Warday

by Whitley Strieber, James W. Kunetka

From the dust jacket: "October 28, 1988 was War Day. It lasted 36 minutes. Seven million Americans died in the immediate blast. Millions more died from radiation, famine and disease over the next five years." The story is told from the perspective of two survivors who cross the continent to see what the new America is really like five years after Warday.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Post Apocalyptic, Apocalyptic, Dystopia, Horror, War

374 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1984

About the author

American writer best known for his novels The Wolfen,The Hunger and Warday and for Communion, a non-fiction description of his experiences with apparent alien contact. He has recently made significant advances in understanding this phenomenon, and has published his new discoveries in Solving the Communion Enigma.

Strieber also co-authored The Coming Global Superstorm with Art Bell, which inspired the blockbuster film about sudden climate change, The Day After Tomorrow.

His book The Afterlife Revolution written with his deceased wife Anne, is a record of what is considered to be one of the most powerful instances of afterlife communication ever recorded.

Reviews

[Jill H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was gathering up some items to donate to a local charity and this book was inside an old backpack. I know I never bought it since I don't read Whitley Strieber or apocalyptic fiction, so I have no idea where it came from. I thought I would read it since I was between books. I'm rather glad I did.

It is the story of a 38 minute nuclear war between the US and Russia which is probably about how long it really would be if both countries were struck by rockets and electronic pulse at the same time. The story follows two men (using the co-authors' names and professions) who want to report on what is happening in the country once this devastation occurs. They travel anyway they can and eat when they can find food that is safe. What they see is very frightening. Only three cities have been struck so there are some "safe" places where they can visit. The US government no longer exists and the safe areas are becoming independent countries or territories. And their laws about persons crossing into their areas are pretty simple...execute anyone who crosses their borders.

There is too much of the story that cannot be put in a review or the review would be as long as the book! Suffice it to say, this is a disturbing and rather prescient book which left me with chills. Even if you don't read this genre, I would recommend that you try this one. It is fascinating.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be required reading for all Americans, and maybe for everyone worldwide.

It takes place a few years after Russia, panicked at being outdistanced in technology, has dropped a few nuclear bombs on the US. Naturally, we retaliated, so the government, and indeed the entire infrastructure of both countries are gone.

In this book, the two authors write as if they were writing a nonfiction story in a world where this has actually happened. They decide to travel together around the country to see what's left, to see what has happened to the America they used to know.

The results are frightening. Even though this book was written some twenty-plus years ago, it's easy to extrapolate and see how our country is a house of cards based on a shaky technological base. Pull out a card or two and the whole thing comes tumbling down.

Add to that countries around the world ready to leap in and take over the US, and you have a recipe for many nightmares to come.

Read it, but be warned: you won't be able to get it out of your mind, and you'll never look at your life and your country in the same way again.

[11811 (Eleven) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A first person tour of America post-nuclear exchange with the USSR. This is dated material, obviously, but those days are still clear in my memory and it was refreshingly different from most of the post-apocalyptic literature out there today. Because the nuclear war was limited, it's not quite an end of the world scenario - more like the world just got really fucked up but has every intention to survive and rebuild with a realistic capability to do so. No zombies.

The first person journalistic approach made it all the more realistic and the excellent audio narration made it all the more enjoyable.

I received a free copy from Audiobook Blast in exchange for an honest review.

[Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wouldn’t call it “wish fulfilment,” exactly, but I think the appeal of post-apocalyptic fiction is that it’s always a fascinating thought exercise: how would you survive? What would you do? Where would you go? Yet whenever people imagine an apocalyptic scenario – be it virus, climate change, zombies, whatever – they never fail to assume that they’d be amongst the survivors. I had a greater than normal interest in the post-apocalyptic genre when I was growing up, but nuclear fiction never engaged me. Some might say that’s because I was a child of the 1990s and 2000s, and the zeitgeist had moved on, but I don’t think so. I think it’s because even for the genre, nuclear war is just too bleak: the unknowable, invisible poisons of radiation, soot blotting out the sky, cities reduced to ash… no thanks. My teenage self wanted to be looting abandoned supermarkets and building a fortress against zombies up in the mountains – not slowly dying, vomiting and losing my hair, lying underneath a door propped up against a wall like in When the Wind Blows.

This is also why, I think, nuclear destruction has become more interesting to me as an adult. As you become older your perspective changes; you become more realistic, more cynical maybe. You have an appreciation of the horrors of the world as something other than a boy’s adventure fantasy.

Warday was written in 1984. It posits a fictional nuclear exchange taking place on October 28, 1988 (interestingly just ten days after the death of Jeff Winston in that other 1980s potboiler I enjoyed recently, Ken Grimwood’s Replay). Five years later, in 1993, Whitley Streiber and Jim Kunetka – writing as fictionalised versions of themselves – set off on a journey around a devastated United States to document how much life has changed. Warday is presented as a factual account of this fictional journey.

Part of the enjoyment (if that’s the right word) of reading a book like this is finding everything out for yourself, so I won’t go into too much detail. The critical thing about Warday is that it postulates a limited nuclear exchange. Only New York, Washington and San Antonio (a military target) are destroyed, along with a number of military installations in remote parts of the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountains, and several US Navy fleets at sea. Multiple weapons detonated in the stratosphere also cause a catastrophic EMP which fries most of North America’s electronics. (It’s implied that the US inflicts a similarly limited strike on the USSR in retaliation.) Of course part of this is simply expediency on the authors’ part: they couldn’t very well write about a journey across the US following a total nuclear war, because there wouldn’t be much left to write about or any characters to do the writing. But part of it is also to demonstrate precisely just how devastating even a handful of nuclear strikes would be. Even beyond the instant deaths of millions and then the slow radiation deaths of tens of millions, the American economy is completely crippled, it faces famine and is reliant on foreign aid from the UK and Japan, and the federal government has lost much of its power as various states become de facto independent. California enjoys a high standard of living but turns American refugees away from its border and is slowly becoming a police state; large parts of Texas have been annexed by Mexico; and the Midwestern bread basket states languish beneath radioactive dust storms blown down from Montana and the Dakotas.

