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beyond the cold war 231 The 1980s marked the last major wave of fiction dealing with nuclear war. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended. But of course nuclear weapons continued to exist. A number of novels were published over the following decades that still address the nuclear threat but that reflect considerable difficulty in identifying the new enemies of the United States and in setting up speculative narratives of nuclear conflict. Alternate histories articulate a different kind of hypothesis from the novels discussed in this volume, which dramatize wars that might happen in the imminent or far future. Alternate history fiction asks instead not what might happen but what might have happened if a given sequence of events had taken a different route. One such novel is Brad Ferguson’s The World Next Door, which describes the United States in the aftermath of nuclear war. Like David Brin’s The Postman and manyothernuclearnovels,itsituatesitsactioninaveryspecificarea—theAdirondacks in Upstate New York—and describes the desperate efforts citizens are makingtorebuildsomekindofcivic order.Thelapseintoapretechnologicaleconomy, the physical dangers presented by wandering looters, and the emptying of urban centers are all familiar aspects of this fiction, as are the efforts of characters to understand what has happened to the United States, done partly by examining a map where all the major cities have been X’d out. The unusual dimension to Ferguson’s narrativeemergeswhencharactersregisterstrangedreamsofpush-buttonphones, government health warnings on cigarette packets, and other cultural details that would have been contemporary reality to the first readers of the novel. It gradually becomes clear that the United States has endured not one but two nuclear strikes, one when the 1962 Cuban crisis erupted into war and the other in the 1980s when chaPter 14 Beyond the Cold War 232 under the shadow the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe. The characters in the novel are thus picking their way through a landscape destroyed twice over. Another novel that takes the Cuban missile crisis as its reference point is Brendan DuBois’s Resurrection Day, whose action takes place during 1972 in the aftermath of a nuclear war that has reduced the United States to a minor player on the world scene despite the fact that it still possesses nuclear weapons. The narrative is focused primarily through Carl Landry, a reporter for the Boston Globe who was serving in Vietnam when the war broke out. The choice of a journalist as protagonist is a shrewd one because it gives a very strong investigative impulse to the plot. Throughout the novel Landry is trying to answer exactly the questions that would be presenting themselves to the reader: How did the war break out, and how is the United States coping with its newly diminished stature in the world? His search for information leads him to discover that there is an underground network of survivors living in the ruins of New York City and that Britain is colluding with sections of the U.S. Army to introduce a militaristic dictatorship —hence the irony ofthe novel’sseveralallusionsto Nineteen Eighty-Four. One of the main points of the novel is its investigation, retrospectively, of the United States’ handling of the nuclear threat. DuBois even quotes at one point from the 1961 Department of Defense booklet Fallout Protection—What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack.1 The latter is ridiculed by Landry for its bland reassurances against despair. More importantly, Landry unconsciously repeats the exposés of the 1970s when he discovers the secret history of the Cuban crisis, namely the covert roles played by the military both in the United States and the USSR, which was opposed to appeasement. It emerges that the nuclear strikes against Cuba and its invasion were ordered by General Ramsey Curtis against the wishes of President Kennedy. Curtis is an obvious version of Curtis LeMay, the head of Strategic Air Command who did recommend preemptive nuclear strikes and an invasion of Cuba and whose notorious speech about gelding the Russian bear is quoted in the novel. Landry, who clearly functions as an author surrogate in the novel, reflects on the crude polarities of the Cold War, which precluded rational thought: “Everything was black and white. We were good, they were bad. Our nuclear weapons were good. And of course, we ringed the Soviet Union with bombers and troops and spy planes and missiles and submarines because we were going to ‘contain’ them.”2 Landry actually meets with General Curtis and engages in a dialogue with him and...

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