“I’m aware that someone over there has his head in a hole.” Or up his ass. The briefing the NSA and DDI had given him said enough about this Merriweather fellow. “And anyone who goes along with that line of thought is kidding himself.”
Bud leaned back a bit, feeling the heat of the comment directed at the President. He silently willed Anderson not to push the limits of respect for the Man.
The President, however, took no offense. The warning had been reassuring, in fact. “So it’s true what they say about you?”
“They say lots of things about me,” Joe responded. “Most of it can’t be printed, though. But if you’re talking about me sparing the bullshit, then, yeah, that’s true. And there’s twice the reason now to say it like it is. Having to answer only to myself and you know who kind of clarifies everything. Lets me speak my piece.”
“We’re not entirely used to plain-speak around here,” the President said.
“That’s one reason I don’t mind retirement.”
Once you were part of the D.C. machinery, you realized how much you wanted to be out of it. Or at least how much you wanted to change it. A nice thought, the President had realized long ago. “One of the reasons I wanted to see you was to thank you personally for doing this. The other was to get a straight analysis of what could happen. I can get the rosy picture or the doom and gloom from any one of a dozen specialists. It’s like pressing a button. Unfortunately Bud here doesn’t know everything about everything, so I have to go out of the circle occasionally. When you’re President, you start to realize that a lot of people tell you what they want you to hear, which isn’t necessarily the way it is. So, Anderson, I want you to tell me the way it is.”
“You may get gloom and doom,” Joe warned him.
“At least I won’t have gotten it from a cookie-cutter expert from some think tank. Straight. What can this thing do?”
“It can kill a lot of people. What more do you need to know?”
“How accurate is it?”
Joe wanted to stand up and shake the man. Details didn’t matter. Couldn’t he see that? “Accuracy does not matter when you’re talking about a warhead this large and a soft target. That thing does not have to take out a silo, or some command post buried under a thousand tons of concrete. We’re talking about a city, and lots of little cities around it, and millions of little people in millions of little buildings. It does not have to land on the South Lawn here to do its damage.”
“How far off could it be, Joe?” Bud asked.
All right, if you want the numbers. “D.C. is at the outer-range limit of the SS-4 of the day. Let’s assume a major miss. A three-mile miss, which isn’t an exaggeration, knowing their targeting systems back then.” Joe stood and extended his left hand, pointing to the wall that separated them from the Yellow Oval Room. “That’s east. Three miles that way, or thereabouts, is RFK Stadium. Fidel aimed it right here, but ground zero is there.
“So RFK is dust. I’m guessing a surface or near-surface burst, because that would do the most long-term damage, so there will be a crater over two hundred feet deep gouged out of the earth. All that good stuff will come down later as fallout. But that’s later. The real damage comes in the first seconds.”
“Heat and blast,” the President said, displaying his rudimentary understanding of the process.
“The correct term is thermal pulse and blast,” Joe explained. “Blast can actually be subdivided into several distinct phenomena, but for the purpose of explanation, just “blast” will do. Down here, three miles from GZ, the first real effect — other than mass blindness for those looking that way — will come from the thermal pulse. The energy liberated by the detonation, about seventy percent of its total release, heats the air in the immediate vicinity to create the fireball. This fireball emits energy outward in the form of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared radiation, which move at the speed of light away from GZ in all directions. These constitute the thermal pulse that can initially ignite fires miles away. Within three miles, any object with a direct line of sight to the blast will receive a minimum of fifty calories per square centimeter of thermal radiation. That’s sufficient to spontaneously ignite just about any material that can burn. Those heavy curtains in the east-facing rooms will spark. The same effect will happen farther out, too, but it degrades with distance. The air will diffuse and absorb more and more energy as it moves farther away from GZ. The actual fireball, which is made of superheated atmosphere, will stop expanding somewhere around the Capitol.” Joe paused. “Fire. Not a pleasant way to go.”
“The blast wave follows,” the President said.
“Basically, yes. A few seconds after the fires ignite, the blast wave will hit here with a force of four-pounds-per-square-inch overpressure. Normal atmospheric pressure is about fourteen psi, so this overpressure will do some nasty things.” Joe knew that “nasty” didn’t covey the true picture. “Here’s a tangible representation of overpressure for you non-engineering types. First, think of it in larger terms. A twenty-foot-long, eight-foot-high wall — just like the side of a small house — has one hundred and sixty square feet. That’s over twenty-three-thousand square inches. Multiply that by the amount of overpressure — four psi — and you get more than ninety-two-thousand pounds, forty-five tons, of force applied to that wall above what it normally holds. That is a devastating amount of overpressure to most buildings in and around D.C. Every window this side of the Potomac will be shattered and a good number on the other side. Wood frame houses will collapse like matchstick houses in a strong breeze, though the breeze that follows the blast wave will come in here at over a hundred and forty miles per hour. All these big reinforced stone buildings will act as wind tunnels after their windows and doors, inside and out, give way. Any fire started by the thermal pulse will be fanned into an inferno inside those buildings. All the wood ones farther out, too. It’ll be a big one.” Joe sat back. “But I don’t have time to get into firestorms and conflagrations and all that stuff. Get Glasstone and Dolan from the library if you want a more technical picture. Suffice it to say that little will be left of this city.”
A phone rang in the background as Joe finished, and Bud went to answer it.
The President said nothing. The fear that Joe had sensed now showed plainly in the chief executive’s eyes. Everyone here could be dead, he thought. Except me. It was a privilege of the office that made him feel small at the moment.
“Sir.”
The President looked up to his NSA.
“Langley just received a confirmation from Moscow Station,” Bud said. “The names on the headstones are of a Russian missile crew reported killed accidentally in Cuba on October twenty-eighth, 1962.”
“My God.”
Joe didn’t react. He had already resigned himself to the fact that this nightmare was real.
“Bud, what about SNAPSHOT?” the President asked. “I mean, if need be, shut it down. It could push Castro over the edge before we can do anything.”
Bud shook his head emphatically. “Drew and Jim and I discussed that possibility, but it could send the wrong signal to Castro.” He didn’t want to try and explain that the rebel commanders would probably just ignore the directive. “We keep the pressure on.”
The President agreed with a nod, then looked to Joe. “You’re going to pull another one of these off for us, then.”
The attempt at levity was shallow but well intentioned.
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir,” Bud began. “I suggest you keep your schedule normal. We don’t want to let on that anything out of the ordinary is going on. That could push Castro into firing the missile.”