The sociologist Lee Clarke has described these sorts of reports as “fantasy documents.” Faced with the unthinkable—a tragedy equivalent to World War II many times over, and executed in just a few hours, carrying the possibility of ending technological civilization—they created process and documentation as a way of feeling in control. Did anyone have a plan for nuclear war? Every bureaucracy did. And they used them to reassure themselves and the public that they had a plan. They’d built bomb shelters made of paper. But these were, like the neatly stocked basements with flashlights and canned food, exercises in imagination, or more simply, fiction.

And so it is appropriate that in 1978, the government commissioned an actual piece of fiction, which was tucked into an appendix of a congressional report until it found a wild afterlife as a key source for the most popular made-for-TV movie ever produced.

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The report was titled The Effects of Nuclear War. It was a product of the Office of Technology Assessment. The OTA, before it was disbanded by Newt Gingrich’s Republican leadership in 1995, was an independent research bureau that carried out research for members of Congress. In this case, 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,” in such a way that the “abstract measures of strategic power” could be translated into “more comprehensible terms.” The Senators were preparing for a debate on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, which ultimately never happened after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the report was written.

The project fell under the direction of Peter Sharfman, the researcher who headed National Security Studies at the OTA. The executive summary does not mince words. “A militarily plausible nuclear attack, even ‘limited,’ could be expected to kill people and to inflict economic damage on a scale unprecedented in American experience; a large-scale nuclear exchange would be a calamity unprecedented in human history,” the report says. “The mind recoils from the effort to foresee the details of such a calamity, and from the careful explanation of the unavoidable uncertainties as to whether people would die from blast damage, from fallout radiation, or from starvation during the following winter.”

The report goes on to outline several different scenarios—single detonations, attacks on oil refineries, attacks on military installations, and an all-out nuclear war leading to the deaths of up to 160 million Americans.

In the last scenario, the authors propose that there would be some structure to the days and months after the war. There’d be the first few days when people were seeking shelter and trying to deal with what had happened, however, the report predicts, “boredom will gradually replace panic, but will be no easier to cope with.” Then there would be the “shelter period” followed by the “recuperation period.”