Description
October 28, 1988. 4:20 P.M.: Warday. The deployment of an American anti-missile system causes a desperate Russian response: Soviet satellite-launched weapons detonate at high altitude over the North American landmass, damaging virtually every electronic circuit, most beyond repair. Within minutes the American retaliatory strike is launched. By 4:56, Soviet land-aimed missiles have destroyed eight North American targets including the cities of Washington D.C., New York and San Antonio, and the missile silos of the mid-West.
No second strike occurs. There is no one left in the military and political hierarchies of either power with the authority to order one. Thirty-six minutes after it began, the first nuclear war in history is over. But its gruesome legacy remains: six million Americans are dead, and in the five years following Warday seventy million more will be added to the toll, killed by radiation, starvation or disease.
Five years after Warday two survivors – best friends from childhood – set off on a voyage of discovery. Theirs will be a journey across America in search of what their country has become. Who has survived, on what terms and under what conditions? What happened on Warday and, above all, could it have been prevented?
WARDAY is the collaboration of two writers, shocked by the world’s continuing complacency in the face of an escalating nuclear arms race. Combining a mastery of technical detail with a vivid and moving narrative, Whitley Strieber and James W. Kunetka succeed in marrying the clinical accuracy of non-fiction with the passionate humanity of fiction. Nothing they describe is beyond the possible, and this is what gives WARDAY its awesome power to persuade, even as it terrifies.
Hardcover. 380 pages. In good preloved condition.