The comparison that obviously comes to mind for a contemporary reader is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (the decent Max Brooks book, not the dire Brad Pitt movie). Warday has a more personal touch, as Whitley and Jim travel around their devastated homeland and encounter problems which create their own personal stories, but the best parts of the book for me were the various fictional interviews. Two of the most interesting subjects are a Royal Navy submarine commander involved in hunting down the many “code-blind” nuclear subs who are still hiding out in the world’s oceans, unsure of what has happened to their governments, still posing a terrible threat; and the former US under-secretary of defence, who was aboard Air Force One in the critical moments leading up to the war, and survived its crash landing after the EMP.

Of course, this is effectively a hypothesised future, and there are many things about Warday I didn’t find plausible. Beyond the concept of a nuclear conflict under MAD ever being a “limited” war, I also couldn’t really swallow the idea of a secret pact between France, West Germany and the UK keeping Europe out of the war. I can buy people turning en masse to alternative medicines when real medical help is in short supply (especially under the new federal triage law preventing the waste of medical resources on radiation-inflicted patients with poor long-term survival prospects, something I did find disturbingly realistic), but the interview with a self-described “witch” is a bit daft. There’s an awkward interview with a black woman which sums up the fate of “the blacks” after the war. And I had to smile at the very American depiction of a British aid worker, who talks about how it would be simply unthinkable for the British not to help America because “one cannot fail to remember the American response during and after World War II.” In my experience the prevailing British opinion about the world wars is actually that America showed up selfishly late to both of them.

But these are all quibbles. No author’s vision of the future is going to chime precisely with what I might have imagined, and it’s also silly to say that this-or-that scenario is unrealistic; the Cold War and the MAD apparatus was insanely complex, with an immense number of variables and potential outcomes, and I’m sure that amongst the thousands and thousands of still-classified permutations the Pentagon modelled (and certainly still models), there were possible scenarios very similar what we see in Warday.

I think we forget too often, these days, that the world is still at risk from nuclear catastrophe. Probably people wilfully forgot all the time during the Cold War as well, since there’s nothing you can do about it and therefore no sense in worrying about it. But – speaking as a member of a younger generation – I think there’s a perception that as of 1990 the problem was solved. Reading up on the contemporary state of things after finishing Warday, I was actually surprised to find that both Russia and the US have massively, massively reduced their stockpiles since the 1980s; down to less than 10,000 each from dizzying heights of over 30,000 each, and of those, both countries are thought to have less than 2,000 each on active deployment at any given time. That seems reassuring until you consider what 4,000 nuclear warheads lancing down across the northern hemisphere would result in. As Streiber and Kunetka show us in painstaking detail, it would only take a few dozen – let alone several thousand! – to cause a one-day holocaust and irrevocably fuck up two major nations. Warday is very a much a product of its time, but it’s also a book that remains compelling and relevant thirty years later.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a child of the 1980s, I remember well just how dark the shadow of nuclear war cast upon us. With billions of dollars being spent on “survivable” nuclear weapons systems and Ronald Reagan joking over an open mic about launching a first strike against the Soviet Union, it seemed as though nuclear war was not a question of “if” but “when”. This feeling was reinforced by the response of numerous writers and filmmakers, who flooded the decade with novels such as Doomsday Plus Twelve and The Postman, movies such as Testament and Miracle Mile, and television shows such as The Day After and Threads, all of which conveyed the horrors of such a conflict and the miseries that its survivors would suffer.

Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka’s book was one of the most successful of this genre. Set in 1993, it is a fictional travelogue of the two authors journeying across the United States five years after a “limited” nuclear war (the “Warday” of the book’s title) triggered by the deployment of a space-based anti-missile system decimates the United States. Electronics throughout North America are destroyed by a massive EMP attack that cripples the economy, Washington D.C. and San Antonio are annihilated, New York City suffers a near miss, and large portions of the Great Plains are irradiated by strikes on missile silos. Much of this is related through the recollections of the characters in the novel (some of whom are fictionalized versions of the authors’ friends), and through documents they collect on their travels.

As the two discover on their journey, the nation is falling apart. Millions of Americans aspire to relocate elsewhere. The British and the Japanese assume an increasingly dominant presence in much of the country. In west Texas, secessionists establish a Hispanic-majority nation of “Aztlan,” which the rest of the state is marshaling forces to attack. The West Coast, which was spared the worst effects of the war, is an exclusionary region that is slowly moving towards independence. The Midwest suffers from recurrent fallout caused by weather stirring up irradiated soil from further west, hobbling efforts to rebuild the economy.

Reading this as a teenager, the future prophesized for a “survivable” nuclear war was a grim one. Re-reading it years later, the grimness is still very much apparent, even amidst the undertone of determination and glimmers of hope that the authors inject in the narrative. Much of this is due to the effectiveness of their approach, as by imagining themselves as part of the story they infuse the book with an extra sense of personal suffering, of the exhaustion of living through an imperfect recovery and sadness over what has been lost. While readers today can enjoy the book with a sense of gratitude that no version of the future they envisioned ever came to pass, the book nonetheless serves as an effective artifact from a time when a sense of imminent destruction felt omnipresent and the future horrifyingly bleak.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

My memory (which I will be the first to admit may well be faulty) of reading this one is that I lounged on the hammock in the back yard on a fine summer day and went through it from cover to cover. It appeared prior to Strieber asserting that his stories were true and setting himself up as the Richard Shaver of his generation. It's a meta-fiction piece of the two authors traveling across the country after a nuclear war; a very fast-paced but not-sensationalized autobiography of a future past or passed future which didn't happen. I found it very fast-paced and tightly-plotted, a real thought-provoking and chilling novel. Good stuff!

