NUCLEAR FICTION NEWSLETTER, ISSUE 4
- lschover
- Apr 20
- 3 min read
Why I Would Want to Be at Ground Zero in WWIII
Where would you want to be if a nuclear World War III begins? If you look online, you will find suggestions like Fiji or Tuvalu, or if you want to take a larger risk, New Zealand—places that would escape a hydrogen bomb strike and be far enough from initial deadly radiation to allow survival. I have considered this question many times, starting at age ten, when I watched the Cuban missile crisis unfold on TV. I vividly recall asking my father, who had worked in the Manhattan Project, why we were not building a bomb shelter in our back yard. I was so disappointed when he replied, “Honey, it wouldn’t help.” I returned to these speculations over the past two years as I wrote a novel, based loosely on my parents’ stories about life in World War II Oak Ridge (Fission: A Novel of Atomic Heartbreak, SheWrites Press, January 2026). At age seventy-two, I believe the only sane answer is: at Ground Zero.
Let me evaporate in a super-heated flash, too intense to even allow the shadows of death recorded on the cement of the far smaller, fission bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not only would it spare me the agony of fatal burns or a slower, hideously painful demise from radiation poisoning, but I would miss the death throes of the human race as even the most healthy survivors who manage to live underground for months succumb eventually to nuclear winter, starvation, and a toxic planet wwwithout an ozone layer. I have never enjoyed post-apocalyptic fiction, and I definitely do not want to live through it. Would I want my son and others that I love to be at ground zero with me? Selfishly, yes, but I would never presume to make that choice for someone else.
Is this an overly pessimistic appraisal of the aftermath of World War III? For one thing, wouldn’t a limited, strategic nuclear war be more likely? Maybe just the middle East and a few capital cities would be struck? Try reading Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario (Dutton, 2024) or watch this interview on YouTube:
Every war game scenario, starting with a missile launched by some rogue nation, leads inexorably to a global war. Her estimate is that within 72 minutes, five billion people would die.
Another book to make you cower is Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons by Sarah Scoles (Bold Type Books, 2024). She interviews many researchers involved in modernizing the United States’ nuclear weapons. Reading it, I could only conclude that the premise of deterrence through mutually assured destruction is an incredibly fragile rationale for the hugely expensive juggernaut of weapons development. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, an organization of experts that annually determines how close to midnight to set the Doomsday Clock, put it this year at 89 seconds away from armageddon, the closest it has ever been.
My father was one of sixty-seven scientists at Oak Ridge (and perhaps the only one without a college degree) who signed a version of the Szilard Petition asking Truman not to use the atomic bomb on Japan without at least demonstrating its power first. It was probably never seen by Truman and would have had little chance of affecting the decision (https://biology.indiana.edu/documents/historical-materials/gest_pdfs/hgSzilard.pdf). Initially, the motivation to create the bomb was to beat the Nazis. By the time it was ready, the Nazis were defeated and Japan was on its knees, but the momentum to use a weapon in wartime, once it is available, is very difficult to halt.
If we cannot even stop our government from disappearing their “enemies” illegally into Salvadoran concentration camps, it is mind-boggling to think what it would take to stop a determined President from hiking the nuclear football into the stratosphere and ending the human race. May that day never arrive. And if it does, may I be at Ground Zero.
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