I thought the book was both harrowing as hell, grim to the point of being close to a horror novel in some parts with its descriptions of what people went through, and also extremely moving. The scene where Streiber manages to visit the wreck of his Manhattan apartment was enough to bring tears.

I'm curious, What were your quibbles with Manhattan and San Antonio?

Edit, and yes, I've read that it was highly praised for realism. The authors really put their effort into making it as close to what things might really be like as possible. No hyperbole or dramatics, just the stark inevitable horror of even limited nuclear war and its effects

Mild spoilers here, I suppose!

It didn’t make sense that San Antonio would be targeted in the limited Soviet strike. It would be pretty far down the list, definitely not in the top 3. I believe Streiber has said as much, and that it was included because of the personal connection, and the reason given in the book (some military headquarters there?) was a weak excuse.

I can’t quite explain it, but it doesn’t feel right to me that Manhattan would be abandoned and salvaged like that. Seems like it would either be too dangerous for people to be there, or it would still be an actual city even if diminished. It seems like another thing done for the narrative and personal connection, to allow him to “return home” while also giving a reason he didn’t still live there.

But again, these are both minor points and really don’t detract from the work at all. San Antonio is little more than a bit of background flavor, and the story makes Manhattan well worth it.

Hmm, good points, but for the first one at least, the way I saw it was that the intended Soviet nuclear strike was supposed to be total, meaning hundreds of warheads for hundreds of targets, maybe even thousands for thousands.

That only a few actually landed was because of problems with Soviet strike capacity and of those few that got through, which ones actually did was mostly a question of random bad luck, so I just assumed that by said bad luck, one of them happened to be for San Antonio, which in a full, thousand-warhead strike, would almost certainly be one of the many targets chosen.

To elaborate a bit on that last point btw, I once saw a predictive map of all likely Soviet nuclear strike targets for a full-blown nuclear war in a military strategy book from the 80s (at the height of both countries' arsenals) that I used to have. It had hundreds of US cities and military installations with little dots over them, often just because they had even modest military or industrial significance. Apparently, if you're going to launch everything and have a lot to launch, might as well be generous with your delivery....

That's how I saw it at least, and at least it seemed like a fairly plausible justification for including San Antonio even though really, he just wanted to.

As for Manhattan, I also had a hard time believing it would be abandoned so totally, but the claim was that the bomb detonated especially dirty if I remember right, and bombs like that really can leave a place too contaminated to live in for many decades. There are atolls in the pacific where this happened from "mismanaged" tests in the 50s.

Either way, glad you (obviously) loved the book as much as it deserves!

I checked and it seems like the reason for San Antonio was a mix of your view and mine (assuming we can believe the narrator here):

“At that time I got a look at the condition of San Antonio. I remember being astonished that this little city had been so terribly devastated on Warday. People had hardly even heard of it in Britain. One would have expected Los Angeles or even Houston before San Antonio. Of course, it has since come out that a good part of the planned Soviet attack didn't go off, so in a sense San Antonio was simply unlucky. The Soviets had given it first-strike priority because of the extensive U.S. Air Force repair and refitting facilities there, and the huge complex of military hospitals, the atomic supplies dump at Medina Base, and the presence of a mechanized army that could have been used to preserve order across the whole of the Southwest as well as seal the Mexican border.”

So the first strike was those three cities, and then the followup total strike didn’t happen, presumably stopped by the US counterstrike.

For Manhattan, it says that the biggest hazard is from chemical pollution from abandoned storage facilities, particularly nearby in New Jersey. Which seems kind of plausible, although I imagine people would be a lot more tolerant of such health hazards in this world. I guess everyone evacuated, and then the fact that you can’t just walk back to Manhattan might keep people from returning.