[Stan James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this book back in 1984 when the Cold War was still a legitimate threat--just before Gorbachev started the policy of Glasnost and Reagan was still joking about bombing the Russians. It left an indelible impression of how even a limited nuclear attack could have devastating, world-changing consequences that could stretch on for decades. Reading it now there is a certain sense of distance with the old U.S./USSR rivalry long dead, Putin's efforts to turn back the clock notwithstanding, but the reality is most of these nuclear missiles still exist, with more than enough firepower to ruin your day and then some.

The book is written as a first person account of the effects of a limited nuclear war five years after the bombs fell. The authors, Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, place themselves into this fictional scenario set in the year 1993, starting a journey across America that takes them to both coasts before heading back to their adopted hometown of Dallas, where they work as reporters.

The story opens in October 1988 with Strieber's recollection of being on a bus in downtown New York when the bombs fall. New York is one of three cities targeted in the first volley (the other volleys do not follow due to U.S. retaliation disabling the Soviets' ability to counter-attack), the other two being Washington and San Antonio. He survives because the bombs miss New York proper, landing over Brooklyn and off the coast. He still gets dosed with enough radiation that he is later classified under the triage system as not treatable, as the radiation is expected to kill him within years and those with better survivability are given priority.

Bombs exploded in the upper atmosphere create an EMP effect that blankets the country, disabling nearly all electronics, ranging from computers to vehicle ignitions and most forms of communication. The final blow comes in the form of volleys aimed at missile silos in the Dakotas and other states. Winds sweep the radiation from these blasts across the bread basket of the U.S., devastating crops and leading to widespread famine.

Against this grim backdrop--the book suggest 7 million die on the day the bombs fall and up to 60 million die from the effect in the following five years--the authors find that some places have prospered, others have become uninhabitable, and assistance has been offered from other nations, albeit with a price.

The bulk of the story captures Strieber's and Kunetka's journey from state to state--mostly by rail, as air travel is still rare five years after the attack--conducting interviews with government officials and ordinary folks, supplementing these accounts with official documentation of the effects of the war. The level of detail in these mock documents is impressive and help paint a picture of a country that has been split apart, where deflation has reduced most items to cents, gold is the favored currency and the federal government, now in L.A., is a stunted shadow of its former self.

The narrative works because it presents its fiction so plainly, even when specific scenarios seem absurd when taken out of context. At one point the authors are escaping authorities in California--which was spared attack but has emerged as a near police-state, locking down its borders--dressed as priests. They make a daring escape from a prison bus to continue their journey through the devastated heartland before heading to New York and then back to Texas. It sounds ridiculous and yet the details that are drawn of California, at once prosperous, yet cold, allow these occasional dramatic embellishments to at least seem plausible.

The bulk of the story is in the interviews, where survivors talk about living through famine and flu, abandoning cities and entire regions killed by radiation, some drifting, others settling, with a general sense that the people are banding together and helping each other where they can. International aid comes from the British and Japanese primarily, but both seem willing to only do so much, with a strong suggestion that the other nations of the world are not exactly eager to see the U.S. re-assert itself as a global power again.

One especially chilling interview is with a British naval officer who works as part of a crew of sub poppers, so-called because their job is to find nuclear-armed submarines that are still at sea--and thus presenting a threat--and disabling or destroying them. He recounts taking out subs with enough firepower on board to cause devastation many times greater than what happened on Warday itself, a grim reminder of how terrible and terribly effective nuclear weapons are.

Although the specific scenario of Warday is no longer plausible--the Soviets launch a first strike due to the U.S. being on the verge of putting together a seemingly indestructible space-based defense system (how Reagan would have approved!)--the story remains as powerful now as it was over 30 years ago, simply because nothing at all has changed regarding the almost incomprehensible effects of nuclear bombs, and as mentioned, there are still an awful lot of them sitting silent in their silos, one launch code away from unleashing their destruction.

[Meg ✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5⭐️
completely absorbing and engrossing, utterly fantastic

[Kazen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fictional reporting about an event that didn't happen, but very well could of. It's amazing, my first five star read of the year.

So. In 1988 the US and USSR had a limited nuclear war. In this case, "limited" means the world didn't blow up completely. Several cities in the US have been turned into craters and radioactive fallout is drifting over the landscape but there are indeed survivors. The authors are making a trip around America five years after what has become known as Warday to see what has become of the country.

I don't want to tell you any more about the plot because the joy (if you can call it that) of this book is discovering what has become of the US. We start off with so many questions and the authors steadily feed us answers on almost every page. They're reporters and they give us all kinds of perspectives - interviews, government documents, maps, polls, and more in addition to accounts of their own experiences.

Over the course of the book we see what Warday meant from myriad angles. What would happen to medical care and transportation after a nuclear war? How about industry and agriculture? Who would come to America's aid, and what would they expect in return? How about international trade? Banking? Immigration? Race relations? What role would the military play? All of these are covered and more.

The chapters are short and read quickly but I kept putting the book down to absorb the situation and its consequences. My copy is dotted with several dozen Post Its and while some are for beautiful writing most highlight parts that made my jaw drop. Here's one non-spoilery example - after a nuke goes off there's radioactive fallout, and some people would get radiation poisoning. Mild cases can be treated but after a certain amount of exposure it inevitably leads to a slow, painful death. How do you allocate limited medical supplies when some patients will die no matter what you do? How do you ease their suffering? And where do you draw those lines? This book goes there.

My immediate reaction is to deny that the US would do this or that awful thing, but when you consider the whole situation it's rooted in fact and makes sense. Heck, it's logical.

And that is chilling.

