At the South Carolina National Security Action Summit, an attendee apparently stated that the Obama administration recently tried to detonate a nuclear weapon in Charleston, South Carolina (h/t Jason). The attempted nuking of Charleston is a delusional fantasy, but it’s terrifying to me that the public statement made by this person is something that actually happened.

The woman included this in a question to Rick Santorum, who didn’t do much of anything to correct her on the issue^*. It turns out that the Charleston thing has been making the round long enough to have its own Snopes page, which declares it to be false. Dave Weigel also wrote about what happened (h/t Steve Benen):

In September 2013, the conspiracy news site InfoWars published an “exclusive” story, citing “a high level source inside the military,” about the transfer of nuclear warheads to the East Coast. The story was shared nearly 25,000 times on Facebook, aided by a video introduction by Alex Jones and by a follow-up that quoted South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham’s worry that a military build-up would lead to nuclear weapons moving through the port of Charleston. “This ultimately reeks of yet another false flag being orchestrated by the United States government in order to send us into war,” Jones wrote in a follow-up.

In October 2013, the European Union Times—a “news” site that combines real stories with rumors — cited a “Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) report circulating in the Kremlin today” to report that a nuclear weapon had been detonated off of Charleston’s harbor, as proven by an Oct. 8 earthquake that happened hundreds of miles from the coast. This, according to the website, was a botched “false flag” attack, which was carried out, strangely, in the middle of the government shutdown.

[Internal links re-routed through donotlink.com.]

So this basically all started with Alex Jones? I’m shocked! Shocked, I say!!!!

Charleston has enough real-life problems, thank you very much.

Anyway, this got me thinking about how speculative fiction really seems to have it in for Charleston. (Spoilers ahead.)

In a Facebook comment, someone pointed out the 1983 television film Special Bulletin:

In this movie, a terrorist group brings a homemade atomic bomb aboard a tugboat in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina in order to blackmail the U.S. Government into disabling its nuclear weapons, and the incident is caught live on television. The movie simulates a series of live news broadcasts on the fictional RBS Network.

I only vaguely recall the movie. I think I remember it freaked quite a few people out, since it was made to look like live news coverage.

The filmmakers were required to include on-screen disclaimers at the beginning and end of every commercial break in order to assure viewers that the events were a dramatization. The word “dramatization” also appeared on the screen during key moments of the original broadcast.

Anyway, you can probably tell where I’m going with this. Charleston gets nuked on live TV. The whole movie is on YouTube, but here’s a snippet:

I had mostly forgotten about Special Bulletin, but there’s also Harry Turtledove’s “Southern Victory” book series, which also features Charleston getting nuked.

For those who don’t know, the “Southern Victory” series, or “Timeline-191” series, is an alternate history in which the Confederacy wins the Civil War (the War of Secession, as they call it in the new timeline.) Over 11 books, it goes from the second war between the U.S. and the C.S. in 1881, World War I, the inter-war years, and World War II. Very long story short, the Confederacy becomes the equivalent of Nazi Germany (quite believably, I dare say.)

Click to embiggen.

In a rather dramatic scene in the last book, U.S. troops have reached the South Carolina coast, and some of them want to keep moving up the coast to take Charleston. The lieutenant tells them they have orders to stay put, but a bunch of troops start bellyaching and are preparing to disobey orders and march on Charleston themselves. Right as the lieutenant is moving to stop them, there’s a bright flash, and a mushroom cloud appears over Charleston. The lieutenant just looks at the men and says “So, do you still want to attack Charleston?”

The war was already lost for the Confederacy at this point the story, but Charleston pretty much clinched it. Around the same time (maybe the next chapter), the Confederate president was killed by a sniper while fleeing through South Carolina or Georgia. It was a rather anticlimactic end for a Hitler-esque character, but then again, Hitler’s end was pretty anticlimactic, too (except for the tantrums.)

Harry Turtledove never got around to writing a follow-up set in 1950 or so, when everyone in that scene would have been dead from cancer. He did a very good job of making it clear that the immediate needs of war took total precedence over anyone’s safety. In all, three nukes (or “superbombs“) were detonated in North America. The U.S. had already dropped one on Newport News, Virginia, because they thought the Confederate president was there (he wasn’t). Before that, the Confederates had nuked part of Philadelphia—the de facto U.S. capital since Washington DC sat on a national border with an enemy nation—with a bomb they smuggled into the city in a truck. Six bombs go off in Europe, destroying (in this order) Petrograd, Paris, Hamburg, London, Norwich, and Brighton. A seventh goes off in Belgium when the bomber carrying it is shot down—I’m not sure if it was a British bomber headed to Germany or a German bomber headed to Britain. It’s fiction, so I guess it doesn’t really matter. The main point is that Charleston is a pawn in the machinations of numerous pieces of fiction, most of which are recognized as fiction.

* I suppose Santorum could honestly say that he just doesn’t know what the administration did or did not do in Charleston in recent months, just like I can honestly say that I do not know with certainty that Rick Santorum doesn’t hide in the bushes across the street from my house to spy on me while I’m getting dressed. I’m not saying he does, because I have no evidence to indicate it. I’m just saying, is all…..

Photo credits: Khanrak (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons; NOAA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; Dave4Prez [Public domain], via Wikipedia.