He grabbed the paper the frantic clerk was waving at him. “I tell you, kid, if the world was about to blow up there’d still be a fucking clerk out there somewhere, saying, ‘Hey, wait. First you gotta sign the fucking paper.”
For the first time in his life David Hannon was face to face with an American President. He removed a circular blue-and-white plastic wheel not much thicker than a dime from his breast pocket and set it on the table before him. It was a nuclear-bomb-effects computer designed by the Lovelace Foundation, the revised 1962 edition computed for sea-level conditions. Hannon was never without it. There was almost nothing he couldn’t tell you about nuclear explosions with that wheeclass="underline" how many pounds pressure per square inch would break a glass window, snap a steel arch or hemorrhage your lungs; the degree of burns you’d get twenty-three miles away from a five-megaton burst; how much fallout it would take to kill you 219 miles away from an eighty-kiloton explosion; the time the fallout would need to reach you-1ind how long you’d go on living once you’d been exposed to it. He glanced at the wheel. New York, he thought reassuringly, was at sea level. There would be no need to make any adjustments in his calculations.
“Let’s get going.”
Hannon recognized the familiar face of the President’s National Security Assistant. He selfconsciously touched his wavy white hair to make sure it was in place and gave a nervous tug to his striped tie.
“Sir, in New York with a three-megaton thermonuclear explosion we’ve got a situation that is unique in the world. All those tall buildings. The thrust of our studies has always been what we can do to the Soviets, not what they can do to us. And since they don’t have any tall buildings, this is a circumstance where the data runs out, so to speak.” Little dew balls of sweat began to gleam on Hannon’s head. “The fact of the matter is, we just can’t say with total precision what this weapon is going to do to Manhattan. The damage would be so great, it’s almost inconceivable.”
Hannon rose and walked to the map of the New York area his deputy had just pinned to the display board of the conference room. A series of concentric circles, blue, red, green and black, moved out from the narrow pencil of Manhattan Island at its center. “What we’ve done is work out here our best estimate of the destruction it would cause, based on our computer calculations. Since we don’t know exactly where this device is, we’ve assumed for the purpose of our study that it’s here.” His finger indicated Times Square. “In that case, the blue circle represents Zone A from ground zero out to three miles.”
He moved his finger along its circumference, down Chambers Street in lower Manhattan in the south, over the East River by the Williamsburg Bridge, through Greenpoint in Brooklyn, Long Island City in Queens, across upper Manhattan at Ninety-sixth Street, and, west of the Hudson, around Union City, Hoboken and parts of Jersey City. “Nothing inside this circle is going to survive in any recognizable form.”
“Nothing?” the President asked, incredulous. “Nothing at all?”
“Nothing, sir. The devastation will be total.”
“I just can’t believe that.” Tap Bennington thought of the view he had so often had of Manhattan Island driving down to the Jersey entrance of the Lincoln Tunneclass="underline" of those glittering ramparts of glass and steel stretching from the World Trade Center up through Wall Street to midtown and beyond.
That all that could be flattened by one thermonuclear device was inconceivable, the CIA director thought. This had to be an overstatement of some bureaucrat too long lost in his charts.
“Sir,” Hannon replied, “the blast wave a device like this will produce is going to generate winds unlike anything that has ever existed on earth.”
“Not even at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”
“Remember we employed atomic, not hydrogen, bombs in those cities. And with comparatively low yields. The winds they creates were just summer breezes compared to what this one’s going to produce.”
The bureaucrat turned back to the slender blue ribbon twisting around the heart of Manhattan Island: Wall Street Greenwich Village, Fifth and Park Avenues, Central Park, the East and West Sides. “We know from our studies in both of those cities that modern steel and concrete buildings just disappeared. Poof!” Hannon snapped his fingers. “Like that. With the winds this is going to produce you’re going to have skyscrapers literally flying all over the landscape. Disintegrating in seconds…They’ll blow away like Long Island beach buts in a hurricane.”
Hannon turned to his audience again. He was so controlled and composed he might have been addressing a class at the War College. “If this really goes off, gentlemen, all that will be left of Manhattan Island as we know it today is a smoldering pile of debris.”
For seconds, the men at the table struggled to digest the enormity of Hannon’s words.
“How about survivors in the area?” Abe Stern asked, nodding toward the blue circle inside which were trapped, at that very moment, perhaps five million people.
“Survivors? In there?” Hannon gave the Major a look of total incredulity.
“There won’t be any.”
“Good God!” Stern gasped. For an instant he looked as though he was going to suffer a stroke.
“And fire?” asked Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense.
“The fire this will create,” Hannon replied, “will be unlike anything in human experience. If this device explodes, it’s going to release a heat burst that’ll set houses on fire all over Westchester County, New Jersey and Long Island. You’ll have tens, hundreds of thousands of wooden houses bursting into flames like matches exploding.”
Hannon glanced at his map. “Inside the first circle, what will happen first is that the thermal pulse, the heat of the fireball, will be passed little diminished through the glass sheaths of all those modern buildings in the center of Manhattan. Now, when you look inside those glass skyscrapers, what do you see? Curtains. Rugs.
Desks covered with papers. In other words, fuel. What will happen is, you’ll have a million fires lit instantly on Park Avenue. Then, of course, the blast will hit and turn the place into piles of smoking rubbish.”
“Christ!” One of the deputies along the conference room wall said. “Imagine those poor people in those glass buildings!”
“Actually,” Hannon replied, “according to our calculations, glass buildings may turn out to be less dangerous than you’d imagine, provided, of course, they’re well away from the shot. At the enormous pressure those things generate, those glass structures are going to fragment into millions of tiny pieces which are not going to have a high degree of penetration. I mean, they’ll make you look like a pincushion, but they won’t kill you.”
Is this guy for real? Eastman asked himself. He stared at Hannon, the square pink fingernails of his thumbs pressed tensely together, his heavy shoulders and upper body untidily enclosed in a gabardine suit. Doesn’t he realize he’s talking about people, Eastman thought, living flesh-and-blood people, not a chain of numbers spat out by a computer?
“What are the possibilities of survivors outside your first circle?” the President asked.
“We’ll begin having survivors,” Hannon answered, “inside the second circle, three to six miles from ground zero.” He mechanically ran his finger along the circle’s red circumference encompassing the rest of lower Manhattan, South Brooklyn, Jackson Heights, La Guardia Airport, Rikers Island, Secaucus and Jersey City, the guts of the most important metropolitan area in the world. “Fifty percent of the population in this area will be killed.