Sadly, it's also relevant today. In a country not to far from me there's a crazy guy with nuclear weapons, and across the ocean another armed crazy guy is egging him on. As long as there are large scale nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons we need to remember that our own Warday is a real possibility.

But don't be mistaken, the book isn't a dreary slog. There's action and light moments that balance things emotionally as well as keep you reading. I wasn't anticipating much diversity in perspectives considering this was written over 30 years ago but several people of color are interviewed and a discussion with a black woman may be my favorite part of the book.

Reading Warday has been an unforgettable experience and I highly, highly recommend it.

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

On Warday in 1985, the Soviets bomb the hell out of the US, completely obliterating DC, New York, and other major cities (LA becomes the new US capitol). Concurrent with the nuclear attack, the Soviets let loose a technology that destroys most advanced electronics, effectively disabling the US communications infrastructure and isolating the various regions of the country. The book attempts to predict what might happen in the wake of such an event-- chaos, hunger, plague, fallout...Four years following the US attack, a writer and a journalist who both survived "Warday" decide to travel across America to write about and try to understand how the country has changed, as well as what's going on socially, politically, and culturally. The chapters take the form of interviews with local government officials, CDC scientists, anarchist movement leaders branded as terrorists, and just ordinary people. The authors fabricate some very convincing, and some not-so-convincing "gallup poll" type documents, secret communiques, etc. It's basically futuristic fiction for a historian, since the two men want to accurately reconstruct what happened during the years of the communication blackout.

Streiber and Kunetka attempt to address some pretty profound questions about how much license the government should take to manage such a crisis, and what kinds of Constitutional sacrifices that would entail. More than questions of politics, or perhaps what should be and is not the central issue in modern politics, the authors talk about personal responsibility for one's era. One of our intrepid narrators even goes so far as to characterize his inevitable death from radiation poisoning as something of a punishment for his pre-war flippancy-- so deeply has his attitude regarding his responsibility in the world shifted. Through tragedy, Americans redeem some of their most admirable traits-- self-reliance, community-mindedness, and a connection to the earth.

But there is definitely some agenda here. For example, when Streiber and Kunetka compare New York to Rome, and suggest that America had outreached herself, they certainly mean to suggest that big government always has and always will run communities into the ground. There is something resonant about this, even if I'm skeptical of their overall politics-- and it's in the overall oddness of patriotism, which essentially entails commitment to and love of an abstraction. It is much more intuitive and human to love and care for ones friends, family, and local community. At the same time, they insist that the resilience of the people constitutes nothing short of a resurrection of the American spirit. I admit that I found this idea very moving.

A few points of criticism. Some of the their fabricated documents were wither repetitive or patently ridiculous. Not all, though. Also, I had the impression at some points that the authors had constructed some elaborate scenarios to enact their not-so-secret nerd fantasies about someday being just like Bruce Willis in post-apocalyptic America. Kind of boy, but okay. Finally, I had a nagging irritation throughout the whole book about the selfishness of the main character who leaves behind his wife and son to traipse about a now highly dangerous America. I get that they are supposed to be information-gathering heroes, like journalists working in war-torn parts of the world today, but...really? And there we go with the tension between patriotic abstraction and community-love. Also, there was a conspicuous lack of woman's perspective. We're Americans, too, dudes.

Overall, this book left me unsettled in a way I value. It's emphatic anti-war message was very moving, its themes enduring. If I were to rate this book on writing-craft and structure alone I would have given it a mere 3 stars, but since I know I will remember it for a long time...there you go.

[Mauri · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wavered right from the beginning with what to rate this, because it hit so many of my personal interests, but it’s also kinda old and it shows, but also it’s also old and maybe a little overlooked. Let’s say 3.5, rounded to 4 because I’m in a generous mood.*

First, I apologize for my snarky status of November 28, 2019. I maintain that there is a veneer of pretentiousness to this whole thing, but it did become clear that Strieber and Kunetka were pretty worked up about the possibility of nuclear war and it being Very Very Bad.

Warday has a device and it sticks firmly to it: it’s 1993, about five years after the USSR bombed New York, DC, San Antonio, and several key missile sites in the Midwest, and the US retaliated. The authors themselves (under their own names) have decided to travel from Texas, where they both now live, through the southwest, up California, and then across the country to New York, to see what has become of the country. They interview people along the way, some man on the street stuff, some government officials, and present various official memos and documents that they manage to obtain.

I really like this kind of thing, as evidenced by my abiding love for World War Z, which I now see must have been inspired by this. Strieber and Kunetka talk to people with varying viewpoints, viewpoints that occasionally flat out contradict each other, and the documents (when done right) have much to read between the lines. It was occasionally difficult to get myself into the right frame of mind for this: what two men in 1984 thought 1993 would be like after the world ends in 1988. I’d find myself thinking, “wait, cancer doesn’t work like that,” only to remember that 35 years ago we didn’t know as much about cancer as we do now.

What I didn’t love is that this is very obviously a straight white Christian male perspective of how the world would end and what would happen afterwards. Only three of the official interviews in the book are with women: a witch(/alternative medicine practitioner/midwife), a middle school teacher, and a homeless professional “rememberer.” Most everyone else is male: the government officials, the soldiers, the doctors. Strieber talks about tons of people returning to the church like it’s an unalloyed good thing.

The authors handle the idea of Hispanics and Native Americans in the southwest forming their own country with a fair amount of nuance for two white Boomers, but otherwise they sort of glide past race. There’s some mention in the Chicago chapters of black people not thriving, because “many were poor, and the poor died first.” Yikes.

What drives the book is the authors’ underlying point: that nuclear war might kill us all instantly, sure, but it could just as easily kill lots of us, leaving the rest to make their way through the aftermath of famine and plague and economic collapse. Nuclear weapons bad, folks.

*Almost forgot to add why I’m feeling generous - this was the only book in my bag when I got locked out my office this afternoon.

