Doomsday 83

(Also referred to as “The Day After ‘The Day After’”, “World War Oops” and “The Balance of Error”)

Current Year: 1985

“Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.”

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Doomsday 83 universe is a version of Earth that is in the process of recovery from a limited but devastating nuclear exchange between NATO and Warsaw Pact countries. A devastating nuclear exchange that, it turns out, was the result of a mistake. On September 26th, 1983, the Oko nuclear early-warning system which had recently been installed at the Serpukhov-15 military bunker in Moscow undergoes a catastrophic glitch. It incorrectly detects a grouping of five inbound American nuclear ICBM’s supposedly targeting various locations in the Soviet Union. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, the commanding officer of the facility during the incident, chose to ignore the reading in our universe, correctly believing it to be a false-alarm due to some sort of electronic error. In this universe, however, he does not make the same decision.

Reporting the perceived incoming attack directly to General Secretary Yuri Andropov, the Soviet Union immediately launches a retaliatory nuclear strike on the United States and its NATO allies. Detecting the incoming retaliatory strike (which is in actuality a preemptive strike), the nations of NATO respond with a nuclear counter-attack. It is only half-way through each side’s process of attack that the error is detected by the USSR and communicated to NATO via the Moscow-Washington Hotline, which is after both Warsaw and NATO have more than 100 nuclear ICBM’s in the air each.

Though many of the launched ICBM’s are intercepted before impact, massive devastation spreads across the northern hemisphere as a total of 181 thermonuclear payloads are successfully detonated (110 launched from NATO countries, 71 launched by the Soviet Union and members of the Warsaw Pact). The average payload of each ICBM in the global exchange is 140 to 160 kilotons, roughly 10 times the yield of the Little Boy nuclear device detonated over Hiroshima in 1945. Major cities including Washington DC, Omaha, Miami, Moscow, Paris and Berlin suffer direct nuclear attacks. Nuclear attacks in Europe are heralded with significantly less time between the public warning and the impact due to the decreased distance for an ICBM to travel. Due to early-warning systems such as that at NORAD, the United States and its allies have roughly just as much time to prepare for the imminent incoming attack as the Warsaw Pact nations do. All major world leaders including Ronald Reagan, Yuri Andropov, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitteran and Karl Carstens survive the nuclear exchange, as well as the vast majority of every nation’s government. Early-warning systems and public fallout-shelters also do their part in saving the lives of a large number of civilians. This is a relative consideration, however, as hundreds of thousands are killed globally in the initial impacts.

In the aftermath, Philadelphia has become the new capital of the United States after the complete destruction of Washington, D.C. In the Current Year, many portions of the United States with surviving populations but are still under the effects of the nuclear exchange are under martial law in an attempt to retain order, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin and Charleston. The United States is currently receiving the majority of its aid in reconstruction from Britain, a NATO country with comparatively little overall devastation from the exchange compared to other nations, as well as Japan and South Korea, while France and a reunited Germany are attempting to provide aid and restore order to portions of the European Union most drastically affected by the disaster. The Warsaw Pact has completely collapsed along with an utterly devastated Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the disaster and before the government devolved into chaos, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was scheduled to undergo an official military trial to determine his culpability in this situation and the possibility of misconduct. On October 8th of 1983, however, less than two weeks after the initial disaster, Petrov was found to have hung himself from the ceiling of his holding-cell while awaiting trial.

China has politically collapsed as a result of the disaster, with several regions disintegrating into civil war. Residual radioactive fallout is still a massive concern, as radiation-related deaths have become a borderline epidemic in many central Asian countries after the exchange, with the death-toll now approaching 4 million.

Massive radioactive dust-storms are also a hazard that has made traveling across the flatlands of the American Midwest nearly impossible, as the concentration of nuclear attacks there was the most intense, thusly making it the part of the continental United States most drastically affected by radioactive fallout. The devastation of the nuclear exchange has had a drastic effect on global agricultural systems, with places like America’s Breadbasket and the agricultural sector of Ukraine (often called “the Breadbasket of Europe”) among others now producing little to no output of food over the past year as a result of the radioactive contamination. This has placed an inexorable strain on the agricultural capacity of the planet’s Southern Hemisphere and thrown the farming market of the world into chaos. While there were not nearly enough nuclear detonations to create the prolonged Nuclear Winter scenario that scientists have often theorized, the nuclear exchange and its ecological affects have had an effect on the meteorological balance of the planet. The summer of 1984 has seen multiple instances of long-lasting ash-clouds in the upper atmosphere that partially or completely block out the sun, destabilizing agriculture in various parts of the world for various lengths of time, further exacerbating the agricultural crisis and further destabilizing the reeling economic markets of trade.

In the wake of this unprecedented disaster, which after an inevitable thorough investigation to discover its cause is found to be the result of mere human and computer error, nearly all nations on Earth with nuclear stockpiles have renounced nuclear armament and are taking steps to disassemble their supplies.

Despite the utter devastation of the nuclear exchange, the Doomsday 83 parallel has not been named a Hell World. While the fate of this world has been forever altered by this cataclysm, the humanity of this Earth is expected and projected to be able to recover as it progresses into an uncertain but livable future.