I do find it quite interesting (and amusing) that one can always find the dog, if one looks for it, and that there is a “data-driven” reason for it being there.

The two posters above were not the only ones that I saw. There were also some of the PATH trains, which are the subway-like trains that service the New Jersey area immediately around New York City, and cross under the Hudson River into Manhattan, and are used by several hundred thousand commuters per day. PATH trains are full of PSAs, most of which are very New Jersey specific, amateurishly designed, and sometimes quite gnomic. My personal favorite was the apparently-award-winning slogan: “Would you give your child HEROIN for a broken arm?”

Above is another “radiation emergency” poster that I saw on a PATH train in 2022. You will see that it has quite a large dump of information compared to the other ones, has a different color scheme (which is somehow even less eye-catching), and is actually missing the “mantra.”

As a work of design, the PATH poster is truly horrible, but fascinating and instructive in the way that only bad art can be. If the bus has too little information, the PATH poster has far too much: nobody is going to read this whole thing on “decontamination for yourself and others” on their morning or evening commute. Even I only do it because I am basically paid to do it! And yet, even while it goes into way too much detail, it also still manages to bury the lede by not explaining what a “radiation emergency” is and thus under what conditions one might want to know this information.

When I rode the trains and noticed these posters, I always looked around to see if anyone else even saw them. The answer: apparently not. People were, of course, in their own little worlds, on their phones, sleeping or zoning out, or (if we weren’t in a tunnel) looking out the windows. I’m not criticizing them; it’s what I do, too, when I’m on a train most of the time, and I’m definitely the strange one for bothering to notice that there are cryptic “what to do if a nuclear bomb goes off” signs posted around. My colleagues Kristyn Karl and Ashley Lytle did a national survey that found that literally nobody in their study could remember having ever heard the phrase “get inside, stay inside, stay tuned.” The only people who seem to know it are the people who work in, or adjacent to, the field of emergency management.

The sign above, which I photographed on a PATH train in 2023, is an interesting variation. The purple and yellow color scheme has been ditched, and replaced with some simple color gradients (better!). It still speaks of the nebulous “radiation emergency,” and has the “mantra” (so tiny!!) in the upper left. We get some more text about what to do once one has gotten inside, and then have some diagrams showing where in a building to go. And, of course, we have the doomsday pupper — once in the “stay inside” graphic, and again (oddly) with a negative “X” above them (presumably that is meant to be someone and their dog who are outside). Oh, and you can see (on the right) that they also provided the entire thing translated into Spanish as well, which makes sense for New Jersey, where over half of the people are Spanish-speakers. This poster also indicates that it was adapted from materials developed by Ventura County, California, which is something to unpack in a future post. The CDC today distributes a similar poster on its website.

The one thing in this 2023 poster that I think is good is that it actually in a few places attempts to explain why the guidance is what it is — the rationale behind “get inside, stay inside, stay tuned.” It tries, in a few sentences, to explain the nature of the threat of radioactive contamination, and relate it to the guidance, e.g., “Radioactive material settles on the outside of buildings; so the best thing to do is stay as far away from the walls and roof of the building as you can.”

To my mind, this is the way to do this kind of messaging. Just telling people to do something unintuitive, without explaining why, or just framing the why in ultimate terms (“to protect your family”) and not proximate terms (how will this protect my family?), does not strike me as likely to be effective. This is probably the case with any guidance, but especially guidance about a phenomenon that people do not understand well and are known to have a high amount of dread towards, which includes but is not limited to radioactive fallout.

Is this signage being noticed? As I said, I really don’t think so. At least, not by the bulk of the targeted audience, and if they are noticing them, I doubt the message is “sticking.”

But that doesn’t mean that literally nobody has seen these signs: I am sure more than a few people have, while on the train, glanced at them them, and wondered about them. If one searches for “radiation emergency” on social media, one does find that others have seen them… and are concerned. The post above, from Reddit, is representative: “Is there a current threat we should know about?”5

And herein lies the bind. These posters conspicuously avoid talking about what a “radiation emergency” is and the circumstances that might lead to one, because to do so is scary and political. And the agencies that put up these posters, from the local (New Jersey) to the federal (FEMA/DHS) are actually quite afraid of attracting attention and political controversy.6 Because talking about the circumstances under which the most densely-populated part of the United States could be exposed to radioactive contamination is inherently political. It will get people’s attention, and not in a good way: people will be alarmed and scared but not necessarily receptive to the message being communicated.

And so the official reaction has been to basically bury the politically-charged aspects of the message, to hide them underneath sanitized infographics and sanitized language. And that renders them invisible and confusing — undermining the entire point of the campaign itself!

So we have this strange situation in which the US government has been spending money to distribute public service announcements about an inherently interesting subject, one which is based on studies that predict that huge numbers of lives might be at stake, and yet are actively written and designed to be as uninteresting and invisible as possible, because the agencies that make them are afraid of being accused of scaremongering. What a waste of time, money, and opportunity.

I don’t know if these particular posters are still being put up. Online, most of the social media discussion about them appears to be from 2022-2023, so perhaps there was just one very aggressive season of them. I would not be surprised if that was the case, as it would be very easy for an official to conclude that this was a pointless exercise in pretending to inform the public. Which is too bad, really: I don’t actually think it is a bad thing to try and increase public awareness on this issue, but there are better and worse ways to go about it, and these posters, well, are not the best way.

As a bit of a coda: in 2013, anti-nuclear power activists apparently put up similar sorts of signs in the NYC subway, meant to draw attention to the alleged hazards posed by the (now-closed) Indian Point nuclear power station. The unofficial nature of them would be fairly obvious to people who can read for tone (“This is the rainy day you’ve been waiting for, catch up on all of your soaps”) but they are done in the same, bland, official aesthetic style of these kinds of public announcements, and are thus fairly visually convincing.7 They even used authentic Helvetica, and not Arial, which is a sign of something.

I don’t condone this kind of deliberate mischief, particularly the misappropriation of public health imagery, which can undermine legitimate public health efforts, and give erroneous information. This is particularly the case in an environment like New York City, where one cannot take for granted that people will understand the signs — not just because there is a large (and apparently ever-growing) population of people who cannot read critically, but also because a diverse city contains lots and lots of people for whom English is not their first language.

But it does inspire me to contemplate how totally earnest, honest, accurate, and unusually direct versions of these kinds of PSAs about nuclear threats could actually be extremely effective means of activism, without any apparent “subversion” of the message at all. Because even acknowledging that these kinds of man-made threats exist today, and that one is a potential victim of them, is a potentially radical act — both on its own merits, but especially in a context in which these topics are still tip-toed around by government officials.

But I do believe I can pinpoint some of the earliest places where nuclear weapons in particular entered in to my conscious awareness. One of them came from a book that I had and loved as a child in the late 1980s and early 1990s: British author and illustrator David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work (Houghton Mifflin, 1988). I don’t remember when I acquired the book, but I believe that I got it through the Scholastic Book Fair, that wondrous institution, and I am pretty sure that I had the Scholastic edition.1 My vague guess is that this would have been around 1990 or so, just based on the associations I have with the book.

For those pour souls who do not know it, The Way Things Work is a masterpiece of art, humor, and technical detail. The basic premise of the book is that it is explaining how mostly technological “things” and machines operate, as well as the basic scientific concepts that underly them, through lush, exquisitely detailed, well-executed drawings of the devices, often drawn dramatically enlarged, sometimes surrounded by tiny people and little angels.

There is also an ongoing theme of wooly mammoths, and the idea that “the author” of the book is doing experimentation with said mammoths in a sort of pre-modern world (a sort of homage to Da Vinci), which is just the correct amount of whimsy and strangeness for a technical text aimed at children. It has none of the sterility of most technical texts, even those aimed at general audiences, and instead adopts a very humanistic and often humorous approach.

The “things” covered run the gamut from the very simple (screws, levers, gears, wheels) to the extremely high-tech (microprocessors, holograms, MRI machines) and so much in between (batteries, cassette tapes, violins, endoscopes, pressure gauges, escalators). At nearly 400 pages, it covers a lot of ground — a great bargain, as opposed to the paucity of most children’s books. It is one of those books I can remember just pouring over, flipping it to random pages, understanding maybe half or less of what I read, but still finding it fascinating. It satisfied for me the kind of childhood fantasy one has about “books of lore,” the idea that there were tomes out there that collected everything you might need to know, but you might have to work through them and their obscurity to get it.2

Macaulay has two pages related to nuclear weapons in The Way Things Work, which is really quite interesting in and of itself, given that it is a children’s book, and no one would be too offended if it did not explain how weapons of mass destruction worked.3 Even I, at the time, recall thinking about these pages in wonder, and a close friend told me some years later that he remembered me once announcing that I understood how nuclear weapons worked and showing him the dread pages.