[Kriston · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is recommended for die-hard fanatics of the genre. The war is exciting and the ecological and economical effects are very interesting. Unfortunately, the political conclusions the authors, as the main characters, jump to are not believable. Most disappointing are the distinctly xenophobic, stereotyped, and negative view the authors present toward anyone who isn't from the United States. One example is the stereotyped position of Japan in the new world with their "credit-card-sized cameras" and their appropriating as much nuclear technology as they can from the US to become a new world power. Likewise, the role of Great Britain as the holier-than-thou creditor and aid provider to the US; the brutal Mexican annexation of the southwest. It's just not tenable. The concepts of the USSR launching a pre-emptive war are also rather dated as it's generally been accepted now that was the USA that maintained a pre-emptive strike posture and it was the USSR who held a defensive posture.

I have to add another comment: it doesn't appear that many reviewers on Good Reads have actually read this book very closely because so many reviews are wrong on certain key points.

New York City was not destroyed because the Soviet bombs missed and hit Long Island and the ocean, instead. Indeed, one of the "authors" survived the war in Manhattan and returns to his old apartment while visiting the Manhattan salvage operation. A horrifying description is given multiple times of the fate of Long Island. New York City was abandoned because of non-functional infrastructure and the uninformed idea that it was all the fault of leaking petrochemical plants of New Jersey that poisoned the rivers. The authors obviously know little about the New York metropolitan area beyond New York City and the refineries they see from the New Jersey Turnpike.

San Antonio, Washington DC, and the Wyoming/Montana/Dakota missile fields were the only places "vaporized" in the USA. Many of the plot devices concern the fallout from the missile fields and visits to salvage operations in New York City as well as a fun survey of the San Antonio industrial area.

[Andy Nieradko · Rating 5 out of 5]

The old saying about art comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable comes to mind while reviewing War Day. This book is an important artistic statement, as fresh and eerily current as it was when it was written in the 1980's. I can't help but think some powerful individuals in Washington read this book and it possibly helped end the cold war.

[BookLoversLife · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an experience! I thought this was just like any other post apocalyptic book, but it's not. This is told like a documentary and I found it was such a unique way to tell the story but I didn't enjoy it that much. I think it was because I was expecting something totally different and was a little disappointed.

The story is told by 2 writers who travel the US a few years after Warday, to document what life is like now. The idea behind the story is amazing but I just found parts to be telling rather than showing. We get a lot of statistics which I just found tedious and not that necessary. I enjoyed the parts where we get to see what life is like now and thought it was fascinating but all the rest was a little stuffy.

There's not much else I can say about this other than it needs to be read to see. If you go into it with the mindset of it being like a documentary of what happened then I think you will enjoy it more. It's an interesting and unique book and I think I may just try listening to it again in a few months to see if I enjoy it more knowing what I know now!

This wasn't my favourite performance from Kevin Pierce but I can see why he had to narrate it the way he did! The style of the book dictated that it be read like a documentary. I just found it confusing trying to differentiate both characters because the whole book is read in the same tone. Saying that though. he read it really well, his voice was clear and concise and other than the confusion, I had no problem with the performance.

*I received a copy of this in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.*

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starting in the late eighties I began to exchange visits with my old friend and former roommate, Mike Miley, now a resident of Sonoma, California. Michael, always entranced by what he calls "high weirdness", had introduced me to Streiber's supposedly autobiographical Communion ('87), an account of what might be interpreted as encounters with extraterrestrials. I didn't read it, still haven't, but did see the movie based upon it and endeavored to read some of Strieber's other books in order to see where he was coming from. A book review by Samuel Delany in The Nation had made me very suspicious of Strieber's claims.

Warday was not what I expected. It's a post-holocaust novel and a pretty good one coauthored with an historian of the nuclear era.

Later on I went ahead to read some of Strieber's horror novels...

PS Now (2012), finally, I have read Communion and its successor book.

[Monique · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very believable story about a nuclear war between Russia and the US that lasted a day in 1988 and that annihilated New York, Washington, and some military bases in Wyoming, the Dakotas and a few others.

The 2 protagonists decide to travel across the US five years after the war to document the aftermath of the war. Part novel part documentary style, the inetrviews and the observations are spot on and keep the story relevant even though it was written in the 1980s.

Interesting read.

[Mayara Arend · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've actually caught myself skipping most of the "report" parts, science reports.
The plot was incredible, truly interesting, but I felt it could've been so much more without the technical science stuff which could be interesting but after a couple really started to bore me and had me having to put down the book for hours until I got into the right "mind" for it.

[Leonid · Rating 2 out of 5]

The worldbuilding was cool.

[Mary Overton]

Two journalists take a working road-trip, Studs Terkel style, across post-nuclear-war America.

From "Interview - Terry Burford, Midwife and Witch":

"I'm working toward delivering a baby a day. Right now I do about three or four a week. At the moment I've got fifty-eight patients in the midwifery and about two hundred in my general practice. I've got thirty psychiatric patients divided into four groups...." pg. 385

"... and then it's time to meet one of my psychotherapy groups. Since Warday the number of people in therapy has dropped by more than half. I think most of us work so hard we don't have time to be crazy. And nobody in this group is actually insane, not in the classic sense. There are ten members, five of them with touch neurosis, which is one of the more common current problems. There are many people who have developed a pathological terror of touching things because of the threat of hidden radiation. Two of my male patients suffer from impotence. Again, fear is a strong factor here. I have two women who have recently discovered they are gene-damaged, and one who is trying to cope with being triaged [denied health care by relief organizations because the person's life-time exposure to radiation guarantees death within 5 years] at the age of twenty-six, as a result of drinking strontium 90 in some milk she got last year in Dallas. Everybody is scared of milk because of the way cows concentrate strontium 90, but it has become a vitally important food. Milk, eggs, dairy products, soybeans, corn, and oats are our staples nowadays. Some chicken, but eggs are now too important to justify the slaughter of potential layers.
"....
"Most of the people in the afternoon group suffer from lack of good nutrition as much as anything else. People in therapy also tend to be the rigid personalities. This is an era of extreme change, and these are people who are afraid of change. Deep panic reactions are common. Most of them have very vivid memories of prewar times, and they are clinging to them. In better-adjusted people, prewar memories are always kind of hazy." pp. 391-2

