Strangelove on the Beach

COMMANDER-l by Peter George. 253 pages. Delacorte. $4.95.

After giving Hollywood a whole series of Armageddon operas--On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe--fiction's doom boom has worn pretty thin. But not too thin for Welshman Peter George, 41, who co-authored the Strangelove script and wrote the novel, Red Alert, on which it was based. In Commander-1, he uses the familiar formula--headline-fresh immediacy wrapped around a minute kernel of plausibility. Red China, newly armed with a few primitive but potent nuclear bombs, decides to eliminate both Russia and the U.S. by convincing each that the other has launched an all-out war. The Chinese smuggle bombs into New York, Moscow and other points, where they are detonated by radio signals from Peking. But when the smoke clears, China is in ruins along with the rest of the world, and only 1,000,000 people survive around the globe, including 100,000 in the U.S.

Chief villain is the standard maniac in uniform--in this case a sensible-sounding but psychopathic U.S. Navy officer named James William Geraghty, commander of a nuclear submarine that is submerged under 50 ft. of polar ice when the big blowout comes on Christmas, 1965. When Geraghty finally surfaces, he finds himself on top: every higher-ranking officer is dead. After using machine guns to quell a rebellion by U.S. survivors who get it into their heads to elect a civilian government, he sets himself up as World Leader, or Commander-1. In his brave new science-fiction world, the males are all drugged into brainless docility, while the sturdiest and, presumably, best-looking women are kept around as Selected Future Leader Breeders. Geraghty's ultimate goal: to rebuild the U.S. population, then track down and kill all non-Caucasian survivors elsewhere. "We've had this racial problem once before in the world," says Geraghty, "but this time we can make sure we don't have it again."

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