Athens, Georgia (1983: Doomsday)

Athens, Georgia was a town 70 miles east of the former city of Atlanta. Athens was home to the University of Georgia and the U.S. Navy Supply School.

Athens became a temporary haven for refugees of the nuclear blasts in Atlanta, as well as residents of other north Georgia towns looking for stable shelter and food. Area civic leaders set up a provisional state government in the city in October 1983, similarly to other towns and cities in the southeastern U.S., specifically Asheville and Hattiesburg.

Unlike those towns, however, Athens would not survive.

Tensions over food and medicine, along with growing racial tensions, exploded in an "orgy of violence and death" which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 90 percent of the population and scattering of the survivors in March 1984

All information about the region comes from written records discovered in Athens by World Census and Reclamation Bureau scouts assigned to north Georgia in 2009. These records include personal journals and letters, political pamphlets and a copy of the provisional state constitution sealed in a vault, as well as a March 1984 copy of the Athens Banner-Herald newspaper.

More to come....