So how do nukes work, according to Macaulay? There are two facing pages, one that concerns the weapons themselves, the other with their effects. They are preceded by several pages explaining the fundamentals of nuclear fission, nuclear fission, and one of Macaulay’s odd little “investigations” section that introduces the concept of nuclear power. Here is the “Nuclear Weapons” page:4

The page is less whimsical than many of Macaulay’s diagrams, perhaps appropriately, but it adds a little bit with the depiction of underground nuclear testing, which causes the landscape at the top of the page to vibrate.

The two “weapons” here are very odd and fairly inaccurate depictions of nuclear weapons. They are also somewhat poorly explained, at least compared to most of Macaulay’s other discussions in the book. One gets the sense that he neither understood them well himself, nor that he believed they really should be explained clearly. The “atom bomb” is a fairly standard depiction of an implosion bomb, with the exception of one very strange and highly-distracting addition: the “neutron source” is being shot into the core of the bomb at the moment of detonation.

This is tremendously confused: such weapons either have a neutron initiator already in the core of the bomb (you would not shoot it into the bomb), there would be an external neutron source outside of the bomb that would shoot neutrons (not a neutron source) into the core, or, in the case of a boosted weapon, there would be a gas that is injected into the hollow core of the the weapon. All of which are quite different from what Macaulay is showing here.

As an example of a far better drawing of an atomic bomb, one done in a style not so different from Macaulay’s overall in its aesthetic and pedagogical goals — e.g., approachable, three-dimensional, tangible, textured — is the drawing of the Trinity “Gadget” from Lansing Lamont’s Day of Trinity (Atheneum, 1965):

The drawing in Lamont’s book is also strictly inaccurate in many ways — the actual Trinity “Gadget” did not have gaps of air between its explosive lenses (“air lenses), it is missing the pusher entirely, the neutron initiator is the wrong shape, and the sizes of things are dramatically wrong (which at least it cops to) — but it is closer to the truth than Macaulay’s diagram, and frankly a better-executed drawing. It is unsurprising that this diagram has been highly influential for later illustrations of both the Trinity “Gadget” and implosion bombs, because it is very comprehensible and striking despite its flaws.

Where did Macaulay get such a strange idea about how atomic bombs worked from? Fortunately it is so strange that it is somewhat easy to trace what is the likely source of it, if one collects diagrams of how nuclear weapons are depicted, which I happen to do (because as you recall, I was born inside of an atomic bomb). The only other place I have seen the strange “shoot the neutron initiator into the bomb core” drawing is from a 1980 publication by The Diagram Group, Weapons: An International Encyclopedia from 5000 BC to 2000 AD (St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1980):

One can see that this is the same idea as the Macaulay drawing, but done in a totally different style, with two “frames” of animation, and with some additional elements and complexity. Its launched neutron source is just as incorrect as Macaulay’s, although if you ignored that particularly glaring aspect of it, it is actually not so bad: it includes a tamper, a detonating system, detonators, etc., and tries (however inexpertly) to really show the compression of the core after detonation.

But the emphasis given to the neutron source issue is really quite distracting, and makes it quite clear that just because it has more pieces than Macaulay’s, and is drawn in a more “technical” style, there is still much that its creator did not understand about how these weapons work.

As far as I have seen, The Diagram Group is the only source that has this strange “launched neutron initiator” approach, and that Macaulay’s book is the highest-profile “descendent” of their diagram, but who knows, in the future I may find that there was an earlier version of this that inspired The Diagram Group’s version. Because almost nobody drawing nuclear weapons diagrams for popular consumption has actually worked with classified information, most artists drawing “how nuclear weapons work” diagrams are copying previous artists to a greater or less extent, and there are often clear “signatures” of ideas that can be followed through these publications.5

Macaulay’s second diagram, of a thermonuclear weapon, is even more confused. I can recall puzzling over it as a child and not really understanding what it was meant to be showing. This is because the diagram’s components are actually mislabeled — a mistake that has propagated through every version of the book — and is only really clear if you compare it to the image that inspired it, which is again also from The Diagram Group’s 1980 book:

At the top, I have put Macaulay’s drawing of a thermonuclear weapon, and at the bottom, The Diagram Group’s. I have cropped both considerably, and removed part of the explanation for The Diagram Group’s just to make it easier to view here (and because it is unnecessary for our purposes, only the named components are important). As one can see, they are essentially the same diagram, again, although Macaulay has simplified it considerably. Neither are very “accurate” depictions of how thermonuclear weapons work — they are both essentially just “boosted” bombs, not “true” thermonuclear weapons, but the text of The Diagram Group’s page makes it clear that they do not understand the difference, which is excusable for 1980 but not for their later reissues — but that is not really what I think is interesting here.6

What is interesting is that Macaulay’s diagram has incorrect labels. What is labeled as “fusion fuel” is actually supposed to be the uranium and plutonium. What is labeled as “uranium and plutonium” is meant to be just empty space. The center of Macaulay’s bomb, the black ball, is meant to be the fusion fuel in the original. Now, granted, the original diagram still makes no sense — you shoot your neutron source into your fusion fuel? — but the visual inconsistency makes Macaulay’s even harder to understand than it needs to be. The basic idea that is trying to be expressed is that a hydrogen bomb is basically an atomic bomb with fusion fuel inside of it. That turns out not to be correct, but at least it conceptually makes sense. But if you mislabel the components, and there is not a visual consistency between the “atomic bomb” and “hydrogen bomb” diagram, then even that basic concept gets obscured.

All of which makes me feel a little less bad that child-me could not really make heads or tails of the “hydrogen bomb” in Macaulay. It’s not my fault, I hear my inner voice protest, not only is the diagram wrong anyway, but they didn’t label it correctly! I wonder if there are similar errors in The Way Things Work, or if it takes something as unfamiliar (to most people) as nuclear weapons to incur such a thing.

The other page in The Way Things Work that is about nuclear weapons is about nuclear fallout. It doesn’t really describe the mechanism of fallout, and there is no mushroom cloud. Rather, it is a view of the aftermath of a nuclear war:

What a grim vision! The idea of all of those people, in such a small space, so far under the ground, with ruins above, celebrating a birthday of all things… what a haunting image in an otherwise non-haunting book. It’s totally quite brilliant, because it manages to be disturbing without being shocking. An image to get stuck in your mind.

Now, is it accurate? As any reader of this blog knows, not really. Fallout shelters are not meant to be inhabited for “many years,” as the text implies. They are for avoiding early fallout, when the threat of radiation is at its most acute, over a time period that might range from days to weeks depending on the intensity at the specific location. Then one is meant to leave and begin some kind of life in whatever new landscape has been created by the war. All of which is horrible enough without the claustrophobic misconception of such an “imprisonment” deep underground in such a confined space for “many years” on end.

So it is misleading, for sure. One could imagine tweaking the text just a bit to make it less wrong — simply removing the need to remain underground for “many years” would be enough, as indeed, life after nuclear war would likely be “a grim business” either way, and one can excuse the depth and size of the shelter as part of Macaulay’s whimsical artistic license.

Tonally, Macaulay’s “fallout” page is quite different from the rest of the book, most of which can be thought of as a celebration of technology, and I wonder how much discussion was had about how far to go. It is quite different, for example, that the discussion of nuclear effects from The Diagram Group book, one page of which is repdouced above. This is far more “accurate,” technical, and clinical, with the kinds of standard depictions (mushroom clouds, circles of death superimposed on a city, tables of radiation levels and their effects) one expects in more technical (and adult) literature, and nothing about having to live underground.

The Diagram Group’s image, however, lacks any “big picture” approach. One does not get a sense of what life would be like after a nuclear war, or what these weapons do at a human scale. It does not stick in one’s mind at all, and indeed the tables of text and numbers, paired with clinical bar charts and maps, seems almost designed not to stick in one’s mind. They almost perfectly bounce off one’s awareness, unlike Macaulay’s sad little fallout shelter birthday party.

I wouldn’t credit Macaulay’s The Way Things Work with my current career at all. If anything, it is just a little bit of evidence that I have been fascinated with this kind of thing for a long time: both the way in which a technical image can be a sort of claim to power (“I understand how atomic bombs work”), and the imaginative attempt to communicate a resonant and very human image of the post-nuclear apocalypse. In both cases, The Way Things Work has significant flaws and errors, some of which would be easy to correct (the text for the “fallout” page could be fixed with minor adjustments), some of which would not be (I think the two bomb drawings ought to be completely re-drawn, because they are simply confusing on top of being based on an inaccurate source, but at a minimum, the labeling of the “hydrogen bomb” could be fixed). But overall, I still think it is remarkable and commendable that The Way Things Work tried to tackle these topics at all.