From "The Dream Bandidos" when one of the journalists is taken hostage by an outlaw band of Destructuralist terrorists:
"'We have a vision,' the girl said, 'of a true Jeffersonian society in America. This could be a nation of farmers, where everybody is self-sufficient and God-fearing, and the family is the center of things.'....
"A man put his hand on her shoulder. She turned and kissed him in what seemed to me a private way. 'We all lost people,' he said. 'That's why we come together. This is a family.'
"Another voice was raised. 'If you're writers, write that another world like the world we had before Warday is going to mean another war. We have to change. We have to turn aside from the hypnosis of politics and the addiction of vast economic systems that eat this beautiful planet and spit out garbage. We need to turn to one another instead. What counts is the person in bed beside you, and your children, and the people next door....'
"My impulse was to try to comfort them, to make all the horror and the suffering of the past few years go away. But I couldn't do that. All I could do was eat their poor meal and look across their fire at them.
"....
"I could see something more than violence and rage in these people. They weren't just inept terrorists or starving road people or fanatics. They had their wounds too, like all of us. And because of that, I could make a case for tolerance and understanding.
"As soon as night fell, the camp went to sleep. As we have all found out, it takes a high level of nutrition and lots of artificial light to keep human beings awake after sunset. They were still like the rest of us were during the famine - dead to the world as soon as the sun went down." pp. 148-151

[Lora Shouse · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read several books now by Whitley Strieber, some of them with various co-authors. Warday is by far the best of them.

The authors tell the story of the aftermath of a very small nuclear war using themselves as the main characters in an exploration of the country five years after the war. They are ostensibly making this report for a newspaper. They include fictional interviews with various people across the country giving their accounts of either their experiences of the war itself or their experiences of life since the war. They also include a number of supposed government documents reporting everything from casualty figures relating to the initial atomic strikes to shortages of vital minerals in the years after the war. In addition to this, they tell their own stories of what happened at the time, and hints of what has been going on since.

The book was published in 1984, and the war it projects was to have happened in 1988. There were only 4 areas hit in the first strike (Washington, New York, San Antonio, and the area of the Midwest where the nuclear missiles are stored). The deaths from the initial strikes were estimated at 7 million, and of course, deaths have been continuing ever since due to radiation, famine, sickness, and other such causes.

A big factor in this war was Electro-Magnetic Pulses (EMP) triggered by detonating massive weapons in near-Earth orbit – far enough away that they didn’t themselves cause any physical destruction from the blast and such things, but close enough to create an Electro-Magnetic Pulse that destroyed almost every electronic device from automobile ignitions to computers. This caused massive disruptions in the economy – knocking out the entire banking industry and most communications, stopping manufacturing and transportation, and so on. (Around 1984 people were just beginning to hear about the idea of an EMP; now there is an entire sub-genre of science fiction exploring the consequences of a serious EMP event.) Imagine how much worse an event like this would be now with massively greater numbers of cell phones and computers and our ever-increasing reliance on them.

A lot is made of the political consequences of the war. The President and Vice President were killed after the EMP messed up the aircraft they were flying in. What is left of the United States is partially divided into several sub-countries. There is a new country in the area near the Mexican border. California, which was relatively undamaged compared to the rest of the country, has closed its borders and implemented a strict immigration policy so that the authors have to sneak in as illegal immigrants. This is despite the fact that what is left of the U.S. government is now housed in the same building as the California State government. When Pennsylvania wants to send a trainload of orphans to a children's’ home in Alabama to give them a better chance in the event of a likely future famine (except for Texas, much of the South is also relatively undamaged apparently), they are turned back in Georgia on the pretext that Alabama doesn’t want them.

A major factor in what recovery has been made since the war is the help provided by the British and the Japanese. Although many people seem to believe that the motivation behind this help is to reduce the U.S. to the status of a colony, or a country divided into zones of influence, once again.

[Charles H Berlemann Jr · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have seen this book at various times on various lists for Post-Apoc and Post-Nuclear fiction. I thought I would give it a whirl and read it after finding it for a good deal on Kindle, plus the Audible read for a decent price of under ten dollars.

The setup is the authors are traveling post limited nuclear attack to the USA some 5 years afterwards and trying to discover how the rest of the nation fared. One of the authors was in New York City when the bombs fell. Another was just outside of Austin when the bombs fell. They start in Dallas and go to Huston and then to California. Some hassles in California and escape with the skin of their teeth to get to Kansas almost get irradiate again by a dust storm. Get to Chicago, Cleveland, back to New York and then home again.

The writing is very much setup like a text book or a non-fiction book. Interspersed through out the narrative of the traveling are interviews about folks and where they were on "Warday" (the day the bombs fell in 1988), what they are doing now, and how conditions are where they are living. There is also supposedly write ups of government documents about conditions during Warday or post Warday. Plus some opinion polls from a unified polling group.

