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Warday

by Whitley Strieber (Goodreads Author)

3.75 of 5 stars 3.75 · rating details · 877 ratings · 54 reviews

The unthinkable happened five years ago and now two writers have set out to find what's left of America.

New York, Washington D.C., San Antonio, and parts of the Central and Western states are gone, and famine, epidemics, border wars and radiation diseases have devastated the countryside in between.

It was a "limited" nuclear war, just a 36-minute exchange of missiles that a...more

Paperback, 515 pages

Published April 2nd 1985 by Warner Books Inc. (first published January 1st 1984)

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Dec 28, 2011 Nicole Sharp rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everyone

Shelves: favorites

Definitely a must-read for any American citizen or indeed any concerned world citizen. /WarDay/ presents the graphic portrayal of a limited nuclear strike on American soil, as told from the perspectives of two journalists who survived the initial attack and subsequently trek across the post-war United States. Tons of charts, figures, and maps bring a terrifying realism to the novel. This book was written during the Cold War, but everything discussed in it remains relevant and true to this day, a...more

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May 02, 2008 Raegan Butcher rated it 3 of 5 stars

WARDAY is the literary equivalent of a Peter Watkins film; indeed what it most closely resembles is his brilliant 1965 "documentary" THE WAR GAME. What the writers of WARDAY share with Watkins is a wholly originaly concept for dealing with a work of art that depicts the possible effects of a nuclear war: treat it like a documentary about the dread event--as if the nuclear war HAD occurred. The scenarios (spun out and supported by a ton of research)of what occurs after a "limited" nuclear war( ju...more

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Feb 23, 2009 Elizabeth rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 countr...more

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Apr 05, 2013 Antony Castellano added it

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Dec 26, 2012 Mary Overton added it

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 numb...more 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(less)

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Oct 11, 2011 Kriston rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: nobody

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. 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 came...more 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.

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Sep 25, 2010 Schnaucl rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, august, read_2010, post-apocalyptic, library

This was a very interesting book. It was originally published in the mid 1980's during the Cold War.

The premise is that when the US decide to implement what is now known as the Star Wars program (not the name in the book) the Russians were so spooked they launched a preemptive nuclear war. They also detonated EMPs that were far more powerful than any shielding the US had in place.

This is the story of two men who decide to traverse America five years after the bombs fell to record the war's impa...more

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Apr 28, 2009 Allen Garvin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: alternative-history, sci-fi

Interesting story of a post-apocalyptic America, set after the USSR launched a pre-emptive attack just as the US was deploying a missile defense shield, a la Star Wars/SDI. California was spared, but the rest of the US suffered a devastating blow that destroyed much of every major city. It's worth noting this was written just before the Nuclear Winter hypothesis was published, so there was no world-wide climate change from the attack. The US responded with attacks against the USSR, but Europe, a...more

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Mar 16, 2013 Michael Airhart rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: dystopia

Warday offers what, in 1984, counted as an optimistic view of life after a nuclear war in which only 50 million Americans die and half of the United States are, at first glance, spared destruction.

Strieber is better-known for his horror novels and his alleged UFO experience, but he and his co-writer James Kunetka effectively combine autobiographical reflection and fiction. Writing as alternate-reality versions of themselves, the authors explore what post-war survival entails for their families a...more

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Jan 14, 2010 Dalleer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Well, this one was made in the 1980's so naturally the apocalyptic nuclear destruction scenario in it largely reflects the decade's fears and so. It also includes some fairly provocative stuff especially for the American reader, but that I would see to be the point of the book, at least partly.

It is decent enough in terms of story and depiction of the events and characters, although in certain parts the story elements seem too far-fetched at least for current standards. Although, to me it does...more

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Sep 12, 2012 Major Faversham rated it 5 of 5 stars

Considering this was first published in 1984 while the Cold War was simmering and President Reagan was talking about "Star Wars" Defense, it made a great impact on me then. The manner in which Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka (who co-authored the book) approach the subject matter is chilling. They extrapolated what could have happened in a very believable style.

I had just finished being trained as a Nuclear Biological Chemical specialist at Ft. McClellan, Alabama. Having just learned how to p...more

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Jul 20, 2010 Dan Kenkel rated it 2 of 5 stars

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

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Dec 04, 2010 Nicole rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

A real masterpiece: an incredibly realistic novel set in a post-nuclear war America. I'd very highly recommend it to anyone interested in the effects of nuclear warfare. Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka write the book through the eyes of two journalists journeying across what is left of the United States. The book comes with maps, charts, reports, & figures for a sense of authenticity and reads easily. The best part is the book is hardly outdated despite its age; the nuclear threat still e...more

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Aug 30, 2011 Joy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, post-apocalypse

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 fol...more 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.