It is relatively easy to see this even in the Anglophone literature of the post-apocalypse. American post-apocalyptic stories tend to embody American concerns and ideals, celebrating rugged individualism and the rugged individuals (often soldiers, police, mechanics, etc., and not doctors, academics, or — god forbid — lawyers) who practice it. American post-apocalyptic fantasies, including Survivalism/Prepperism, are often explicitly about a kind of American class anxiety turned on its head, where the low (blue collar) suddenly becomes high. British post-apocalyptic fantasies emphasize other questions and concerns, notably the idea that even the supposedly cultured and educated people would immediately revert to savagery. There are narrative consequences to these different points of emphasis.

I have been living in France for over a year now, and have been very curious about whether there is a French post-apocalyptic tradition that is distinct from the Anglophone ones and their clear domination of the genre. What, I have asked several Francophones I have known, does une apocalypse française look like?

One suggested that I take a look at René Barjavel’s Ravage, written in September 1942 and published in 1943, translated into English as Ashes, Ashes. I have not yet read the novel — my French is not quite there yet for a full novel, and I am interested in the original more than a translation — but I was happy to discover that there was a modern graphic novel adaptation of it.

My perception is that the French take graphic novels (bande dessinées, or BDs) very seriously. More seriously than Americans, anyway. I can easily walk past half a dozen dedicated bande dessinée stores while walking my dog around my neighborhood in Paris, and I do not think that is particularly remarkable here. That is approximately the same number of dedicated comic book stores on the entire island of Manhattan, as one point of comparison. Many French graphic novels are adaptations of serious literature (or have pretensions to that), many resemble illustrated essays (for better and worse), and the natively French ones (as opposed to translations) seem more prone to engage with historical and political themes than their American equivalents on the whole.

René Barjavel (1911-1985) is apparently considered today one of the more important mid-20th century French science fiction writers, although my sense is that he is considered fairly obscure outside of the French context (I had not heard of him). His English Wikipedia page is rather sparse compared to his French Wikipedia page. His English page says nothing about his activities during World War II, whereas they take up a great amount of his French page. These are relevant for any Frenchman, particularly an artist, I think, but the fact that Ravage was written and published during the German occupation of France makes it all the more important for understanding the story and its themes.

We will come back to this in a moment, but it is also worth emphasizing that the graphic novel adaptation, published in three parts in 2016, 2017, and 2021, clearly makes some rather significant changes to the original plot and characters, and is (as one French BD website puts it) a “modern interpretation” of Barjavel’s novel. One senses that this has to be the case even without looking up the original — it involves technological tropes that were not common in the 1940s, for example — and I did compare some parts of the graphic novel with the original, just to see how radical the changes were. My sense is that the writer, Jean-David Morvan, did try to stay fairly close to much of Barjavel’s original story and plot, even while adapting it into a somewhat different narrative structure, changing some of the underlying technological concepts (e.g., introducing nanotechnology at one point), and changing the ending in a significant way.

Ravage is a story set in France, about an apocalyptic event in 2052 — a much closer year to the publication of the graphic novel than the original novel. (The graphic novel, unlike the original book, also has a parallel story that takes place over a century later, but we will come back to that.) Our protagonist is 22-year-old François Deschamps, a promising young man on the verge of career success. He travels from Marseilles to Paris, where he hopes to see his childhood crush, Blanche Rouget, who is herself about to embark on a career as a singer.

The Paris of 2052, in the lovely artwork of Rey Macutay, is essentially modern Paris that has been traced over with “future” technology added: lots of skyscrapers and huge numbers of flying cars. Both of which, it is perhaps amusing to note, would be considered truly apocalyptic by the standards of modern Parisians: they loathe the skyscrapers they have (they regard La Défense, a skyscraper dense area just outside of the Paris borders, to be an inexcusable travesty of an eyesore and a mistake) and have been endeavoring for the past 20 years to reduce automobile usage and dependency. It is hard to see how Jetsons-like sky traffic jams would be an improvement on anything. Still, Macutay’s artwork is very effective if you are are at all familiar with Paris today: it is clear that this is meant to be a future Paris, as opposed to anywhere else.

The larger story of François and Blanche is not all that interesting and is moved on from fairly quickly. François pines after Blanche while considering his own future, while Blanche is being actively seduced by a lecherous agent into a life of showbiz. Blanche ends up in a bad situation and sends a message to François pleading for help. As François is on the way to her, the apocalyptic event happens.

The cause of the apocalyptic event is astronomical in nature, a solar flare of some sort. The result is that all of the electricity on Earth appears to turn off immediately, with direct consequences for a society that is entirely dependent on it. All of those flying cars start to fall out of the sky, with disastrous results. Airplanes crash into buildings, because their autopilots fail. One might assume that any flying car or airplanes that would pass future-EU regulatory standards would have failsafes in place so that they wouldn’t just crash if the power goes out, but alas, apparently in the future everyone is an idiot — a crushingly plausible take.

François has to climb up dozens and dozens of stories of the mega-tower that Blanche is stuck in, made all the more difficult and pressing because one of those airplanes has struck it, but he of course does find her and becomes her knight in shining armor. In what feels like one of the very-French aspects of this, François and the lecherous agent have a philosophical debate about the nature of the apocalyptic event and the best response to it while they attempt to escape the burning building.

François is quite blasé about the apocalypse, in many ways. “It was bound to happen sooner or later (Il fallait bien que ça arrive un jour),” he says while looking across a dark and burning Paris, “Humanity should never have entrusted its destiny to progress (L’humain n’aurait jamais dû confier son destin au progres).” The lecherous agent objects that progress is good, actually, and that humanity has made life better, safer, and longer for everyone because of it. François is having none of it, and aggressively suggests that while perhaps there was a time in which progress was useful, people had gone too far: “In seeking to cast off its gods, its leaders, and its elites, humanity has forgotten morality. And this is the result! (En voulant se defaire de ses dieux, de ses leaders et set élites, l’homme a dublié la moral. Et voilà le résultat!)”

The agent attempts to convince Blanche (and perhaps François) to go with him on his private plane, and they turn him down, which (of course) turns out to be the correct solution since the plane promptly crashes as part of the on-going catastrophe. François and Blanche carefully make their way down the burning tower, through the streets of ruined Paris, somehow find a horse, and make their way home to recuperate.

What then follows is the somewhat standard arc of the post-apocalyptic road trip. After coming to the conclusion that order is not going to be restored anytime soon, François concludes that a disorganized and de-technologicalized metropolis is a deathtrap, and that he and Blanche need to find a better place to start a new kind of life. Of the course of several days he also assembles a little troupe of companions: neighbors, friends, colleagues, and so on. Paris is, in the meantime, descending into chaos, with martial law declared, occasional massive fires raging, and gangs of ravenous thugs prowling about. Before heading out, François organizes a raid against one of the gangs, in order to steal their motorcycles. They sneak-murder much of the gang, get into a big drawn-out boss fight with their massive leader (a former butcher). They then also execute three surviving members of the gang on François’s orders, because letting them survive would be possibly dangerous and because the needs of the new world required them to act in the common interest without pity.

Is François a “good guy”? We’ll come back to that, but he’s really quite unlovable in many ways. He transitions immediately from relative affluence into post-apocalyptic survival mode almost instantly, disturbingly quickly. Despite his lecturing about the dangers of society having abandoned morality, his own moral code is sociopathically self-interested. He is also given, by the author, an aura of unimpeachable reliability: nobody convincingly challenges him, all are generally persuaded by him. It is clear that the author expects us to find him compelling; there are barely any foil characters meant to ask questions about what kind of person he was becoming, or always was. After one of his companions — a young boy — viciously executes the surviving bandits, the only reaction is the boy, blood splashed across his face, saying, “After that, I am ready for anything (Après ça, je suis prêt a tout).”

The group of them go on their post-apocalyptic road trip, leaving Paris, looking for somewhere better to set up camp. As they leave the city, a massive inferno overtakes it, to again emphasize the point that indeed, François was right. At first the group are riding their purloined motorcycles, but François has them swap them for bicycles early on, on the argument that motorcycles are both not very stealthy, and dependent on gasoline. As gasoline will not be available in the future, he argues that they needed to get used to not having it, sooner rather than later. Several of their crew do note that this is easier for young, athletic François to say than for the older and out of shape among them, but they go along with François anyway on this. François at several points asks them whether they want another leader, but clearly François is their desired boss.

As they make their way through the rural roads of France, they have various post-apocalyptic adventures. More gangs, wildfires, a madman — each of these things winnow their party down a bit. After fighting a gang, François allows three of the former members to join his crew (after asking their names and former professions — their anciens métiers), telling his own suspicious friends that these people are no more thuggish than they are, and that it is only circumstance which makes the two gangs opposed. There is no contradiction, here: François doesn’t fight the gangs because he thinks they are evil, he fights them because that is what one does in the post-apocalyptic dog-eat-dog morality.

