In the end, the story folded together with the beauty and precision of an origami bird. First, he called Jim Talon who covered the United Nations for the network. Talon had made some good contacts prior to the Second Gulf War when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had been at the center of the search for WMDs in Iraq. Recently, IAEA Director General Dr. Mohamed El Shouhadi had called upon the United States and the other Coalition Partners to allow IAEA experts to return to Iraq in order to address what he described as a “possible radiological emergency” but, of course, the U.S. was being reticent. The Coalition didn’t want to see the IAEA, nor the UN back in control. And the U.S. Administration was still smarting from the fact that no Weapons of Mass Destruction had been found. Talon promised El Shouhadi that he would play the story up, put more pressure on the Administration if he would confirm a rumor he had heard about a shipment of HEU that had allegedly been hijacked in Kazakhstan early yesterday morning. El Shouhadi was surprised. He asked Talon how he’d learned about the hijacking but Talon wouldn’t answer. A confidential source, he said. Eventually, El Shouhadi confirmed the theft, but he also played it down and pointed out that the eight kilograms of HEU fell under the minimum thresholds specified by the IAEA. That’s why they hadn’t made it public. The amount simply wasn’t large enough to cause a fuss. More than that went missing from Russian plants each month, but it generally turned up sooner or later — misplaced, mislabeled, mis-something-or-other. Thefts in excess of the thresholds were rare. Talon thanked the Director General and passed the information onto Gallagher.
Next, Gallagher called a buddy of his from journalism school named Don Abernathy who happened to work at the National Resource Defense Council. Abernathy told him the NRDC was just about to come out with a scathing attack on the IAEA and the agency’s handling of its inspections in Iraq. When Gallagher pressed on, he also told him that part of the report claimed the standard minimum thresholds posted by the IAEA were ridiculously low. They were all based on dated research, ancient analyses. Modern techniques enabled the construction of WMDs from much smaller quantities of plutonium or uranium. Eight kilograms of HEU was more than enough to make a significant nuclear device, capable of generating a one-kiloton blast, or more. Gallagher thanked Abernathy, hung up and jumped online.
He combed the IAEA and NRDC sites for more data. The NRDC posted a number of articles on nuclear stockpiles located throughout the world. Gallagher cut and pasted his research, folding the story, panel by panel. Then he Googled a variety of subjects, from fission bombs to fallout. Within twenty minutes, he had gathered enough material for his piece. It was terrifying stuff, especially when you put it in a local context. He called Amanda in the animation lab. Yeah, she told him. She had time. Another fold. He emailed her the stats and started on the script.
Within forty minutes, he had pecked out a first draft on his PC and called Amanda to see how she was doing. Come on down, she told him. Take a look for yourself. He took the elevator to the third floor and watched the animation. It was crude — not all the planes were linked together yet — but still effective. Gallagher told her to add concentric circles around the map of New York City so that the viewers could see the different bands of pressure about the blast zone — from twelve pounds per square inch near the hypocenter, to five, then two, then one. No problemo, she said. He got up to leave and ran right into Ira Minsky, his producer.
“I hear you’ve got a hot one,” Minsky said.
“Oh, hi, Ira. Just wanted to tighten it up a bit, add a few more graphics before I came to see you.”
Minsky was a short fat man in his late forties, with thin receding hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He was perpetually out of breath, as if each time you saw him, he’d just finished sprinting. It was actually a mild case of asthma. Probably psychological, thought Gallagher. Minsky carried an inhaler with him everywhere he went and he squeezed it now, and took another breath, and said, “Sure you were, Seamus. What’s the angle?”
Gallagher told him and Minsky took it like a body blow. “You realize this will mean another call from Homeland Security.” Only two months earlier, a story Gallagher had done on the nuclear facility at Indian Point had raised the agency’s ire. Gallagher had contended the plant was still vulnerable to terrorist attack, despite recent changes in security.
“Yeah, so what?”
Minsky pushed his glasses up his nose. He took another breath through his inhaler. He was sweating furiously and Gallagher took this as a good sign. “Our ratings jumped almost two points after that story,” the producer said. “Mazel-tov.” Then he turned and waddled off.
A few hours later, with Minsky watching from the wings, the story aired.
First there was the hijacking, confirmed by the IAEA Director General himself, Dr. Mohamed El Shouhadi. Then the contention by the NRDC that the minimum thresholds were too low, backed up by various technical experts. Then the background on Gulzhan Baqrah and El Aqrab, and the Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar. Some file footage of suicide attacks in Iraq and Israel. That photo of El Aqrab and Baqrah in Kuwait during the First Gulf War, with that smoking oil well in the background. And then the “closer,” the colorful animation of a one-kiloton bomb exploding in Manhattan, just to give it that local angle. Amanda had really worked her magic this time. Gallagher reminded himself to take her out to dinner. No… lunch.
It began with an illustration of a gun-triggered fission bomb, the simplest to build. Then the explosion itself, animated on Amanda’s CGI in colorful detail. The bomb winked, blanched and bellowed, sending a shockwave like an invisible smoke ring around the island of Manhattan. The skyline collapsed. Buildings melted in a wave of flames. A great gray cloud of smoke rose up, billowing higher and higher into the sky, into that hauntingly familiar mushroom shape. Then the cloud cleared, revealing a crater at the center of Manhattan. Gallagher’s VO swept in: “According to the report ‘The Effects of Nuclear War’ authored by the Congressional Office Of Technology Assessment, the blast generated by a one kiloton bomb would fashion a crater more than two hundred feet deep and one thousand feet in diameter, encircled by a ring of radioactive soil and debris. Nothing recognizable would remain within a half mile of the crater.
“Imagine you’re a survivor, walking from the hypocenter of the blast, trying to get away from the carnage. Niney-eight percent of the people around you are dead, incinerated in the inferno. You’re one of the lucky ones.
“By the time you reach one point seven miles from ground zero, only the strongest buildings made out of reinforced, poured concrete stand — burnt-out skeletal remains. The rest have disappeared, vaporized by a force equivalent to twelve pounds of pressure per square inch, or PSI.”
Minsky beamed from behind the camera as the concentric circles gleamed.
“Virtually everything between the twelve and five PSI rings has been destroyed. The walls of all multi-story buildings — including apartment blocks — have been shredded, blown away. As you get closer to the five PSI ring, more large structures remain. But all the single-family homes have been obliterated. Only the odd foundation still reveals itself through the rubble — a ghost, an echo of some family now gone. Fifty percent of the people around you have been killed, forty percent are horribly injured. At two PSI, any single-family home not completely destroyed by the blast is heavily damaged. The windows of all the office buildings have been blown away. The contents of the upper floors — including the people who worked there — are scattered along the streets before you, like so many autumn leaves. Debris lies everywhere. Five percent of the people between the five and number two PSI rings are dead, forty-five percent seriously injured.