Free The Pentagon's Brain by Annie Jacobsen Page A

“The Emergency Plans Book,” including most atomic weapons facilities, naval bases, airfields, and Army bases. All major communication centers, financial districts, and transportation hubs have been targeted for attack, and the majority of them have suffered catastrophic losses. America’s infrastructure has been obliterated. Virtually nothing remains of Washington, D.C. Even those living in rural America experience death and destruction on a cataclysmic scale. Because of automated-targeting errors, many of the nuclear weapons miss their intended targets and instead strike at random across the heartland.
    Though crippled, the U.S. military has not been destroyed andthe counterattack begins. “Notwithstanding severe losses of military and civilian personnel and materiel,” the authors predict, “air operations against the enemy are continuing and our land and naval forces are heavily engaged. Both sides are making use of atomic weapons for tactical air support and in the land battle.” Lightweight portable nuclear weapons, like Livermore’s Davy Crocket bomb, are deployed across the nation by the thousands as Soviet ground forces invade. Next comes a final full-scale nuclear exchange. ICBMs rain down from the skies by the hundreds. Coastal naval bases are pummeled with hydrogen bombs. Ports are clogged with sinking ships. Merchant shipping comes to a halt. Surface transportation and airlift capacity are nonexistent.
    There are now hundreds of ground zeros across America, and everything within a five-to ten-mile radius of each one has been obliterated. The confluence of fireballs has created a series of major firestorms. Forests and cities are in flames. Those who escape being burned to death are subjected to varying degrees of deadly radiation. “The surface bursts have resulted in widespread radioactive fallout of such intensity that over substantial parts of the United States the taking of shelter for considerable periods of time is the only means of survival.”
    In the document’s “Post-Attack Analysis,” things get much worse. One hundred million American survivors now live in a nation entirely without the rule of law. The government is paralyzed. Roughly 50 million people are in need of immediate emergency medical attention, half of whom will require hospitalization for up to twelve weeks. Twelve and a half million others have received lethal doses of radiation and will die in the next few days, regardless of treatment. Health resources are in a critical state. The doctors and nurses who survived the first strike cannot begin to handle what is now being asked of them. Of a pre-attack total of 1.6 million U.S. hospital beds, 100,000 remain. Radiation is but one malady. “Communicable diseases, including typhoid fever,smallpox, tetanus and streptococcal diseases, begin to run rampant.” Day-to-day production of food comes to a halt. Most salvageable food stocks have been contaminated. Widespread looting has begun, with survivors hoarding what little remains.
    The housing system has gone critical. Millions of homes were destroyed in the nuclear exchange; millions of people now have nowhere to live. Fallout has made vast portions of the Eastern Seaboard uninhabitable. There is no electricity, no refrigeration, no transportation, and no community water systems. Another deadly health menace emerges with the inability of the survivors to dispose of human waste or the dead bodies of millions killed in a single day. Then comes the knockout punch. “Along the coasts, bubonic plague, cholera and typhus are expected to emerge,” write the authors, “part of a Soviet biological warfare secondary attack.” The authors of the secret document clearly believe the Soviets to be the kind of enemy who will stop at nothing. Americans who managed to survive nuclear Armageddon must now prepare for the emergence of incurable diseases like bubonic plague.
    By the twenty-first century, catastrophic narratives like the Doomsday