As the entire roadtrip is contained in the final of the three graphic novel volumes, it feels a bit rushed. One thing after another occurs. The strangest part is when they stumbled across an isolated and abandoned island laboratory that had once been run by transhumanists. In the graphic novel, they were experimenting with nanotechnology; in the original novel, my sense is that is left a little more vague. The transhumanists had somehow created a nanotechnological Jesus, who resurrects one of François’ party who dies after exposure to some kind of nanopathogen. The nanotech Jesus then walks away, over the surface of a river. “Huh,” I thought.

Finally, they arrive at their destination: François’s boyhood home, complete with his (doing just fine) mother and family dog. This is where the 2052 narrative ends. As I mentioned before, there is another narrative, set a century or so later, that is interspersed with the books. This shows an extremely old man referred to simply as The Patriarch, and depicts his battle against future post-apocalyptic people who have tried to resurrect technology in the form of a steam engine. It is clear from the beginning that The Patriarch is meant to be future François, what he has become after the many years after escaping burning Paris. (Why does he live so long? Nanotechnological magic taken from the laboratory, apparently.) This future narrative shows the death of The Patriarch, and so the book actually ends, immediately after François in 2052 arriving at his childhood home, with the funeral of the Patriarch.

This is one of the stranger parts of the graphic novel, and from what I can see, a total diversion from the book. The funeral oratory is given by Blanche, who married François (of course) and bore him no fewer than 17 children. After the initial role as “something to be saved,” Blanche barely says a word in the rest of the book. She is basically François’ reason for living and survival, but little else. (She does participate in a little of the gang warfare, so she’s not entirely useless.) But now, in the last pages, while she sings the deceased François’ praises, she also has room for some critique. She explains that when the events of the collapse — the titular Ravage — occurred, she was uncertain what her future ought to be:

And the Ravage decided for me. François saved my life. It was on the face of it impossible, but it was as if he had been programmed for this all along. I knew instantly, amidst that vast, burning inferno, that the trap had snapped shut around me. In a split second, I resigned myself to never saying no to him again. […]

Your Patriarch was a hero—do not think I say otherwise. But since you chose me to speak to him one last time, let me tell him what I never knew how to express...

When I was told of your death, François, I felt relieved... and immediately guilty for not being sad. It made me reflect, look back on all those years. Too many years... I didn’t want you to prolong my captivity by injecting me with the same substance as you, François.

You really emphasized that it was a priceless gift, because what you used for me depleted your personal reserves—and thus the duration of your own life. So I put on a grateful look and thanked you. But each of those infusions wore down my soul, even as it prolonged my body.

I saw you becoming more powerful with each passing day. And increasingly authoritarian. You were certain you were right about everything, and for everyone. […]

You told your lieutenants that if misfortune ever befell you, it would be up to me to take up your torch. Another gift, from your point of view. A poison, from mine.

So here goes, today, for the first time, I’m telling you... no.

This is, again, not in Barjavel’s original text. It is fairly inconceivable that it could be. It feels dramatically out of place even in the graphic novel, given everything that has come before. It’s not that Blanche’s position feels wrong, it’s that Blanche’s critique goes against the message of the entire text that precedes it. It is interesting, to be sure, but it feels tacked-on, a way for the modern-day author to make the text feel more appropriate for the actual 21st century, as opposed to Barjavel’s imagined one.

There is much that can be analyzed thematically about Ravage — nanotech Jesus alone feels like something more than I for one understand — but to me a few things jumped out about it as both a French text and as a work from very specific French context.

First, on the general Frenchness, from the perspective of an American who has been living in Paris for a year (toutes mes excuses): François’ philosophical speeches (particularly in the middle of action sequences) feels like something that only the French educational system could have produced. The complicated relationship (awe and disdain) of urban Paris feels like a rather reflection of the national ambivalence with their “primate city.” (They both love and resent it.) The fact that this is not really an individualist narrative, but one about how to organize small groups of people effectively, and everyone is essentially defined by their vocations/professions, their métiers — a concept the French take very seriously.

But there is another theme here, one that is trickier, because it is both French but also a very specific sort of French outlook. I mentioned that Barjavel’s World War II activities are important, particularly for a book written in 1942 and published in 1943 — which is to say, under the occupation of France by the Nazis. Barjavel, if the French Wikipedia page of him is to be believed, was a collaborationist and a supporter of Philippe Pétain. He wrote for collaborationist newspapers that advocated for an independent French fascism. Which adds a different spin to things.

Before knowing that, I had noticed that one of the major themes was, of course, anti-technological. The overall narrative is about how the technologically dependent civilization had become decadent and, ultimately, helpless. Their hubris caused it to crash down around them, and the only “correct” response was to return to the countryside. (“François Deschamps,” taken completely literally, means basically “Frenchman of the Fields,” if you needed it to be spelled out any clearer.) This is a line of argument that resonates well with other European fascist ideology of the 1930s, the fetishization of the “brown bread” eating Volk being the German equivalent of it.

And, of course, François’ approach to the post-apocalypse is to get himself appointed (with consent, of a sort) as a supreme leader of a literally patriarchal community (again, he literally becomes Le Patriarche, this is not subtext). I suspect, in the original text, that Barjavel is quite literal about this being the answer to saving La France from the fiery Ravage that was sweeping the world in the 1940s. This isn’t a Lord of the Flies sort of anxiety, “look what we could become” — it’s a prescription for surviving a collapsing world by a French fascist.

So that is the tricky place I find myself in, trying to understand this as a work of French post-apocalyptic fiction: it is that, but it is also specifically a work of French fascist post-apocalyptic fiction. Which does not make it less French, although it does make it more specific about what sub-type of French culture one ought to see this as, just as a works by American or German fascists would also be still, alas, American and German. Presumably this is not the only model for French post-apocalyptic fiction — the French have a lot more political modes than fascism, thank goodness.

This is, again, why the speech from Blanche at the end feels so out of place. It’s an injection of anti-fascist, somewhat feminist critique into a work of art that is, in its primary message and goals, literally fascist and patriarchal. Having Blanche give the last word isn’t the worst possible way to deal with that, and Barjaval’s noxious politics doesn’t mean that one can’t get something out of his writing, but it does raise some questions about what stories we choose to retell today. I do think that I am a bit closer to having some sense of what une apocalypse française might look like, but the specifics of this particular one and its author have encouraged me to not generalize too much for any given national cultural production.

But the weapons, of course, also have a more mundane form of “dirt”: they exist in our dirty world, one where disorder is the natural direction of things and it requires energy to fight that back. And so the weapons must be maintained and monitored and repaired, and that includes cleaning them. Even when the weapon has been retired, and its casing turned into a museum piece, it requires work to keep them presentable.

In the photograph above, two women — presumably janitors — at the Russian nuclear weapons museum in Sarov strain to keep the 100 megaton “Tsar Bomba” sparkling. The weapon is large-enough that one really feels for them (will someone not get them a step stool?). The caption for the photo in the Russian source, a memoir of sorts by the Soviet weapon designer Lev Feoktistov, reads: “Every child needs care.” (“Всякое дитя нуждается в уходе.“)1

American nuclear museums also have their bomb-scrubbers, of course. One amusing photograph of that is the above: the casing of the “Fat Man” bomb, of the same sort dropped on Nagasaki during World War II, being taken through a self-service car wash in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on a flat bed truck.2

Even though “Fat Man” was physically and explosively much smaller than the “Tsar Bomba,” it still looks like it would be a pain to clean.

All of the previous weapons were museum pieces, essentially empty casings. The photo above, from the photographer Paul Shambroom, shows less innocuous subjects: B83 nuclear gravity bombs, each with a maximum yield of 1.2 megatons (100X the Hiroshima bomb), in the weapons storage area of Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, photographed in 1995. It is one of many wonderful, provocative photographs that Shambroom took of the American nuclear weapons complex, available online and also in his 2003 book, Face to Face with the Bomb: Nuclear Reality after the Cold War.

It is of course the soldier who is sweeping around the thermonuclear bombs that makes the photo. Without him, it would just be yet another photograph of bombs in a row, interesting in its implications (that’s at least 13 B83s, so nearly 16 megatons, several multiples of all bombs dropped by all sides in World War II, and there are also some cruise missiles in the back, there), but the same sterile images of technical weaponry that one sees again and again.

But when you add the man sweeping, it suddenly transports us somewhere else. The mundanity of the weapons comes out. Here are literal doomsday machines, each capable of utterly destroying even the largest cities, and yet they, too, require the same sort of regular cleaning that every workplace and home requires.

It is not deep that they require cleaning: every bit of machinery and human space does. The deeper point is in recognizing that the weapons are, despite their awesome implications — the rhetorical and political power that comes with that and their real potential for almost unimaginable violence — still mere machines, invented and assembled by human beings, and requiring all of the care and attention that all of our machines do, if we want them to continue to function as expected. “Every child needs care,” indeed, and the weapons are man’s children (just like Want and Ignorance, as Dickens put it)3, whether we want to acknowledge that or not.

