In this section, Jacobsen provides the historical backdrop for the hypothetical nuclear attack she introduces in the narrative. In late 1960, several high-ranking military officials gathered at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska to discuss plans for an all-out nuclear war, which would kill at least 20% of the earth’s population. One of the participants, John Rubel, revealed the details in 2008, soon before he died. Large maps of the Soviet Union and China were unfurled, with hundreds of marks around Moscow, each indicating a nuclear strike. Moscow alone would endure “more than four thousand times more than the bomb over Hiroshima and perhaps twenty to thirty times more than all the non-nuclear bombs dropped by the Allies in both theaters during more than four years of World War II” (5). No one in the room says anything to question the wisdom of this plan, or how one might stop it before it spun out of control.

The atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima, Japan in August 1945 killed at least 80,000 people at once, with the total casualties being almost impossible to calculate. When the bomb struck, at an altitude designed to kill as many people as possible, a 13-year-old girl named Setsuko Thurlow was buried under a pile of rubble and miraculously rescued when dozens of other girls in the same building burned to death.