10 Finale

10.1 America

10.1.1 New York

The containerized cargo had sat undisturbed for weeks. Like all other shipments involving a Middle East belligerent, it had been impounded by the U.S. Customs Service.

They had briefly inspected it and found that the bill of lading was correct. The cargo container held machine parts and a large piece of electronic equipment identified as an electron microscope. They had meant to move it to another storage area, but there was just too much to do, with the war on and all. The container was pushed further back into the corner of the warehouse on Pier 58, just off Fourteenth Street near New York's Chinatown.

The inspectors could not be faulted. It should have looked like an electron microscope, because it was, except that the large box containing the instrument's power supply was both too large and too heavy. Still, when they opened it, they saw a case with dials and buttons, which appeared to be in accordance with the manual. Had they looked inside, they would have seen a mass of electronics and a large metallic ball. Unless they had unusual expertise, none of them could have suspected this innocent-looking, metal sphere to be a nuclear bomb, and the electronics surrounding it to be the detonation device.

The bomb itself had been made in Iran with the assistance of the North Koreans and Chinese. Six of these small and very "dirty" weapons had been built in secret, in spite of UN inspectors and international monitoring. Originally, they had been intended for use against Israel, but as war with America loomed, four were loaded on ships from neutral countries and sent to American ports. As soon as the American officials determined that they had been shipped from Iran, they were seized, bringing them within U.S. borders for the duration of the war.

A New York cab driver received his orders. Throughout the day, he drove from pier to pier, searching for the radio response he had been told to expect. That afternoon, as he approached Chinatown, the transceiver responded to his continuing message. That was all he needed. His radio's signal had been answered, and the weapon was armed. He quickly turned, entered the Holland Tunnel and exited in New Jersey. He followed Routes 1 and 9 to Interstate 78, and two hours later crossed into Easton, Pennsylvania. He hoped he was far enough away.

At five minutes after five o'clock, the klystrons surrounding the ball fired simultaneously, causing plastic explosives to detonate inside the metal ball. The segments of plastic explosive had been carefully machined to fit together like the panels of a soccer ball. They were forced, both by their shape and the steel outer sphere, to explode inwards. This implosion accelerated an array of similarly shaped pieces of U235 metal towards a large sphere of U235 residing in the center. The force of the explosion blew the small pieces across the air gap, welding them to the surface of the larger ball.

The ball had exceeded "critical mass." It was only a matter of time before one atom of the radioactive Uranium isotope split, emitting a neutron. That neutron struck the nucleus of another Uranium atom, which split apart violently, generating two neutrons. These neutrons struck other Uranium nuclei, splitting them. Each of these violated atoms generated two additional neutrons, which split four Uranium atoms, and so on.

As each Uranium atom split, some of its mass was converted into energy, in accordance with Einstein's principle of E=mc2. The small loss in mass became a huge release of energy, which doubled in its power with every generation of atomic fission.

The explosion had driven the small pieces of Uranium into the core within thousandths of a second. The core reacted instantaneously. Within millionths of a second, the sphere of U235 was heated to one million degrees. The energy generated was so great that it burst the ball apart.

The explosion stopping the reaction, but the damage had already been done. The A-Bomb exploded in the heart of Manhattan with a force five times greater than the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima. A blinding white light erupted from the fireball. A cloud of dirt and ash rose towards the stratosphere.

That which once had been a sphere, a box, and a building, blew apart on a supersonic wind. The Freedom Tower became a plasma of aluminum, iron and silicon, streaming towards Brooklyn, while the atoms that had been the Jacob Javits Center raced towards Yonkers. The Empire State Building's atoms were expelled towards Queens. The Statue of Liberty became a stream of copper ions, glowing green for those who could have seen them, while its granite base, and the exposed plinth it was on melted and flowed like the lava it had once been. For a radius of one mile from Pier 58, everything that had existed became a stream of ions hurtling in the winds.

Beyond that limit, for five miles in every direction, that which stood was toppled. Jersey City and Hoboken were flattened, and huge fires erupted from the rubble. Brooklyn and Queens were destroyed. Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Rockefeller Plaza, the New York Public Library and the U.N. Building crashed to the earth, burning.

The gigantic fires merged and fed off each other causing a huge updraft. As the updraft increased, the air along the surface rushed in to fill the vacuum. Winds increased to two-hundred miles per hour, further fanning the inferno, which only added to the mushroom forming over the dead city. Within minutes, a firestorm of epic proportions engulfed the region from Bayonne to the South Bronx, and from Flatbush to Astoria. Five million Americans were dead.

The explosion also vaporized the Hudson River for almost a mile in each direction. The force of the explosion temporarily reversed the flow of the Hudson, creating a tidal wave of gargantuan proportions. Guttenberg and Cliffside Park as well as all of upper Manhattan were destroyed by a wave of water over one hundred feet high. As the wave entered the Palisades, it was channeled, increasing both its height and its speed. A two hundred foot wall of water obliterated Yonkers. Further upstream, a one hundred foot wave inundated Poughkeepsie, and a twenty foot surge ripped through Albany. Two million Americans died.

A similar tidal wave also raced southward. Staten Island was inundated by a two hundred foot wave that killed its entire population. The fires in Bayonne and Jersey City were extinguished as the cities were washed away, to be deposited in Newark and along the New Jersey moraine. Bay Ridge, South Amboy and Keansburg disappeared beneath the flood.

One million more Americans were dead.

Then, the sea rushed back in to fill the void left by the vaporized water and the tidal surge. That which hadn't been completely destroyed by the outgoing wave was crushed and ground by the incoming one. Within fifteen minutes over ten million were dead.

About an hour later, a second bomb exploded in San Francisco. San Francisco, Oakland, Palo Alto and the entire Bay Area were obliterated. The Bay itself was lifted up and displaced north over the hills into Marin County and the Napa Valley. Five million Americans died within minutes.

The bomb also relieved stresses that had built up for decades in California's numerous earthquake fault zones. Huge earthquakes, later determined to be over ten on the open-ended Richter scale, destroyed what little was left of the City by the Bay.

The quake rumbled southward, as fault after fault slipped and buckled. Eight hours later, the Los Angeles area was hit by a series of magnitude seven and eight earthquakes. The region from Ventura to San Bernardino to Oceanside was flattened. Over seven million more Americans lay dead.

10.1.2 Washington, DC

The President was ashen. Emotionally, he was beyond outrage, anger, or even rage. He was stunned by the magnitude of the catastrophe, which had befallen his country.

Never in the history of the world had there been such a man-made disaster. Within less than twelve hours, twenty million Americans had died in nuclear attacks or from their direct consequences. Depending upon the deaths from radiation, starvation and disease, the total would continue to climb. The experts predicted the death toll to exceed thirty million, or about one in twelve Americans.

America had gone to war many times in the past, but seldom with fury in her collective heart. The Civil War had begun in a spirit of determination and resolve rather than anger. However by its end, the hatred was so intense that it left an open sore in the American psyche that had never healed. In World War II, Americans went to war against the Japanese with hate in their hearts, for the very first time in their history. The hatred only deepened during the war, resulting in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In that same war, America had fought Germany, but without the intensity of hatred. It was only after the Malmedy Massacre and the discovery of the Death Camps, that American revulsion turned to hate. Fortunately, the war in Europe was at an end, and America's rage was never realized in actions.

Two nuclear bombs had made America mad! There could be no appeal to the soft American heart or equally soft American psyche. America would not ask for quarter, nor would she give any. America would wage a war of extermination.