The 36-Hour War

Indulge me, then, for a moment on an otherwise grim subject. I've always been a fan of what-if history and, when younger, of science fiction. Recently I decided to take my own modest time machine back to September 11, 2001; or, to be more exact, the IRT subway on several overheated July afternoons to one of the cultural glories of my city, the New York Public Library, a building that--in the realm where sci-fi and what-if history meld--suffered its own monstrous "damage," its own 9/11, only months after the A-bombing of Hiroshima.

In November 1945, Life magazine published "The 36-Hour War," an overheated what-if tale in which an unnamed enemy in "equatorial Africa" launched a surprise atomic missile attack on the United States, resulting in 10 million deaths. A dramatic illustration accompanying the piece showed the library's two pockmarked stone lions still standing, guarding a ground-zero scene of almost total destruction, while heavily shielded technicians tested "the rubble of the shattered city for radioactivity."

I passed those same majestic lions, still standing (as was the library) in 2006, entered the microfiche room and began reading the New York Times as well as several other newspapers starting with the September 12, 2001, issues. Immediately I was plunged back into a hellish apocalypse. Vivid Times words and phrases from that first day: "gates of hell," "the unthinkable," "nightmare world of Hieronymus Bosch," "hellish storm of ash, glass, smoke, and leaping victims," "clamorous inferno," "an ashen shell of itself, all but a Pompeii." But one of the most common words over those days in the Times and elsewhere was "vulnerable" (or as a Times piece put it, "nowhere was safe"). The front page of the Chicago Tribune caught this mood in a headline, Feeling of Invincibility Suddenly Shattered, and a lead sentence, "On Tuesday, America the invincible became America the vulnerable." We had faced "the kamikazes of the 21st century"--a Pearl Harborish phrase that would gain traction--and we had lost.

A thought came to mind as I slowly rolled those grainy microfiches; as I passed the photo of a man, in midair, falling headfirst from a WTC tower; as I read this observation from a Pearl Harbor survivor interviewed by the Tribune: "Things will never be the same again in this country"; as I reeled section by section, day by day toward our distinctly changed present; as I read all those words that boiled up like a linguistic storm around the photos of those hideous white clouds; as I considered all the op-eds and columns filled with all those instant opinions that poured into the pages of our papers before there was even time to think; as I noticed, buried in their pages, a raft of words and phrases--"preempt," "a new Department of Pre-emption [at the Pentagon]," "homeland defenses," "homeland security agency"--already lurking in our world, readying themselves to be noticed.

Among them all, the word that surfaced fastest on the heels of that "new Day of Infamy," and to deadliest effect, was "war." Senator John McCain, among many others, labeled the attacks "an act of war" on the spot, just as Republican Senator Richard Shelby insisted that "this is total war," just as the Washington Post's columnist Charles Krauthammer started his first editorial that first day, "This is not crime. This is war." And they quickly found themselves in a milling crowd of potential war-makers, Democrats as well as Republicans, liberals as well as conservatives, even if the enemy remained as yet obscure.

On the night of September 11 the President himself, addressing the nation, already spoke of winning "the war against terrorism." By day two, he used the phrase "acts of war"; by day three, "the first war of the twenty-first century" (while the Times reported "a drumbeat for war" on television); by week's end, "the long war"; and the following week, in an address to a joint session of Congress, while announcing the creation of a Cabinet-level Office of Homeland Security, he wielded "war" twelve times. ("Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there.")

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