• Nobody, you are truly the Last Person on Earth: A depressing state of affairs, once you get bored of running around through the ruins, particularly if they are inhabited by zombies or aliens or sentient apes. Or if you, god forbid, break your only pair of glasses.

• A child: Usually a liability, certainly a dependent, and what kind of world are you helping them survive to live in, anyway?

• A “found family” of other survivors, who you will get emotionally attached to, and who will, in their own way, eventually disappoint, betray, or sadden you.

• A dog.

It’s obvious which is the best choice, here. Your Doomsday Pupper — clearly the best of the puns, you’re welcome, but Doomsday Dog, Post-apocalyptic Pup, and Catastrophe Canine are also acceptably alliterative; feel free to suggest your best alternative names for this trope in the comments section — will be a loyal friend, a useful partner, and, above-all, they’re just happy to be part of your pack, whatever you’re up to. A dog has no long anticipations for the future; they live entirely for the moment, and so never envy the dead.

Humans and dogs have a long, long history together. How long is still an area of active research, but dog domestication occurred over ten thousand years ago, predating agriculture, and may be much longer. They traveled with humans as they migrated across the globe, and have served many roles, including, but not limited to: watch dogs, hunting dogs, guard dogs, herding dogs, pulling dogs, and fluffy little babies that you just keep around because humans are real suckers for that kind of thing. Dogs are probably the oldest domestic animal, and it shows. Nobody is ever going to mistake a cat — a johnny-come-lately to human cohabitation — for “man’s best friend,” as they are barely domesticated, and everyone knows that the people who really go for cats are probably just being mind-controlled by a cat-loving parasite. (I kid, I kid. Or do I? I do. Maybe?)

So the fact that the trope of “dogs in the post-apocalypse” is very, very old, is perhaps not surprising. How old? Lord Byron’s “Darkness” (1816), one of the earliest of modern post-apocalyptic fiction, features an aside about one loyal Doomsday Pupper:

Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse [corpse], and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.

Aside from the poor case of the dog defending his master’s corpse until his own demise — find me a cat that would do that — “Darkness” is also notable in that you can tell the world has really gone to hell when all dogs but one “assail’d their masters.” William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” (written 1805, published 1863) makes a related observation: “A dog starv’d at his master’s gate / Predicts the ruin of the state.”

Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), about a 21st-century plague that kills off basically everyone, leaves the titular Last Man on Earth with but one companion:

My only companion was a dog, a shaggy fellow, half water and half shepherd’s dog, whom I found tending sheep in the Campagna. His master was dead, but nevertheless he continued fulfilling his duties in expectation of his return. If a sheep strayed from the rest, he forced it to return to the flock, and sedulously kept off every intruder. Riding in the Campagna I had come upon his sheep-walk, and for some time observed his repetition of lessons learned from man, now useless, though unforgotten. His delight was excessive when he saw me. He sprung up to my knees; he capered round and round, wagging his tail, with the short, quick bark of pleasure: he left his fold to follow me, and from that day has never neglected to watch by and attend on me, shewing boisterous gratitude whenever I caressed or talked to him. His pattering steps and mine alone were heard, when we entered the magnificent extent of nave and aisle of St. Peter’s.

Which may make this the first semi-fleshed out Doomsday Pupper: not just defending a corpse (so sad), but actually playing a role in the post-apocalypse with a human. Alas, this happens on basically the last few pages of the book, so we don’t get all that much about the pair’s adventures other than the fact that they will go on adventures.

There are many, many examples of Doomsday Puppers in 20th and 21st century post-apocalyptic literature. I am not going to try and inventory them all here (that’s what TV Tropes is for, and am not embarrassed to say that I use it — but come on, my “trope name” is so demonstrably better than their “Post-Apocalyptic Dog”). Instead, I want to just talk about a few sub-species of the trope.

We might call one of these My Will To Live — e.g., a dog whose existence has taken a Lone Survivor protagonist and given them something to live for and acted as a psychological benefit. Shelley’s unnamed sheep dog seems to serve some of that role. One early 20th century version of this is in Richard Matheson’s hugely influential I am Legend (1954), which deserves its own post at some point. In the book (and not the movie), adopting a dog gets the Lone Survivor out of a depressing funk and encourages him to strive to survive. The dog, however, does not survive long, unlike in the movie version.

The 2007 movie adaptation of I am Legend features another sub-species: The Last Man’s Best Friend. This is a dog who is an important companion, a real partner, in helping our Lone Survivor navigate the apocalypse. Where this particular sub-species originated exactly, other than perhaps the brief bit in Shelley’s The Last Man mentioned above, I am not clear. Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog (1969) features, in that way of weird 1960s pulpy sci-fi apocalypses, a telepathic dog companion. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) has an accompanying dog (and is clearly the inspiration for the dog companions in many later series, including Fallout).

In most of these cases, I must note, aside from serving as a friend and assistant and indeed a will to live, the dog is also important because it is vulnerable. Even when dogs are given extraordinary Plot Armor, they are still less capable than humans, unless, perhaps, they have telepathic superpowers. And so things often end badly for the dog in these stories, with sometimes strong reactions from their bereaved masters. This makes for something of a contrast with the child companions in post-apocalyptic literature, who are usually, for all intents and purposes, ultimately invulnerable from a narrative perspective.

We might also note that for some types of post-apocalypses, dogs get a special role: if your apocalypse-carrier is a disease or zombie or alien or android, a dog is perhaps the only one who can tell you who is friend and who is foe. Dogs serve this role Terminator movies, where they spot human-impersonating-killer-robots, as well as Max Brook’s World War Z (2006), where they can detect who has been infected by whatever causes zombiism before they have turned into the walking dead.

World War Z — the book, not the movie (it is known that the latter was in fact written by a cat) — is worth noting for having an entire chapter dedicated to the use of dogs in the zombie apocalypse, and for trying to be reasonably realistic about what that might look like. Aside from the aforementioned “sniffer dogs,” it features an entire K-9 corps, in which the specific capabilities and training of dogs are adapted to fighting back zombie hordes (“Zack”):

It all came down to training. You had to start young; even the most disciplined, prewar veterans were hardwired berserkers. The pups born after the crisis came out of the womb literally smelling the dead. It was in the air, not enough for us to detect, but just a few molecules, an introduction on a subconscious level. That’s not to say it made all of them automatic warriors. The initial induction was the first and most important phase. You took a group of pups, a random group, or even a whole litter, put them in a room divided by a wire mesh. They’re on one side, Zack’s on the other. You didn’t have to wait long for a reaction. The first group we called Bs. They’d start whimpering or howling. They’d lost it. They were nothing like the As. Those pups would lock eyes with Zack, that was the key. They’d stand their ground, bare their teeth, and let out this low growl that said, “Back the fuck off!” They could control themselves, and that was the foundation of our program.

The interviewee (World War Z is presented as an oral history of the zombie apocalypse, so each chapter is from someone else’s perspective) for the K-9 chapter itemizes some of the different roles that the trained dogs could provide, as they worked alongside military handlers, not unlike actual K-9 units in war today. He specifically mentions: Lures (attracting zombies to a firing line), Decoys (keeping zombies away from people while they set up), Scouting (using their sense of smell to tell their soldiers where zombies are, particularly concealed ones), and Long Range Patrol (the dog is wired with a camera and quietly scouts a distant area). For the latter, he notes that a small dog like a dachshund could work the best, but that they would also be accompanied by a larger dog that could act as a guard/escort (the dogs were trained to knock the zombies down, since biting them was toxic).

One of the many things I appreciate about Brooks’ book (and not the movie, again) is that even when he is inventorying the post-apocalyptic conditions, he is also attentive to things like psychological matters. So it is important for him to not just talk about how “useful” the dogs could be, but about the burdens that their handlers ultimately had, particularly if the close bond between the dog and handler was treated trivially by the military brass, who regarded the dogs as “assets.”

Separate from all of these Good Boys are, of course, the Bad Dogs. I sometimes teach a course that allows me to have a section on human/non-human animal relations (how fun is that, right?), and my favorite question to ask undergraduates is what, exactly, it means to be a “Good Boy” in the context of a dog. They think it’s a joke, particularly if my own dog is acting as a guest visitor in the course (he speaks his truth), but it’s not: what do we mean by it? What the students ultimately end up coming around to is the notion that a Good Boy is a dog that subverts its behavior to the needs and conveniences of humans, as opposed to doing things that either threaten or inconvenience them. A Bad Dog is a dog that can’t or won’t do that.

Wolves are not Good Boys for the most part. Even a trained, tame wolf is still a scary wolf; wild animals are, by definition, wild, and not totally subverted to human needs. Dogs were once wild, but over the millennia they were bred so that many of their wolfish traits were suppressed. But they’re not totally gone, which is why dogs require training, particularly if they are large dogs, where the consequences of wildness increase.

