Billy Justin, a 37-year-old commercial artist and Korean War veteran, is working as a dairy farmer in Chiunga Center, New York when the radio announces that Soviet and Chinese forces have overrun the Canadian-American line at El Paso, Texas, and also learns that the last American naval forces were destroyed three months earlier but the news had been kept secret. The Communist armies destroy in Los Alamos, New Mexico the incomplete "Yankee Doodle", a satellite capable of dropping hydrogen bombs from orbit that are impossible to shoot down.