Dr. Jeffrey Simmons discusses his disaster thriller Oppenheimer's Demon.

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Transcript Ryan Wrecker: Joining us now is the author of a new book called Oppenheimer's Demon. You can find it online, and it's a really fascinating premise. Jeffrey Simmons, thank you so much for joining us here this morning. Dr. Jeffrey Simmons: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Ryan Wrecker: I think a lot of people, um, especially this week—it's Labor Day—and we're going to have to revisit the trauma of September 11th, and it's kind of an unfortunate time. And it's such a weird time in history, too, because there's—there's a demographic that doesn't remember anything that happened during that national tragedy. And there's another half that remembers quite well, and they're going to have to relive all these things. It's kind of a fascinating look, your book, Oppenheimer's Demon. It looks at the idea if there was a huge-scale national disaster—in this case, a nuke goes off in a major city. Kind of talk about the premise of this book, and the research, and why you decided to write about it. Dr. Jeffrey Simmons: Well, I've written seven thrillers, and one of them—if I may say—was a huge hit. I don't mean to be egotistical, but The Z Papers a long time ago sold 350,000 copies, so it was optioned for movies. And so my other books also are thrillers, but I finally went back to that recipe or—however you'd say that—how to write it against time. And so this work—and I've been teaching disaster preparedness for 20 years. I could list off my credentials, but locally, nationally, and a little bit overseas. And so that's my expertise. I work with FEMA, I'm interested in the subject. So, preparedness, and a thriller, and what about a nuclear terrorist attack? Are we prepared for that? Could that happen? And I talked to a few emergency managers, and it turns out, they've kind of turned a blind eye to it, not entirely. If—I've looked at New York, and Chicago, and L.A., and Miami, to name a few, that you can't get into the city stuff. So I'm only looking at the superficial stuff. And they all have the FEMA stuff, which, by the way, go to Ready.gov if you have—are pursuing any information on any disaster. That's a good place to start, Ready.gov. That's the FEMA site. Anyway, they talk about if there is a nuclear blast, and they're talking about that or a nuclear accident, or a nuclear missile—stay put for 48 hours. Before that, get inside, behind a concrete barrier, get in the basement if you have one, a bomb shelter if you know of one, if you can get there quickly. You don't want to suck in, breathe that radioactive dust that's going to come. Before that, you've already been hit by a blinding light. Yeah, don't look at it. You may be hit with something like an earthquake, you may be knocked to the ground, buildings may come down. But suppose you're just beyond that limit, which is usually seven miles—and I can give a website where you can see how far the bomb goes picking the city, just—you just list what city and it tells you, interesting enough. But anyway, so what's going to happen? There's going to be mass havoc, mass chaos, mass gridlock, people in panic, people who are not prepared. It's going to be an awful mess, and that's why some of the cities even say, it's not feasible to address this. I think an effort should be made. If you're dealing with panic, one of the things that helps is being prepared. Yeah, you know that you're prepared. Number two, you've rehearsed this. It's like a basketball player or any number of sports things, you do it a thousand times, you kind of do it automatically. You involve the kids in the rehearsal. So you're prepared, you have the rehearsal, and you have the right supplies, and you just sit tight and wait for help. If you look at some of the things with evacuation like Hurricane Rita in the early 2000s is a good example. There was 104 evacuation-related deaths and something like seven or less related to the hurricane itself. So people got stuck in gridlock, they got stuck—they were ...

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