The story seems very interesting. However, I guess what I started to lose it is that the world building is very off. I say that in the sense the book was probably written in 1983. It was first published in 1984 and it talks of how the US was deploying an SDI laser system in 1988. The primary targets per the world building was the use of EMP across six major spots in space by the Soviets. Then they used both missiles and Satellites to deliver nuclear warheads against San Antonio, DC, New York City, and the missile fields and bomber bases only in the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. Yet, there are segments as the authors do the world building they talk about how Japan is a renewed power in the Pacific and occupies most the US West Coast out to at least Los Alamos. The next few chapters talks about how the US Navy was all destroyed by a few nuclear missiles some launched at the headquarters of places like 3rd Fleet and 7th Fleet. Which is confusing the frack out of me because those places are San Diego and Tokyo respectively. Yet, Japan is "untouched" by the war. Similarly, Europe is supposedly untouched by the war, but the US nuked most of Europe Russia back into the ground with its own surviving missiles and space based nuclear weapons.
Wait..Space based nuclear weapons? Like the whole outer space weapons treaty from the 60s is somehow null and voided between 1984 and 1988?

Similarly, the rest of the world is doing supposedly okay, but the Soviets used nuclear weapons at sea and against limited US targets in Europe and Asia. Again how is it that works. Well the authors handwavium UK and Germany with some secret treaty that says if one sides uses nukes during a general war then the European will storm NATO bases and secure all the US troops overseas. Wait....What...NATO says treaty says what....
Let alone in the early 1980s there were some 500 ships in the US Navy, but all of them were destroyed in 24 hours (the total war supposedly lasts 36 hours from start to finish) while at sea by one or two Soviet ships with nuclear missiles. No other radiation patterns and no one else experiencing targeting of weapons on their joint bases and no one else in the US experiences a bomb attack?
Also the UK and Japan have supposedly stripped all the brains out of the US and are talking deep space travel to Barnard's Star. Mach 2+ passenger liners, cars with radioactivity detectors built in, oil doesn't exist as a fuel source but something else that is more eco friendly somehow exists to heat homes in the "undamaged" areas and power industry and provide electricity.
Again the book is set some 5 years after the war so circa 1992-93. There is no way tech advanced that quick even given it was the start of the computer age. I mean lasers were just in their infancy in the last 70s, but somehow in less than a year there is the first SDI laser satellite going into space which started the whole war. Somehow there is radioactivity filters and detectors able to be installed into passenger cars so they could travel the roads and not worry about radioactive dust clouds. Airplanes, cars, and even trains with alternative fuel sources other that oil and able to run with whisper quiet modes.
There is just something completely missing in the world building and I understand they didn't want it totally bleak, but somehow we go from a book that should be talking about the dangers of nuclear war and even a "limited" nuclear war, instead we jump somehow into some serious sci-fi stuff.

I could forgive a few of these but by the time I started to cross the 50% of the book being read the errors in this book with the world building just caused me to say "what the heck!" more than a few times.
It isn't a bad book, it isn't a good book, and it really doesn't seem to do what it may have intended because it just isn't sure of what it wants to be in its writing style? A faux non fiction book about a war and its aftermath? There are others that have done it better. A travel log about a Post-Apoc USA sort of set in the "modern" era? Maybe but at times when it wants to keep you engaged it throws in one of those interviews or random documents that upsets any rhythm going for the story at that moment. Even as a sci-fi book it sort of does it, but I can't tell if it wants to be hard sci-fi or soft sci-fi because it alternates between the two.

I am glad I picked this up for less then ten dollars because I think even at that I was ripped off. I would rather read "Alas, Babylon", "After The Bomb", "Arc Light" or even "On the Beach" again before I would really recommend this book to anyone.

[Kaethe · Rating 1 out of 5]

I remember what it was like to worry about nuclear war. Perhaps if I had read this back in 88 or so, it would have been strongly affecting. Reading it now, when it seems even less likely than the zombie apocalypse, I just can't sustain the disbelief. And as a presumed journalistic account from five years after warday, I find it not as good as WORLD WAR Z.

[Dan Kenkel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally finished this book. This is the second time I've read the book. It was so much better 20+ years ago.

[Dan · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's a bit like The Good War and a bit like Alas, Babylon except written by (and god help me, starring) Whitley Strieber. So, you know, not good.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book sometime in the early 90's and loved it. I believe it may have been my first encounter with this kind of framing device, and it certainly was the first I heard of EMP's. Everything about this book just works.

It's a very simple story. Five years after a 36 minute long limited nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union which destroyed large parts of both countries, two journalists travel around the US. The novel is part travelogue, part interviews with people they encounter, and part various (fictitious, of course) documents they unearth. It's easy to see where Max Brooks got a lot of inspiration from in the (in my view) subpar World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

Another novel which borrows very heavily from this one is Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois, released 15 years after Warday. The setting is essentially the same. Nuclear bombs are dropped over Queens and Brooklyn. Manhattan, which isn't hit directly and thus survived the bomb, is a restricted area under military control. The UK is essential in delivering aid as well as practically governing the fledgling United States (if there even is such a thing anymore). Even smaller details, like the last limited issue of the New York Times. But what Resurrection Day does is that if offers a stronger narrative (basically a gumshoe story) and a mystery. It's also a very good novel.

Strieber and Kuntetka paint a very vivid picture of a country in turmoil and their description of how the US and the Soviet Union stumbles into a nuclear war are very realistic - and remain so to this day. Just take the Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian nuclear radar installations:

"The United States is concerned about Ukraine’s recent strikes against Russian ballistic missile early-warning sites," said a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

"These sites have not been involved in supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine," the U.S. official said. "But they are sensitive locations because Russia could perceive that its strategic deterrent capabilities are being targeted, which could undermine Russia’s ability to maintain nuclear deterrence against the United States."

U.S. concerned about Ukraine strikes on Russian nuclear radar stations
The Washington Post
May 29, 2024

These words echo the Soviet Union's response to the fictitious Spiderweb warhead-killer system in this novel as described by Wilson T. Ackerman, Undersecretary of Defense:

Although I was not a party to the decision to deploy Spiderweb, I am trying to come to grips with the fact that I was assisting in the management of a system of defense that had drifted into a state of extreme brittleness, in the sense that our own technological superiority was making our enemy increasingly desperate, and thus was actually causing the very war it was intended to prevent.

