Warday

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 abruptly ended when the superpowers' communication systems broke down. But Warday destroyed much of civilization.

Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, old friends and writers, take a dangerous odyssey across the former United States, sometimes hopeful that a new, peaceful world can be built over the old, sometimes despairing over the immense losses and embittered people they meet.

In an eerie blend of fact and imagination, Strieber (author of "The Wolfen" and "The Hunger") and Kunetka (author of "City of Fire: Los Alamos and The Atomic Age", "1943-1945" and "Oppenheimer: The Years of Risk") cut through the doublespeak of military bureaucracy and the rhetoric of the 1980's peace movement to portray America after Warday.