James Nicoll Reviews

Peter George’s1965 Commander‑1 is a nuclear war novel.

October 1964. China’s strategic position is lamentable. While China can build nuclear weapons, they lack the US and USSR’s bomber and missile fleets; they will not be able to build up to parity for some time. Who knows how the Americans and perfidious Soviets will use this window of opportunity?

Comrade Li believes China can win an overwhelming victory, provided China’s limited resources are applied judiciously.

Fast-forward to Christmas Day, 1965.

The officers in Command Post are faced with confusing but ominous information. Infrared cameras in space detect launches. The advanced radar facility in Clear, Alaska goes silent, incinerated by a nuclear blast. The president of the United States is likewise incinerated by a nuclear explosion near the president’s vacation home in Scott’s Hill, North Carolina. Then New York goes up in nuclear flame¹. More missile launches are detected.

Although the logic behind the manner in which the attack is being conducted is unclear, there is no doubt that there is an attack. Silencing the president will do the enemy no good, as the US has in place multiple facilities like Command Post, each one able to pick up the baton of nuclear war as the others are destroyed.

Comrade Li’s visionary plan to trick the Russians and Americans into killing each other works almost perfectly. The only flaw in his plan is that both the Russian and American war plans took into account the possibility that China might be allied with the other side. Therefore, rather than neither great power attacking China, both do. Oops.

The Americans and Russians and lesser powers have between them about 90,000 megatons, which at one million deaths per seven megatons is sufficient to kill the population of Earth about four times over. Obviously, many of the weapons are destroyed before they can be used — all but two or three British bombers were annihilated in the six minutes it took to erase the UK — but enough survive to kill eighty percent of humanity in the first two days. Then the fallout and weaponized diseases go to work on the survivors.

Submarine commander James Geraghty is the sort of USN officer to whom one might assign some time-consuming, inessential duty such as conducting social isolation tests under the arctic ice. Thus, when the rest of the USN is destroyed, Geraghty and his crew are overlooked. The submarine represents a significant fraction of the world’s surviving military assets, of whom Geraghty will soon be the senior-most officer.

Fussy, puritanical Geraghty is mildly alarmed to discover that nuclear war has broken out, but he is convinced that the United States must have prevailed. In fact, the United States has very nearly been depopulated, along with every other nation on Earth². Within half a year only about a million humans are left. Fallout and disease will reduce that to about one hundred thousand.

No matter. The last remaining continental facility, Safe Base, shelters about nine thousand survivors. Geraghty knows of a well-stocked island largely spared fallout. Providence makes him the senior-most surviving USN officer. Providence also provides a nuclear-powered freighter that can convey two or three thousand people from Safe Base to the island, there to found a glorious new world order.

Sacrifices will have to be made… but not by James Geraghty, Commander‑1.

~oOo~

The novel begins with anecdotes entirely unrelated to nuclear war, detailing various acts of inhumanity inflicted by people of all races on people of all races. The moral seems to be that anyone is capable under the right circumstances of horrific acts. So adding nuclear weapons to the human arsenal would be bad.

Peter George is beyond obscure today, but I would bet that most people have at least heard of a movie based on George’s Red Alert. Red Alert (written under the penname Peter Bryant) was the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb³.

Perhaps the Welsh author might have parleyed Strangelove (and the Oscar nomination George shared for it) into greater fame. However, depression (and his unrelenting anxiety over nuclear war and its likely consequences) led to his suicide. He shot himself, just as one of his characters in this novel does.

Peter George’s life reminded me of the life of H. Beam Piper. I found it interesting to compare and contrast how Piper and George tackled their final novels. Piper imagined the means by which a capable man might find a role suitable to his potential, given only miraculous technology and incredible luck, whereas George imagined what might happen given monstrous technology and exceeding poor luck. Unsurprisingly, George’s novel is more of a downer than is Piper’s.

So why did I review Commander‑1 and not the more significant Red Alert? Because the micro-dot font size in my copy of Red Alert was completely unreadable and the font size in Commander‑1 was not.

Commander‑1 is a rather talky novel. The author decided to use dialogue as his preferred infodump method (as you know, Bob). It’s convenient that quite a number of people need to have important things explained to them. It’s also convenient that the Americans do figure out China’s cunning plan; while they don’t do this in time to save humanity, it does allow the Americans to explain to each other (and the reader) the bits that the Chinese mastermind didn’t.

Commander‑1 is very nearly a black comedy. It isn’t. Had the novel focused only on confidently ignorant James Geraghty, it might have been such a work. Among the many points of view included are those of well-informed innocents with whom the reader will have sympathy. George’s purpose is to demonstrate that nuclear war is bad, and the aftermath might well be worse, not to inspire bleak laughter.

Not that it matters, because Commander‑1 is long, long out of print. Good luck finding a copy.

1: The light of the New York bomb illuminates adorable youngster David’s precious Christmas present just as he is peeking at it…”For one, bright, unholy millisecond.” On the minus side, that’s nowhere near long enough for David’s brain to process the image of his present but on the other, far more important side, too fast for David to feel himself being turned into plasma.

2: America delenda est.

3: Also, for Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s Fail Safe, or so Kubrick and George’s lawsuit asserted.