Post-Apocalyptic Fiction: Zombies and Nuclear War
Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic scenarios are interesting to me (and judging by the number produced, sales volumes, etc., to many other people as well.)
There are a few big themes in this which don’t interest me at all, or where I’ll overlook those themes being present only if the rest of the work is incredibly good.
I’m against “magic” generally, or anything which just flagrantly violates physical laws (particularly when there’s no effort to even pretend to explain this violation).
I’m very against zombies specifically — they make no sense in two main ways. One, they’re basically impossible — the energy to power them comes from what exactly? The physical process which would create and animate them violates all reasonable laws, etc. Maybe you could have a “mind control virus” where normal people behave differently, and where some bodily processes change to digest their own flesh and everything else, but those aren’t the zombies of popular media. The “bullet sponge” invulnerability makes no sense. Nothing made of meat is going to resist physical damage in the way zombies do in movies. The irony of “only killed by a headshot” is it would be more plausible to make an animated corpse which needed everything except the head/brain to function, rather than something which didn’t depend on circulatory system, lungs, etc. You could easily render something immune to “psychological stop”, fear, etc., but high-velocity rifle rounds or high-weight shotgun rounds are going to cause physical trauma which destroys the body enough to cease movement and function.
Two, and probably more importantly, they’re portrayed as a civilization-ending threat, but they just wouldn’t be that big a problem as described. A contagious disease and people acting oddly, spreading that disease, quarantine and quarantine evasion, welding doors shut, etc. all are plausible (and have been seen!), but once the “unprovoked lethal force authorized” flag goes up, it should be fairly reasonable for even greatly outnumbered normal humans to dispatch large numbers of aggressive but unthinking zombies, even more so the shambling slow zombies of many movies. The only way something like this could realistically destroy civilization is massive undetected or unmitigated spread early on, contagion other than direct physical contact, or other things not common to the “zombie” theme. Bioterror or natural pandemic as a way to destroy civilization is a thing, but that’s not “zombie” thing, that’s something else.
A specific scenario (in the real world, plus fiction) that I’ve always wondered a lot about is what do military strategic weapons crews do after their mission is over.
Some of these realistically wouldn’t have much survival chance in many possible conflicts — the people in the missile fields are going to be a high-priority counterforce target, and even if they weren’t the only target, I don’t think any large-scale countervalue strike against cities would ALSO leave ICBM fields intact, assuming an adversary with functionally infinite weapons of his own. Once ICBMs are launched from a field, they won’t get resupplied in any war-relevant timescale, even if the facilities aren’t themselves destroyed. These facilities are continuously manned even in peacetime, so continuing normal operations after launching a few missiles and before a complete inbound countervalue strike would make sense, even if most topside facilities are destroyed, but “continue in the command capsule underground, communicating over secure networks, as the world ends, and then ends for them a few hours, days, or weeks later” isn’t terribly interesting.
Nuclear bombers probably go on their bombing mission and return to alternative airports (the main airbases they launch from would be obvious initial countervalue targets); they have alternate basing plans and presumably weapons rearm plans, and might get multiple missions, combined with spending time in-air and being refueled. This could last through an initial massive engagement but wouldn’t be particularly sustainable; most bombers would be gone within days, at most weeks, and not months.
The survivable nuclear forces would be naval — SSBNs especially, but possibly nuclear armed surface combatants (at least before hypersonic missiles and satellite data made carrier battlegroups an obvious initial target). Leaving aside the surface fleets, SSBNs should be largely immune to the effects of even a large nuclear exchange, at least for few hundred days, and might have a mission of launching their entire payload early, or launching some and repositioning, or remaining entirely as a reserve.
The problem of command and control of submarine forces is a big one — there are ELF radio systems designed for communicating below the sea, plus subsurface sonar sensing networks (which presumably also include a transmit capability), and satellite communications infrastructure, but I’d assume many of these would be high priority targets and destroyed in initial engagement. Still, the submarines would exist, with 10-50 years of nuclear energy, a sealed underwater environment, and would be primarily limited by food resupply and eventual mechanical or psychological failure.
There isn’t much open source material on the post-launch survival strategies of SSBNs. Some say they’re supposed to retask to be attack submarines (most designs carry some torpedoes), or at least a recon asset, but that seems fairly irrelevant to most conflicts. Others that they would try to make for surviving naval bases (perhaps of allies), and this would depend on scale of conflict.
Famously, UK’s limited fleet of four nuclear submarines each contain letters from the Prime Minister to the commander for what to do in the event of a strike which destroys the government — the Letters of Last Resort.
The one novel which addressed this is On the Beach by Nevil Shute. There’s a nuclear submarine which relocates to Australia after the war and then life goes on; it was interesting, but written in the 1950s, broadly doesn’t get the nuclear science right, and thus isn’t quite as interesting as it could be. I haven’t found anything else addressing the same topic.
I’d be very interested in more modern fictional takes, or real-world documentation, of what happens in such a situation.