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Mar 15, 2011 Tracey rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: re-read

Read this way back when it first came out. Since I've been doing a bunch of apocalyptic fiction recently, thought I'd see how it holds up. Parts are a little trip down nostalgia lane, with the talk of 80s technology, and the names of companies that haven't existed in years.

OK, finished now. I got really sad during the part about New York City, with the constant references to salvaging the World Trade Center. It was worth re-reading to remember how we thought the world would end, back in the 80s.

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Mar 24, 2012 Erik Graff rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Kunetka/Strieber fans

Recommended to Erik by: Michael Miley

Shelves: sf

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 se...more

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Aug 30, 2012 Carol rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: great-books-to-curl-up-with

This is a graphic portrayal of a limited nuclear strike on American soil, as told from the perspectives of two journalists,one in New York and one in Texas, who survived the initial attack and subsequently trek across the post-war United States. Tons of charts, figures, and maps bring a terrifying realism to the novel.Two authors take turns writing their about their experience. A great page turner!

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Jun 12, 2012 Bob rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read this when it came out in the mid-80's, and recommended it to my son. I just re-read his copy.

This is a very intriguing book. The premise is a limited nuclear exchange has destroyed Washington and San Antonio, damaged New York and contaminated the upper mid-west. It's a sad book, but it gives lots of insight into the possibilities and ramifications of such an attack.

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Jun 04, 2010 carl theaker rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi-scary

The USA as seen by a pair of roaming journalists after a nuclear war that
leaves at least some parts standing. Dated now that the USSR has
gone its way, but still a good whatif tale.

A few others of the same genre but other authors,
'The Road', 'The Stand', 'Handmaiden's Tale', 'Malevil' and
a good flic 'Panic in the Year Zero'.

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Mar 18, 2010 Jak rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: post-apocalypse

An interesting take on the post-nuclear theme in that the devastation by the nukes is only partial. Due to systemic failure in the USSR weapons program only New York, Washington and San Antonio, Texas get obliterated while the rest of the country avoid direct strikes but suffer problems due to fall out etc and EMPs.

The book takes place some five years after Warday as a pair if friends, who are respectively a journalist and author, decide they must write a book about Warday and how America has c...more

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Aug 09, 2011 Stacy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Stacy by: Uncle Lou

Shelves: fiction-post-apocalyptic

This is an excellent book set in America, post nuclear exchange with Russia. Two journalists travel the country, interviewing people about their lives after the war. Complete with sample government documents they manage to bribe from people and statistics about life in America. VERY INTERESTING READ! Highly recommend!

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Oct 10, 2009 Kat rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone!

Whitley Strieber's and James Kunetka's writing skills are top notch! I cried as I read this out loud to my husband.
Evoking emotions of sadness and realization of how easily everyone on the planet could be living a very different life in a flash.
I am unable to express the seriousness of the need to read this one!

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Sep 21, 2012 Joe rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: re-read-soon

I have read this book a few times over, yes it is technical in the aspect of knowing what RADS are and such but the vision that Whitley gives in this book is outstanding

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Sep 18, 2012 Brenda Spalding rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

This is one my all-time favorites. Unfortunately I traded it for some other great books, and it's no longer in print. I would love to read it again!

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Dec 26, 2012 Occuntist rated it 5 of 5 stars

Disturbing. I'm going to read it to my kids if they won't run from home before they turn 7.

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Dec 18, 2010 John Reas rated it 2 of 5 stars

Not a bad work of fiction chronicaling the travels of two reporters in a post-Apocalptic America.

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Mar 12, 2013 Julie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Oldie but good! Post nuclear USA - makes for really thought provoking reading.

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Sep 16, 2012 Lynne rated it 5 of 5 stars

I've read a lot of Strieber's books. I think this one is my favorite.

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Mar 08, 2012 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars

God - read this years ago... No, decades.
I think I liked it... :)

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Nov 20, 2011 Aaron rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: apocalyptic

A good read. Thought-provoking.

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About Whitley Strieber

American writer best known for his horror novels The Wolfen and The Hunger 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 t...more

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