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OPPENHEIMER'S DEMON
Nuclear Terror... and the Race to Save a City
By Geoffrey Simmons, MD
Hiroshima, Nagasaki... Chicago?
In his new book, OPPENHEIMER'S DEMON: Nuclear Terror... and the Race to Save a City by Geoffrey Simmons, MD, Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) Trainer of Trainers and former member of the Board of the American Academy of Disaster Medicine, also the author of Common Sense and Disaster Preparedness, Dr. Simmons begs the question: If a terrorist nuked a U.S. city, are we really prepared? Our nation's major metropolitan areas have detailed community response plans for hurricanes, forest fires, and other natural disasters. But there is a worrisome gap: pre-disaster community planning for a nuclear event such as a terrorist plot.
Oppenheimer's Demon is a thriller with a purpose: to show how an American city would likely respond to a catastrophic threat, and where that response would tend to break down. Every scenario is built on the author's disaster-medicine expertise:
·
Grounded in real disaster science, not
Hollywood: As a disaster-preparedness expert, Dr. Simmons builds the novel's
emergency response on actual protocols - how agencies hand off command as the
level of the threat escalates, and what a coordinated response really looks
like under pressure.
·
The disaster inside the disaster is panic: In
a mass emergency, uncontrolled panic frequently kills more people than the
threat itself.
·
Nuclear terrorism realistically imagined:
Stolen tactical warheads, Geiger-counter radiation checks, decontamination,
sheltering away from windows, and fallout dispersion are all depicted with
technical care.
·
Triage when the system is overwhelmed: The
aftermath shows a health system at its breaking point - 911 jammed, ambulances
trapped in gridlock, hospitals swamped.
·
The everyday lessons are real and usable: The
novel is followed by a practical disaster-preparedness essay by the author,
covering matters like To-Go-Bags, family communication plans, out-of-area
contacts, medication lists, and why untrained rescuers so often become victims
themselves.
· A city we recognize: Set in a near-future Chicago strained by budget cuts and crime, the book poses the question every emergency manager quietly carries - are we actually prepared?
Everyone knows about the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. But Robert Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project had on hand a third nuclear core. After claiming the lives of two scientists in separate accidents, it was dubbed the "Demon Core" and melted down. Some demons, however, are not so easily destroyed. In Oppenheimer's Demon, when two stolen tactical nuclear missiles are smuggled across the Great Lakes toward Chicago, District Attorney Glenn Winders finds himself the reluctant incident commander in a race against the clock to stop a shadowy terrorist and prevent World War III. His city teeters on the edge of panic, his teenage daughter is swept into the chaos, and the clues that could stop the attack are locked inside the damaged brain of a single dying man.
In Oppenheimer's Demon, Simmons draws on his disaster-medicine background to dramatize a nuclear terrorism event from the inside - the incident-command decisions, the evacuation bottlenecks, the triage, and the human panic that threatens to kill more people than the terrorist threat itself. Grounded in real emergency-response science, from incident command and mass-evacuation dynamics to radiation triage and the psychology of crowd panic, Oppenheimer's Demon is at once a relentless page-turner and a sobering look at how a modern American city would actually respond to the unthinkable.
"No author should be allowed to be as multitalented as
Geoffrey Simmons. Oppenheimer’s Demon is a riveting disaster
thriller in which both the origin and end of man hang in the balance.
Bravo!"
--Stephen Meyer, Author of the New York Times Bestseller Darwin’s Doubt
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Geoffrey Simmons, MD is a nationally recognized disaster-preparedness expert,
Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) Trainer of Trainers and former member
of the Board of Governors of the American Academy of Disaster Medicine and
previous member of FEMA Advisory Council Ten (RAC X). He is also the author of Common Sense and Disaster Preparedness, praised by Cyril H. Wecht, MD, former
president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and a charter diplomate
of the American Board of Disaster Medicine. Dr. Simmons's novels - including Pandemic
and The Z Papers, were widely praised, with The Chicago Daily
News describing the latter as containing "all the urgency and medical
detail of an early Michael Crichton novel."
