Please find below a short list of novels claiming to depict the horrors of nuclear war, along with what we think of them!

  • Arc Light by Eric L. Harry (10/10)
    • This is possibly the most detailed and accurate depiction of a “real” nuclear war as can be found in fiction.  The author is a lawyer and military reservist with several fine novels to his credit.  The setting is the mid-1990s when Russia and the West are supposed to be friends, but the builddowns of nuclear arsenals on both sides have yet to occur.  So far as can be determined by research online into declassified documents and the like (not to mention the fine non-fiction book Raven Rock by Garrett M. Graff, of which more elsewhere) the codenames, procedures, technology and so forth are quite accurate.  Plus, it is a real page turner of a novel, gripping from start to finish.  A fine antidote to the books at the bottom of this short list.
  • Trinity’s Child by William Prochnau
    • This has less detail about the actual processes of nuclear war, but what it lacks in that regard, it makes up for in tension and dramatic storytelling.  It is hard to say, especially as a lay person, how much of the apparatus of nuclear war would survive a sudden first strike, the associated electromagnetic pulses, and the synergistic effects.  But that is why so many redundancies were built into that apparatus over the years by the militaries of both sides to ensure effective command and control of nuclear forces, not to mention a deterring second-strike capability.  This novel shows both pushed right to the edge.  Also made into a fairly decent film with Powers Boothe, Rebecca de Mornay, Martin Landau and James Earl Jones titled By Dawn’s Early Light, available on YouTube.
  • Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
    • For an early effort that bought into the totally unwarranted hype of the late 1950s about a “missile gap” between the Soviets and the Americans, this is actually a pretty good read that also gives insights into the culture of the American Deep South (Florida) as segregation was being brought to an end.  The viewpoint characters are all in the surviving location after the bombs fall, and yet a realistic depiction of how they can know something of the bigger picture is conveyed.  The practical considerations of surviving a general nuclear war (type: many inaccurate and dirty early 1960s multi-megatonne H-bombs) in a rural area that manages to avoid fallout are also well described.  But mainly it is a damn good yarn with compelling characters, a real page turner.
  • Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois
    • This is also a compelling read, but it mainly takes place ten years after the Cuban Missile Crisis becomes (alternate-history style) a Cuban Missile War, with some remembered descriptions of the conflict by viewpoint characters and a few “document” reads that flesh out the (very realistic) depiction of what could have happened in October 1962 well enough.  It is mainly a spy / journalism thriller set in a grim postwar martial-law America, with a thrilling chase through a New York City that has been abandoned but is being patrolled and rehabilitated by the military for an eventual rebirth.  Definitely worth a read.
      • Moreover, the nuclear war depicted in this novel seems to portray very realistically what would have happened had the nukes flown back then: the complete destruction of Washington DC, Cuba and south Florida, the partial destruction of New York City and a few other American cities… and the utter, total, barbaric annihilation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Such was the imbalance of nuclear forces back then, and the “horrible spasm” that was American nuclear war fighting strategy.
  • Warday by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka
    • I used to really like this 1984 novel back before I knew better.  With its great level of detail both in “documentary reports” and eyewitness accounts, its depiction of a “limited” nuclear war in 1988 in response to the American deployment of a “Star Wars” type of missile defence system seemed very realistic (modulo an insane speed of technological advance yielding orbital laser satellites in seven years).  But the “Hollywood EMP” that downs all aircraft, automobiles and communications; the targeting by both sides of major civilian sites rather than military ones in the first strike; and the use of dirty, inaccurate, 1960s-era multi-megatonne city busters (even after the SALT II treaty of the late 1970s clearly showed that everyone was moving to much smaller, more accurate and more numerous warheads); all this clearly shows the ignorance and/or CND-style scare-tactics of the authors.  Some of that ignorance is understandable as they wrote this before the declassifications after the Cold War ended.   But to depict Soviet warheads as missing many continental targets but conveniently and precisely wiping out all the US Navy’s flotillas in a short time; and to depict all America’s allies somehow co-ordinating a seizure of all US bases worldwide simultaneously within minutes of the first nuclear detonation; these illustrate clearly the extreme contrivance of the scenario by the authors to deliver an anti-nuke message.  Give it a miss.
  • On The Beach by Nevil Shute
    • This is arguably one of the most famous, if not the most famous, nuclear war novels in history.  Depicting the last few survivors of a global nuclear war in Australia semi-stoically awaiting their eventual and inevitable doom from cobalt-bomb fallout clouds descending slowly from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern, it was turned into a great film starring Gregory Peck, Eva Gardner, Anthony Perkins and Fred Astaire.  Nevil Shute was a terrific author and this book induced me to discover the excellence of his entire oeuvre.  The scenario is almost all human drama with very little of the technical details of a nuclear exchange that people like me so enjoy – but I do manage to enjoy that drama just as much.  However…
      • I ran the numbers on a “global nuclear fallout doom” scenario and I think it most unlikely.  Four tonnes of plutonium were spread by above-ground nuclear tests in the 1940s to 1970s.  This increased background radiation count around the world by 0.15 milliSieverts (mSv) per year.  That is 6% of the total natural background count of around 2.4 mSv/year.  Each modern bomb has about 4 kilograms of plutonium, and at maximum (in the 1980s before the treaties and reductions) a full nuclear exchange might have involved 20,000 such bombs or eighty tonnes of fissionable materials, or twenty times that spread by the tests.  That’ results in a total background count from all sources, natural and artificial, of 5.4 mSv per year.  For comparison, Canada’s nuclear workers are limited to effective dose limits of 50 mSv per year and 100 mSv over five years.  Another nuclear war myth bites the dust… literally!
  • Triumph by Philip Wylie
    • This novel was so far over the top.  I mean, just bonkers.  And yet the author treats the scenario with absolute deadly seriousness.  Totally po’faced.  (Spoiler alert…) The entire Northern Hemisphere is turned into a permanently radioactive and sterile landscape of overlapping craters by a fanatic Soviet Union intent on having a small surviving communist elite in underwater refuges ruling all that remains (the Southern Hemisphere) for the sake of historical glory.  Only a handful of people in a wealthy man’s very expensive and well-thought-out shelter make it through… at least to begin with.  I don’t think there’s enough fissionable material in the world to achieve even a tenth of what is depicted, even if a secret conspiracy of an elite ten thousand could have succeeded in this way.  Basically a bottle episode to allow the American author to deliver some messaging about the perfidy of communists, the horrific effects of nuclear weapons, the ultimate destructive potential of such weapons far beyond what most can imagine even now, and the challenges of race relations.  Not to learn from like the first novel listed at the top of this page, but perhaps to entertain if you are into this sort of thing…