Years ago, when faced with the threat of nuclear war, people created process and documentation as a way of feeling in control. They made bomb shelters out of paper or wrote plans for what to do if suddenly there are thousands of refugees. But in 1978, the government commissioned an actual piece of fiction, which was tucked into an appendix of a Congressional report until it found a crazy afterlife as a key source for the most popular made-for-TV movie ever produced, writes The Atlantic. The name of the report was The Effects of Nuclear War and it was created by the Office of Technology Assessment, which was an independent research bureau that carried out research for members of Congress. For this report, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations had asked the OTA to “examine the effects of nuclear war on the populations and economies of the United States and the Soviet Union.” The report outlines several different scenarios, ranging from single detonations to attacks on military installations or oil refineries, to an all-out nuclear war leading to the deaths of 160 million Americans. The fictional work that came out of it (and later turned into a TV show), Appendix C, titled Charlottesville, is based on the longer-term set of difficulties of the surviving population.
The work was written by written by Nan Randall, a journalist who had reported for The Washington Post and Newsweek and put in a couple of years at the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy as a program director, according to The Atlantic. They called the series “Doomsday” and it was published across four days, on A1, beginning Feb. 25, 1979. It’s a brutal mix of fact and fiction.
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