Reverend Michael Dougherty puts it even more bluntly:

But the United States in fact got so far ahead of the Russians technologically that we were about to send up a satellite that would have made their missiles useless against us. And they had no similarly effective weapon. So they were forced to start the war. They were backed up against the wall.

Let us hope that this novel is not a prophecy.

[Romann Weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

1984's Warday is very much a snapshot of its time, a what-if story of what we'd stand to lose and how our society would change if the Cold War suddenly turned hot in the late 1980s and resulted in a limited nuclear war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. It's a soberly told and sobering story of what was then an all-too-possible near future.

Unlike in The Day After and Threads, that decade's far better known nuclear cautionary tales, the war in Warday is limited to an almost unrealistic degree. (Washington, San Antonio, and New York are the only cities hit, but numerous missile fields in more remote areas are also attacked; a number of the Soviet bombs are also far off target or fail to detonate at all.) This constraint is necessary, since one needs to have some roads left in order to tell Warday's on-the-road story, and much of the book's impact comes from how profound the changes to society are given that so much of the country was left relatively untouched by the bombs.

Warday has apparently gone out of print, which is unfortunate. It's a fascinating story that feels to have been actually lived, with credit due to the authors for approaching the book as speculative journalism rather than nuclear horror pulp fiction. The book also features a variety of government documents, polls, tables, and figures that read like the genuine article, as though taken from an alternate reality we were lucky enough to avoid. This may not seem like riveting stuff, but it coldly adds to the book's verisimilitude and contributes to its overall eeriness.

Given its setting and presentation, Warday has an admittedly limited audience among 21st century readers. But the tensions in the world have hardly eased to the point where this story becomes an irrelevant relic. And given that we've become even more dependent on technology than we were in the pre-Internet era when the book was written, one can easily imagine how much more frightful this tale would be if it were adapted for our time.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this stunning noveI in 1984 or 1985, stiII hardback onIy, stiII a new reIease. My father bought it, and after finishing it, dropped it in my Iap and said, READ THIS! I did, and feIt Iike I had been kicked in the gut.

Now, I grew up on the FIorida Coast during the CoId War, and the Cuban MissIe crisis. I grew up doing "bomb driIIs" in schooI...get under your desk, keep your head down, and do NOT Iook at the Iight. We might as weII have just pIayed "hangman" on the bIackboard, but we did not know that. In Iater years, but not much Iater, we knew the futiIity of what we were doing, but we aIso had the idea that either you wouId be vaporized at the time, or everything wouId be ok. We had no cIue what a "Iimited nucIear war" wouId mean. Now, I did. And now I do.

James Kunetka and WhitIey Strieber take us on a tour of post-war America. They interview the peopIe who survived. They fIy over the "dead zones," whoIe cities turned to smooth sheets of bIack gIass. They teII of the good, the bad, and the ugIy of surviving such a war. Of those with over a certain radiation IeveI being "triaged," and no Ionger being abIe to IegaIIy seek medicaI assistance, of those starving in what was once a pIace of pIenty, of New York, deserted save for saIvage workers and wiId dogs...but aIso of the determination of those who are Ieft to carve out a Iiving, and to make things better. Kunetka and Stieber speak is as if they had actuaIIy Iived it, and their voices are impactfuI.

I had intended to go directIy to "Nature's End," another joint noveI by them about our fragiIe ecoIogy, but...I cannot. Not right now. I'II read something VERY Iight for a few days first. I need to recover. And that said, I highIy recommend both of these books. Sometimes, we need this.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

Of course the book is badly out of date by about 35 years which makes it considerably less compelling then once it may have been. The series of disconnected snippetted correspondent style interviews are not a particularly compelling narrative device either. The likelihood of such an extremely limited nuclear conflict back then is not very believable, but nowadays (2019) perhaps more so hmm...? The only thought provoking bit is the discovery half-way through of the parallels found with the slow dissolution of the United States today, but only without the abrupt decline in population - which political correctness ignored, probably wouldn't be a bad thing. Pandemics, economic power moving overseas, scientists abandoning the country, the breakdown of the transportation system, large scale ethnic division and encroachment, and the ineffectiveness of centralized democratic government are just some of the themes to ponder. On the other hand the authors may have gotten too much wrong to make this a worthwhile read such as a return to the value of the nuclear family, the education system, the place of religion, the effectiveness of communistic ideals, the abandonment of the drug trade, etc. So no on this one.

[Pam Shelton-Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was written decades ago and the event takes place in 1988, however, with current loud dialogue on nuclear war between the US and North Korea, this does not seem as dated. Rather than near total destruction, the Warday conflict occurs in several areas of the US and Russia. The story is told by two friends who were writers/journalists before the war and, besides the tales of recollections of "The Day", this unfolds as a documentary on how America and the world has changed as a result. It would make interesting reading in a book club or class because it explores how the population adapts and the changes to government, economy and society. We see harsh triage of people even 5 years after the war who are denied treatment because of the lifetime dose they incurred. There is voluntary and, in cases, mandatory euthanasia. Polygamy gains a foothold as do Wicca herbal healing. I found the discussion of these and many other topics quite fascinating the age of the story notwithstanding.

[Michael Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought it an effective, humane mockumentary about a limited (tens of millions dead immediately, hundreds of millions long-term limited) thermonuclear exchange between the then Soviet Union and the United States. Description of the detonation of the New York Pattern was eerily prescient: in the way it's depicted by a passenger on a Manhattan bus, it prefigures the realities of September 11 2001. Effective slice-of-life 'reportage' throughout interspersed with plausible faux-official military and official documents. Some critics have found it wanting for character development. I would suggest, given the intent of the authors, that's like slagging your local auto mechanic for not providing an update on latest Paris fashion with an oil-change. Overall, a good addition to the Nuclear Apocalypse/post-Apocalypse literature.