One post-apocalyptic trope, present since at least “Darkness” (1816), is the idea that one consequence of the End Times is that once friendly pets will change from Good Boys to Bad Boys. The dogs will become feral, and form their own packs, and that’s a terrifying thing for survivors. (Cats are sometimes mentioned as going feral in these conditions as well, but, honestly, my sense is that a feral cat is just a slightly snippier variety of cat.)

An early version of this, more fleshed out than “Darkness,” can be found in Richard Jefferies’s After London; Or, Wild England (1885), which takes place a century after a astronomical-based apocalypse has collapsed civilization. He has quite a lot about the fate of domestic dogs in this situation (and cats, who, again, just basically act like cats), as much of the book is a sort of “post-apocalyptic inventory” talking about the changes.

Some kinds [of dog], more hardy and fitted by nature for the chase, became wild, and their descendants are now found in the woods. Of these, there are three sorts which keep apart from each other, and are thought not to interbreed. The most numerous are the black. The black wood-dog is short and stoutly made, with shaggy hair, sometimes marked with white patches.

There can be no doubt that it is the descendant of the ancient sheep-dog, for it is known that the sheep-dog was of that character, and it is said that those who used to keep sheep soon found their dogs abandon the fold, and join the wild troops that fell upon the sheep. The black wood-dogs hunt in packs of ten or more (as many as forty have been counted), and are the pest of the farmer, for, unless his flocks are protected at night within stockades or enclosures, they are certain to be attacked. Not satisfied with killing enough to satisfy hunger, these dogs tear and mangle for sheer delight of blood, and will destroy twenty times as many as they can eat, leaving the miserably torn carcasses on the field. Nor are the sheep always safe by day if the wood-dogs happen to be hungry. The shepherd is, therefore, usually accompanied by two or three mastiffs, of whose great size and strength the others stand in awe. At night, and when in large packs, starving in the snow, not even the mastiffs can check them.

No wood-dog, of any kind, has ever been known to attack man, and the hunter in the forest hears their bark in every direction without fear. It is, nevertheless, best to retire out of their way when charging sheep in packs, for they then seem seized with a blind fury, and some who have endeavoured to fight them have been thrown down and seriously mauled. But this has been in the blindness of their rush; no instance has ever been known of their purposely attacking man. […]

This uncertainty in the case of the black dog is the bane of the shepherds; for, not seeing or hearing anything of the enemy for months altogether, in spite of former experience their vigilance relaxes, and suddenly, while they sleep, their flocks are scattered. We still have, among tame dogs, the mastiff, terrier, spaniel, deerhound, and greyhound, all of which are as faithful to man as ever.

Which is a nice mix of Good Boys and Bad Dogs, allowed because while civilization has collapsed (or relapsed), the Earth is still populated enough to have communities of farmers, shepherds, etc., to maintain the older relationships between dogs and man.

Jack London, in his The Scarlet Plague (written in 1910, serialized in 1912 and published as a book in 1915), has a similar take on feral dogs after a post-apocalyptic event: “Nor were the dogs long in adapting themselves to the changed conditions. There was a veritable plague of dogs. They devoured the corpses, barked and howled during the nights, and in the daytime slunk about in the distance. […] As a result, the many different kinds of dogs disappeared, and there remained, running in packs, the medium-sized wolfish dogs that you know to-day.” This trope of feral dogs, of course, aside from being a general slander against the Good Boy nature of these noble creatures (Again, I kid, I kid. Or do I? I do. Maybe?) is of course just one of many applications of the “look how far we can fall once civilization stops working” trope that is the driver of much post-apocalyptic fiction.

As with most elements in post-apocalyptic stories, Doomsday Puppers exist to highlight aspects about the pre-apocalyptic world — that is, our world, and our dogs. Humans have used dogs for many things over the years, sometimes in ways that have benefitted the pups and sometimes in ways that have decidedly not, and it is reasonable to assume that aspects of that would continue into a post-apocalyptic world. Even with post-apocalyptic tropes about the “dog eat dog world” and the “new order” demanded by such events, people have a soft spot for dogs as companions. Dogs have utility, yes, but their “mere” companionship is also a form of utility separate from their more “practical” skills.

Today, there are entire aspects of modern emergency planning that are dedicated to helping people plan for their pets’ survival during a major emergency. Whether this is because people have asked or demanded this, or because the emergency planners fear that without a “plan” in place, people will try to save their pets (and perhaps do it poorly, in a way that harms the animals or the pets), I do not know.

I think it is a fascinating thing, though, because it is all very well and good for people to announce, as they often do, that they would either embrace an early death in an apocalypse (an attitude I am skeptical of), or would quickly jump into a post-apocalyptic mode (“head for the hills”), once you start asking, “OK, so how are you taking care of your dog?,” the situation starts to feel very concrete, and very tangible. I have heard tell from people involved in nuclear risk communication that studies have shown that if you include a dog in your attempts to communicate risk, that people will take it more seriously. Saving myself? I mean, why bother? But saving my dog? Of course, I’d do anything for him — even take on the end of the world.

The player starts with some fuel already in their vehicle, and can acquire more through various means as the make their way west: gas stations and truck stops may still contain some in their tanks, abandoned vehicles might have some to be siphoned, and the player can barter for it with other travelers.

OR83 is not meant to be a “perfect” simulation, whatever that would mean in this context, but it is meant to be “plausible” and “grounded.” Which provoked me to think quite a lot about the question: How much gasoline would there be in a post-nuclear United States in the early 1980s?

Gasoline is refined from crude oil in refineries. Contrary to how it is treated in most post-apocalyptic fiction, it also has a definite shelf-life, measured in months — it is a volatile chemical, after all.2 Fuel stabilizers can be added to increase that shelf-life a bit, but we’re still talking about a limited amount of gasoline that exists in the world at any one time, and it is of limited duration.

The number of oil refineries is pretty finite: as of January 2024, according to the US Energy Information Administration, the total number of operating refineries is 132. They don’t all pull the same weight; the top 10 refineries account for 28% of all production, and the top 20 account for 45% of it.3 For the early 1980s, the number of operating petroleum refineries was higher, around 320. Again, they varied in size, and some of these produced far more than others, and the top refinery in 1983 is still the top refinery today (Marathon’s Galveston Bay, Texas).4

Today, our vehicles run on a variety of different types of fuels, although 89% of the transportation sector energy use still are petroleum products.5 In 1983, that was 97%, with the other 3% made up of natural gas.6 So that means pretty much every vehicle involved in any kind of war-fighting, rebuilding, peacetime recovery, and general logistics — cars, trucks, planes, trains, and boats — ran on petroleum products.

In 1983, the US produced around 70% of its total petroleum products and imported the rest.7 90% of the imports took place via tankers going into US ports, with the other 10% being crude oil coming in from Canada via the Interprovincial Pipe Line system.8

So we have a resource that is absolutely essential for anything relating to war-fighting, industrial production, and economic and political power, which is also produced in a relatively small number of facilities (some of which are far more important than others), and whose imports largely take place at areas of economic and military activity that would probably be targeted anyway (key ports). It is also the crucial resource for all other logistics: it doesn’t matter if you get food production back online in rural areas if you can’t move it to the population centers where it will be needed. And the distances required for the United States are quite large.

Consequently, the US Department of Defense anticipated that the petroleum industry would be heavily targeted by Soviet strategic nuclear forces, as it was a crucial lynchpin for pretty much everything in the United States from a military, economic, and political standpoint. Kill the fuel, kill the country. Or, at least, make everything more difficult for awhile.

So how much petroleum would be around and available after a hypothetical full-scale Soviet attack in the early 1980s, one that targeted industrial and economic activity as well as military facilities, and cities? Crunching those numbers would be hard, but fortunately it was done at least once around that time. In June 1976, the Civil Defense researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory finished their 200-page study on “Survival of the Relocated Population of the U.S. After a Nuclear Attack.”

I’ve written about this report before, because it is one of the most interesting unclassified studies on the aftermath of a nuclear war done at the behest of the U.S. Department of Defense. As I’ve previously discussed, the essential conceit of the study — a requirement handed down the funders — is the assumption that there will be so much advanced warning about a likely nuclear war that the US will successfully relocate 90% of the US population to areas that are not nuked, and protect them from any fallout that might follow. Which even the people who performed the work appear to have considered… optimistic. And so they slipped in little “and so what if that didn’t actually happen?” inquiries into the report while they went along.

