I'm not a child and I certainly don't want to play down Zachary's experience, but I fail to see how the Charlottesville story would be that traumatizing. It's certainly in the optimistic end by the standards of nuclear war descriptions, even for something written before people in the West knew about nuclear winter. It's so optimistic it literally mentions TV reruns as one of the problems people would be facing post-attack!
I'd not read Charlottesville before and it's a fascinating piece, if anything more troubling for the lack of direct nuclear horror; no reason an ordinary (if drastic) economic collapse couldn't cause a lot of the problems imagined there. Do we know who Nan Randall was? As far as I can tell this is her only writing credit.
Timely subject material given that I have a chance in the near future to visit This cold war relic:
https://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/sites/falloutpostjg3.shtml
I'm not a child and I certainly don't want to play down Zachary's experience, but I fail to see how the Charlottesville story would be that traumatizing. It's certainly in the optimistic end by the standards of nuclear war descriptions, even for something written before people in the West knew about nuclear winter. It's so optimistic it literally mentions TV reruns as one of the problems people would be facing post-attack!
I'd not read Charlottesville before and it's a fascinating piece, if anything more troubling for the lack of direct nuclear horror; no reason an ordinary (if drastic) economic collapse couldn't cause a lot of the problems imagined there. Do we know who Nan Randall was? As far as I can tell this is her only writing credit.