Apocalypse made easy

A top-secret U.S. government scenario for the aftermath of nuclear war reveals something truly scary -- cockeyed optimism.

By Jonathon Keats

Feb 7, 2002 | Should you happen to find yourself running a country under nuclear assault, you simply have to expect your national economy to suffer. Your wounded will demand intensive care regardless of their insurance plan, your labor force will be far too busy burying the dead to return to farm and factory, and mass destruction in major cities may hold up postal deliveries for months, even assuming you unearth enough change-of-address slips to go around. But fear not. If the forecasting skills of the United States military are to be trusted, only half of Americans will survive -- a decrease in population almost certainly sufficient to offset losses in goods and services.

This isn't fiction. On the contrary, it's the story the military told itself back in 1958. For decades after that, journalists heard rumors of an official government "doomsday scenario," yet it wasn't until 1998 that the document was briefly, inadvertently, declassified. Innocuously titled "The Emergency Plans Book," the elusive memorandum was turned over to the National Archives -- together with scores of other previously secret files released by the office of the Secretary of the Air Force in a routine housecleaning -- where military historian L. Douglas Keeney discovered it and had it xeroxed for future reference. When he returned to the archives a year later, he saw that the original was gone; a colonel had ordered it reclassified, and thereafter it was available only to those with top-secret clearance. Keeney found himself with the only copy in civilian hands. Naturally, he decided to publish it.

This month, Motor Books International -- specialty house to the hotrod and pickup crowd -- will release "The Emergency Plans Book," complete with Keeney's explanatory commentary and archival photographs of nuclear tests in the Nevada desert. Taking "The Doomsday Scenario" as its title, Keeney's book will for the first time expose the public to how the government has for decades pictured America the day after, and how it has schemed to contain the damage by keeping the president in office, the dollar stable and the telephones functional.

Keeney believes that "The Emergency Plans Book" is still in use, at least in part, judging from the government's response to the crisis on Sept. 11. He cites, for example, the flight of George W. Bush to Offutt Air Force Base -- where a Cold War-era shelter remains operational -- shortly after the terrorist strikes. And had the attack been nuclear, perhaps far more of the scenario would have been implemented: For example, to save the maximum number of lives, conserving the necessary supplies to do so most effectively, doctors might have had to let so-called hopeless cases die without even the ease of anesthesia. Fortunately, we may never know.

So such speculation is beside the point. What makes "The Emergency Plans Book" so interesting is that it offers such extraordinary insight into the military mindset. The fact that the scenario comes to a happy ending, relatively speaking, even in the wake of a nuclear holocaust, helps to explain the aggressive behavior of those who ought to know better than anybody the horrors of war. Generals may look grim and admirals may effect admirable calm in adversity, but the truth is that, far from heartless, military men are hopeless optimists, as blithesome as a Broadway musical.

Which isn't to say that "The Emergency Plans Book" is written at the chipper clip of an Andrew Lloyd Webber extravaganza. It seems instead dead serious, if only because the writing is so stiff. Its language wears the uniform of respectability, so rigid that even were the content doggerel, it would still sound like an official pronouncement. "The USSR has made attacks with large numbers of atomic weapons on the United States and on some of its territories, bases overseas, and its Allies," the book begins. "The domestic air defense warning yellow for the first attack was disseminated two hours before USSR aircraft appeared over U.S. frontiers."

This description is all business, nothing like "Failsafe," say, or "On the Beach" or any of the myriad other novelistic accounts of nuclear attack from about the same period. It's every bit as fictional, yet reads as stark fact. This apparent immediacy -- the urgency that makes someone say exactly what he means -- is what gives "The Emergency Plans Book" its surface legitimacy. The book is believable because it seems so artless: There's no expression of emotion by which we'd expect to be deceived.

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