A few weeks ago, I wrote a short piece about a 1978 Defense Department study on the effects of a Soviet nuclear attack upon the United States. I was hoping to fit it somewhere in my dissertation but, unfortunately, wasn't able to find a place where it would fit. The study described an apocalyptic scenario, so it easily fits this thread's theme. I'll post it here:

In late 1978, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations asked the Department of Defense to produce a study “on the effects of nuclear war.” Ted Kennedy, the committee’s chairman, stressed that the study’s authors should put the typically arcane discussions on nuclear weaponry and strategy “into more comprehensible terms.” Like Pat Frank, the popular author of several early-Cold War thrillers, the senators recognized that "to someone who had never felt a bomb, bomb is only a word." They wanted to know the felt consequences of a nuclear attack on the United States: the number of casualties, the degree of infrastructure damage, the effects on American society and government.

Several months later, in May 1979, the Defense Department sent its report to Congress. Its conclusions were horrifying. In an all-out Soviet nuclear attack on 250 American cities, up to 165 million people would perish and an “incomprehensible” number would be wounded. The majority of victims would die due to “blast-induced” injuries: “collapsing buildings, flying debris, being blown into objects, etc.” Any attempts to rescue or treat the injured would face “near insurmountable odds” due to the complete destruction of urban infrastructure. Fires would engulf the bombed cities while busted water mains would flood them. Highway overpasses would collapse, barring emergency services from entering or exiting the cities. Even if rescuers could reach the injured, they would probably lack the heavy machinery needed to sift through the rubble and free the individuals buried underneath. Only a “fortunate few” would be rescued, but even then their situation would remain dire. Rescuers would be forced to take the wounded to makeshift hospitals (the main hospitals having been destroyed in the bomb blasts), which would almost certainly be understaffed and undersupplied.

In the hours and days immediately following the attack, an invisible deluge of radioactive particles would ride the wind and wash over large swathes of the United States. Irradiated motes of dust and ash would fall from the sky and cling to foliage and crops, wild animals and unsheltered livestock. The fallout would blow from the cities to the suburbs, and from the suburbs to the “idyllic rural towns and villages that seemed light-years away from the problems of international power and politics.”

Many Americans would retreat to fallout shelters, where they would spend up to a month in hibernation while the radiation outside slowly decayed. Emerging from those shelters bleary-eyed and afraid, they would look out upon a decimated country with faint hope for its reconstruction. The federal government would no longer have the capability to govern so vast a territory. The economy would collapse. Bandits might come to patrol the roads, preying on the weak and perpetrating literal highway robbery (or worse). Scarce resources and ineffective political institutions might, in time, spark a civil war that would cause the United States to fracture “into several regional entities.” This was nuclear war’s dreadful potential.

Apocalyptic preaching and imagery was a big part of the First Crusade. There were lots of reasons that people went on crusade, but it seems that for some of them, a big reason was that they thought the end of the world was actually imminent. And once they actually conquered Jerusalem, they were sure that this was it, it was actually happening!

That belief faded away pretty quickly but it must have been pretty mind-breaking for some people in 1099.

This is the subject of Jay Rubinstein's book Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (Basic Books, 2011).