Alas, Babylon

Foreword

I have an acquaintance, a retired manufacturer, a practical man, who has recently become worried about international tensions, intercontinental missiles, H-bombs, and such. One day, knowing that I had done some writing on military subjects, he asked: “What do you think would happen if the Russkies hit us when we weren’t looking—you know, like Pearl Harbor?” The subject was on my mind. I had recently returned from a magazine assignment at Offutt Field, Headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, several SAC operational bases, and the Missile Test Center on Cape Canaveral. More to the point, I had been discussing just such a possibility with several astute British staff officers. The British have lived under the shadow of nuclear-armed rockets longer than we. Also, they have a vivid memory of cities devastated from the skies, as have the Germans and Japanese. A man who has been shaken by a two-ton blockbuster has a frame of reference. He can equate the impact of an H-bomb with his own experience, even though the H-bomb blast is a million times more powerful than the shock he endured. To someone who has never felt a bomb, bomb is only a word. An H-bomb’s fireball is something you see on television. It is not something that incinerates you to a cinder in the thousandth part of a second. So the H-bomb is beyond the imagination of all but a few Americans, while the British, Germans, and Japanese can comprehend it, if vaguely. And only the Japanese have personal understanding of atomic heat and radiation. It was a big question. I gave him a horseback opinion, which proved conservative compared with some of the official forecasts published later. I said, “Oh, I think they’d kill fifty or sixty million Americans—but I think we’d win the war.” He thought this over and said, “Wow! Fifty or sixty million dead! What a depression that would make!” I doubt if he realized the exact nature and extent of the depression—which is why I am writing this book.

— Pat Frank