They spend a considerable amount of the report talking about the logistics of shipping food, maintaining control, and moving people around. Which means, as they correctly understood, that this meant they had to pay close attention to the petroleum availability problem. They assessed that:

Oil pipeline terminals will be damaged or destroyed in crucial locations, and most of the refineries will be destroyed. However, about two billion gallons of diesel and about three billion gallons of gasoline would survive in tank storage outside of the major risk areas, which would be more than adequate for the trains and trucks to carry out survival missions during the first few weeks after the attack. At least 20 million gallons of aircraft fuel will survive in tanks at lesser airports, which may be available to light aircraft of the Civil Air Patrol.9

Later they say that based on their attack scenario that 3-4.4 billion gallons of automotive gasoline (40-60% of the pre-war amount) would survive, 2.3-3.4 billion gallons of diesel (40-60%), 15-25 million gallons of aviation gasoline, and 80-100 refineries (40-50% of refineries, but constituting 20% of pre-attack crude refining capability, because not all refineries are equal). They don’t give a percentage for the aviation gasoline, but, as noted above, they are assuming that these will be in “tanks at lesser airports,” which they assume will not be targeted.

They also go into more detail on the logistical problems of moving fuel around within the US than I have seen elsewhere. Much crude fuel in the US moves around through national pipelines. Two pipelines alone at the time were responsible for about two-thirds of the oil used in the New York and New Jersey areas, starting in Louisiana and shipping to the eastern seaboard.

If these two lines were severed by a nuclear strike, it would require from 200 to 250 T-2 tanker equivalents to move this liquid from Galveston, Texas, to New York, a thirteen-day round trip including loading and unloading… This operation “would use all of the U.S. tankers, and the ports at each end, if they are not destroyed by the attack, would be so crowded that a complete traffic jam would result.”10

They estimated that some 124 to 144 or so of the 224 refineries around in 1976 would be hit by the attack. The 80-100 remaining, as noted, only constituted around 20% of the total pre-war refining capability. Even those that remained would likely be “inoperable” because it was also anticipated that the attack would cripple the American electrical grid, many would lack feedstock (crude oil), and none were constructed to operate if they were in areas of heavy fallout conditions.11

One might also note that the US had begun a Strategic Petroleum Reserve in 1975 as a result of the OPEC crisis, which ranged between 294 and 371 million barrels of crude oil in 1983. The 1976 study does not mention this, probably because it was too new to matter, or perhaps because it would need to be refined anyway to mater, and as noted, it was assumed that refinery operations would be down for awhile.12 But to put that into context, if all of that was refined into automotive gasoline (which would also produce other products), I believe it would be around 6.6 billion gallons. Which is a bit more than the amount of automotive gasoline that they imagined would survive the attack (3-4 billion gallons).

Now, we’re complicating things here by mixing up 1976 numbers and 1983 numbers (which are even more complicated by the fact that the 1976 numbers may be from a few years before the report was finished), but the general conclusions seem somewhat clear. Under the 1976 attack scenario (CRP-2B), with good relocation of the civilian population prior to attack, the US would have something like 40-60% of its pre-war gasoline and diesel available, but its ability to produce new petroleum products will be severely limited. This is, again, a fairly optimistic estimate: they are assuming that 90% of the US population has survived, that political control has been maintained, and that rebuilding and recovery efforts are starting essentially immediately. They also estimate that over 60% of American automobiles have survived, 50-60% of busses, 50-75% of trucks, trains, and single- and twin-engine aircraft.13

So how bad (or good) is this? This depends on what you think the need for gasoline is going to be, which is an even trickier question. In their scenario, 80% of the population has been “relocated” (evacuated). Are they going to stay there? For how long? If their homes (and cities) have been destroyed, what then? They don’t really get into that, but they seem to imagine people will stay put.

I will admit to finding this entire evacuation scenario ridiculous on the face of it — the logistical difficulties of evacuating 80% of the US (largely urban) population astound the mind by itself, much less having anywhere secure for them to be evacuated to, much less somehow maintaining order and food supplies and so on the entire time, much less the political impossibility of a US President actually saying, “OK, everybody, time to evacuate for nuclear war” a week or so before it happens. This strikes me as a total fantasy, one completely unhinged from reality.

But let’s go along with it for a bit more. What would the fuel needs be? The pre-war automotive fuel usage for the US in 1976 (just to use consistent numbers) appear to have been on the order of 105 billion gallons.14 The 1976 study imagined that 3-4.4 billions of automotive fuel would survive. So that is between 10 and 15 days of gasoline that has survived, at average pre-war usage levels. And then you have nothing until you get your refineries back online, which, even once you do, only would produce 20% of what you could produce before.

Now, obviously that level of usage would not be very sustainable. A later study, from 1979, suggested that basically all of the available fuel would need to be used exclusively for emergency usage for the first year — including the movement of food and medicine, as well as for mechanized farming and pumping water — and that even then, it would be insufficient (“thus, extensive manual agriculture might be necessary,” they conclude).15

This is one of those problems that gets “easier” if you don’t imagine that 90% of the population has survived, but instead imagine that only 20-40% have survived, then your requirements for everything go down a lot. That is one of the somewhat perverse conclusions that one comes to in looking at this closely: the difficulty of caring for survivors after a nuclear war increases with the number of survivors who survive, because all of the systems for feeding and caring for people will be damaged and broken by the attack.

Ultimately, for the purposes of the game, I looked at all of the above and made the following conclusions.

One, there would likely be enough fuel around for several weeks to several months of usage, assuming that the usage was significantly reduced from pre-war usage. Which I assume it would be, on the basis of the number of people killed (I am not assuming any mass evacuation would have taken place). Much of this fuel would be in civilian sources like gas stations and surviving automobiles. If people are moving around, though, it will steadily deplete. And if there has been a “scare” event that caused people to rush out to gas stations and put fuel in their cars, the gas stations would likely be depleted anyway, because they won’t be being refueled.16

Two, whatever survived of the US government and military would absolutely try to requisition and ration as much of that fuel as was possible, and among their top priorities would be the re-establishment of domestic refining capacities and, as part of that, pipeline operations. Because if they don’t do that, not only will nearly all of the survivors starve, but there will be no way to maintain any semblance of political control, nor no hope for any economic recovery.

The combination of these two conclusions, from the perspective of a random survivor living for several weeks after a nuclear war (essentially what you play as in the game), are important. One is that fuel will be available but if the surviving population is mobile to any degree (which I assuming they might be) or hoarding fuel (ditto) then they are going to run those supplies down steadily. And in areas with decent post-attack governance (at whatever level) those “available” supplies might be run down quickly if they are requisitioned and seized. So for the purposes of the game, we might assume that the world “starts” with 40-60% of its “normal” amount, but that this will be decreasing (and never be replenished) over time, and in some areas that might be reduced much more.

The other is that while these various reports tend to ignore what the surviving population would be doing in the weeks and months after the attack, other than surviving (maybe), I assume that there would be a lot of pressure to essentially enlist them (perhaps voluntarily, perhaps not) into things like infrastructure rebuilding, particularly petroleum infrastructure. Because the clock will be ticking as those reserves start to be depleted, and a country running on empty is a very dangerous place to be.

“AI apocalypse” is a sub-genre of apocalypse, and is well-represented in late-20th century fiction. One version of it, probably the most common, which we could just call “Skynet” as a mnemonic reference to The Terminator (1984), involves a hostile AI that actively wages war against humanity. Another, which I suspect is actively feared less but is nonetheless known and resonant, could just be call “The Matrix,” after the film of the same name (1999), involves a hostile AI that enslaves humanity. These are only two of many, and they of course have sub-variations, like “WOPR,” from 1983’s WarGames (1983), where the AI unintentionally (almost) starts nuclear war.

These are all examples from the late-20th century, when digital computers had become ubiquitous in human society, when the idea of “digital minds” had become commonplace. But how far back to these ideas ago?

E.M. Forster’s short novella, “The Machine Stops,” is perhaps one of the earliest of this style of story, dating all the way back to 1909. It is an amazing thing to read at the present moment. Forster (1879-1970) is better known for other works on quite different subjects — like A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924) — and “The Machine Stops” is one of his only works, I believe, that is concerned with the far future, or science fiction. But what a vision it is.

The novella is quite short, composed of just three chapters. They are all told more or less from the perspective of Vashanti, who is a “lecturer” living, like everyone she knows, in a “cell” inside a vast underground city which is managed by the Machine. Although Vashanti never leaves her room, she is connected through the Machine to thousands of friends and colleagues, part of innumerable conversations and discussions, and both attends and gives lectures on historical and artistic subjects regularly.

Her physical body is atrophied (“think of her as without teeth or hair… a swaddled lump of flesh… with a face as white as a fungus”), but her ever need is met by simply pushing a few buttons. If she needs anything, it comes to her, not the other way around. She cannot imagine any other way of life, at least without recoiling.

And of course she had studied the civilization that had immediately preceded her own — the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people. Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!

Everyone in the city lives the same fashion. Their rooms (the “cells”) are all assigned by the Machine, and all identical, and their physical location in the world is of no consequence, for what does physical location mean in an age where everyone is instantly connected to anyone and anything instantly? For in their age, they have conquered distance: “space is annihilated.”

She has but one physical book, The Book of the Machine, and it instructs what buttons to push to get any need met.

Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world. […]

By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter – one book. This was the Book of the Machine. […] Sitting up in the bed, she took it reverently in her hands. She glanced round the glowing room as if some one might be watching her. Then, half ashamed, half joyful, she murmured “O Machine! O Machine!” and raised the volume to her lips. Thrice she kissed it, thrice inclined her head, thrice she felt the delirium of acquiescence.

Such is Vashanti’s life, until her son, Kuno, calls her on the videophone with an odd request: that she visit him in person. She cannot really understand the request. Surely a videophone connection is the same thing? She has not seen him in person since his infancy. He lives in an entirely different continent, hours away by airship. Surely she does not have time for this. But Kuno is insistent, even blasphemous:

“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine. […] You talk as if a god had made the Machine. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”

Vashanti reluctantly agrees, and makes the arrangements (through the Machine) to take an airship to visit her son. This distresses her greatly, as she has not left her cell in years, and even though the transportation is as smooth as one would imagine it to be (because the Machine manages it), it involves disturbing things like being in the physical proximity of other people, exerting physical activity, and looking out the window, revealing horrors like dirt, mud, mountains, the sea, and stars. “I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark,” Vashanti tells Kuno. “I get no ideas in an air-ship.”

The surface, we learn, is toxic. No one lives upon it. It is a relic of a past age, before the Machine. Vashanti suffers the trip as best she can, closing herself off to the outside world as much as possible.

She finally arrives to see Kuno, who tells her he is threatened with Homelessness — exile from the Machine — which of course means death. He explains to her that he had a radical idea, which was to explore the outside, outside of the confines of the Machine. She cannot believe it: “Don’t. Don’t talk of these terrible things. You make me miserable. You are throwing civilization away.”

Nevertheless, Kuno explains how he found a way outside of the city, through old ventilation tunnels used in its construction. He prepared his body for the physical activity of it, and made it to the surface. The process changed his view of the human conditional in a profound way:

“But I had got back the sense of space and a man cannot rest then. I determined to get in at the hole and climb the shaft. And so I exercised my arms. Day after day I went through ridiculous movements, until my flesh ached, and I could hang by my hands and hold the pillow of my bed outstretched for many minutes. Then I summoned a respirator, and started. […]

“I felt that humanity existed, and that it existed without clothes. How can I possibly explain this? It was naked, humanity seemed naked, and all these tubes and buttons and machineries neither came into the world with us, nor will they follow us out, nor do they matter supremely while we are here. Had I been strong, I would have torn off every garment I had, and gone out into the outer air unswaddled.”

Kuno has been thoroughly radicalized by the experience. The surface is not as barren as understood. Nor necessarily as deadly. And he understands that their dependence on the Machine is dehumanizing at the core:

“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops — but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds — but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die. Oh, I have no remedy — or, at least, only one — to tell men again and again that I have seen the hills of Wessex as Ælfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes.”

Kuno further tells her that he saw evidence of humans living on the surface, before he was pulled back into the city by massive “worms” that had emerged from it and wrapped themselves around him.

Vashanti leaves, understanding that her son has gone mad.

Above: Accidental cyberpunk at a Whole Foods parking lot electric car recharging station in New Jersey, which I filmed in December 2024.

In the final chapter, we hear of changes with life in the Machine. First, the Machine bans the use of respirators, which means that none would be able to ever leave its perfect control. Airships travel was still permitted, but nothing on the surface. The inhabitants of the Machine are by and large friendly towards this change. Then, religion is reestablished: the worship of the Machine, which “is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.“ Again, who would object to such an obvious thing?

Years pass. To Then atmospheric control and lighting. Finally all stops — silence surprise, she gets a call from Kuno, which is as mystifying and insane as anything:

He refused to visualize his face upon the blue plate, and speaking out of the darkness with solemnity said: “The Machine stops.”

“What do you say?”

“The Machine is stopping, I know it, I know the signs.” She burst into a peal of laughter. He heard her and was angry, and they spoke no more. “Can you imagine anything more absurd?” she cried to a friend. “A man who was my son believes that the Machine is stopping. It would be impious if it was not mad.”

But soon there are signs of problems. The Machine starts to glitch. Vashanti notices them while listening to music. She reports them to the Central Committee, but they persist nonetheless. Soon other glitches emerge — strange noises. The sleep system malfunctions. Then atmospheric control and lighting.

It becomes clear that the Machine’s own Mending Apparatus is failing, and that the people who manage the Machine no longer possess an understanding of how the Machine works that is sufficient to repair it.

Eventually, as Kuno predicted, the Machine stops. There is nothing but silence and darkness. Vashanti is forced to do the unthinkable: she opens her door and wanders into the corridor. It is full of other people, equally panicked, trying to summon help and trains and fighting over buttons.

People at any time repelled her, and these were nightmares from her worst dreams. People were crawling about, people were screaming, whimpering, gasping for breath, touching each other, vanishing in the dark, and ever and anon being pushed off the platform on to the live rail. Some were fighting round the electric bells, trying to summon trains which could not be summoned.

Others were yelling for Euthanasia or for respirators, or blaspheming the Machine. Others stood at the doors of their cells fearing, like herself, either to stop in them or to leave them. And behind all the uproar was silence – the silence which is the voice of the earth and of the generations who have gone.

She retreats back to her cell. Eventually she ventures out one last time. The fighting has stopped, the dead and injured lie around. She somehow finds Kuno, who lays dying in the dark. He tells her that men outside the Machine exist. She suggests they will restart the Machine, then. He tells her, “Never. Humanity has learnt its lesson.” And at that moment, an airship crashes into the city — destroying it. The end.

I think the easy, superficial way to appreciate Forster’s “The Machine Stops” is to marvel at how much he managed to get “right” in predicting what a world might look like in the far future. The ubiquitous communication and connectivity, which produces highly physically isolated people who are nonetheless constantly engaged with hundreds or thousands of others (a state of Sherry Turkle calls “Alone Together”), and shrinks the world by making it possible to rapidly move anything you want to you (rather than you to it) — this is all a fairly impressive extrapolation of late Industrial Revolution advances in communications, transportation, and automation technology. Similarly, the lament that humanity might become passively addicted to technological convenience feels ahead of its time. If this book was written in the 1960s or 1970s, it would be commonplace in this respect; by the fact that it was written in 1909, it is remarkable.

What I think is the deeper point of appreciation, though, is Forster’s humanistic concerns. It is not just the dependence that is the problem, although by the end of the book, when the Machine stops, it is clear how dangerous that can be. It is that people have gradually allowed the Machine to dominate their dreams of what it means to live and thrive. As Forster puts it at one point:

Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

Again, one can find other 20th century voices saying similar things, with different degrees of emphasis. The idea that modern “decadence,” particularly technological decadence, had produced a separation between modern humanity and the eons of generations before it, becomes very common starting in the 1920s and 1930s, and the technological horrors of the two World Wars spurred much of that sentiment. But 1909 still feels rather early for this.

If H.G. Wells gets credit for the trope of the atomic bomb (1914), should E.M. Forster get credit for… whatever this is? The idea of an artificial intelligence — for what other way can we understand the Machine in our present time? — that has been built for the convenience of humanity, whose workings become too impossible for humanity to understand and maintain, and on whose survival humanity becomes utterly dependent?

This is not “The Matrix,” I do not think. The people in Forster’s story are aware they live in the Machine, and while it is hinted that the Machine is involved in some degree of enslavement (the “worms” pulling Kuno back into the city and the banning of respirators that follows are all implied to be efforts the Machine to avoid humanity possibly leaving its embraces), it does not have the same degree of externally-imposed coercion that is implied by “The Matrix.” The situation with the Machine is even more of a reference to Plato’s allegory of the cave than “The Matrix,” as very few people who learn about the nature of “The Matrix” actually want to go back into it afterwards.

Is “The Machine Stops” an end of the world story? I think so, somewhat. Certainly it is the end for most of those people who live in the Machine. The implication that there are people living amongst the ruins of the world, and that they will be new inheritors of the mantle of humanity, is meant to be a little hopeful. But it is still quite grim, as it is hardly implied that those people living outside are doing very well up until that point, and even if there were significant numbers of Machine survivors, it is hard to see how much help they would be: not only are they useless at anything practical, including physical activity, but despite Kuno’s pronouncement that humanity must have learned its lesson, it is hard to believe.

As a humanist at a moment when the most profound disrespect to humanistic endeavor, art, thought, and ideals are being broadcast constantly from the engines of capital, the halls of governance, the administrators of higher education, and the centers of science and technology, I will admit that “The Machine Stops” sings to me and my concerns. Not so much in the sense that I think its specific future of people living underground is one that I am particularly worried about. But Plato’s cave was never a warning about literal caves, either — it is about the cave of men’s minds. We live at a moment in which great excavators are at work, boring metaphorical holes in to the metaphorical earth, and their monied and powerful operators are telling us pleasant lies about how happy we’ll all be, once we embrace living in our little cells.