Triumph (6 page)

With it the long, trans-TV conference ended. Reporters everywhere, aware of some new but as-yet unannounced crisis, were given a general account of the situation and, at about ten-thirty, Eastern Daylight Time, they began to file their stories and to broadcast an outline of the new Red "Push."

A little later the giant radar receptors in Greenland, northern Canada, and Alaska began to show ever-increasing numbers of blips that indicated planes winging toward North America, and, minutes later, the upsurge of swarms of what seemed to be missiles.

In Nebraska, where the information was collected and computer-analyzed, there was a period of hesitancy, owing to the fact that Grovsky had asserted some such "maneuvers"

could be expected. Many precious minutes were lost before the warning system made its electronic knowledge certain:

This was an attack aimed at America.

And now, as the red phone did ring at President Conner's White House desk and as the nightmare of three Presidents became imminent reality, he gave coded orders in a steady voice, while tears ran down his cheeks. Then, impulsively (and disastrously) he phoned his mother in Seattle to urge her to take cover. After that, with his wife and three daughters, who had been waiting outside his door, he proceeded to the helicopter on the lawn. It took off, swiftly, toward the cavern carved in a Maryland hill provided for just such danger.

The helicopter did not reach it.

The delaying confusion as to whether the Soviets were merely staging maneuvers or starting assault--and the call to Seattle--had cut the time left to a margin not quite sufficient.

Still, the President and his family, their pilot and co-pilot, were fortunate, in a fashion--more fortunate than scores upon scores of millions of their fellow citizens. For they, at least, never clearly knew the cause of their swift obliteration.

Of the salvo of twenty-three, five-megaton missiles launched at the Washington-Baltimore area, seven were precisely on target and eight burst within twenty-five miles of their aiming-place. Most, as intended, went into fission-fusion-and-fission on or just above the ground, with a burst-altitude variation of some twenty thousand feet. One of them opened in the hot, clear sky almost directly over the green field where the President and his party were about to descend in order to reach the fortified cave, mere yards away from the landing field.

Father, mother, daughters, and two fliers neither saw nor heard--and probably did not even have time to feel--what happened.

The missile exploded at eighteen thousand feet. Its nature and effects were characteristic of most intercontinental warheads in the current Soviet arsenal. . . .

The burst of a nuclear weapon is curiously different from an ordinary explosion.

An observer, providing he has adequate protection for his eyes and is far enough away to survive, at first merely
senses
some tremendous event in the air. There occurs a not-really-seen but shocking awareness, as if of an invisible leap, or as if the air itself had been smitten by a colossal but unseen fist.

This, in the case of a weapon such as annihilated the presidential party, swells, to engulf between two and three miles of whatever surrounds it. For seconds, with unholy glare, it grows. Where it touches the earth, it melts it, rends it, converts millions of tons of it to gas, and only then, heaved upward by a rebound force of its own making, the fireball climbs and flickers, in vast churnings of white light mixed with enormities of darknesses, until, free of earth, it gradually billows out as pure light, and still ascends steadily, a torrent of interwhirling luminosity of every hue, composed from the intermixed and sun-hot elements of itself and the air and the cratered earth beneath.

So it is not like the shuddery thump of a land mine or the geysering bang of a torpedo or the boom of shell. There is no sudden noise. When the noise comes, it is infinite, enduring, and more a
compression
than thunder--thunder augmented beyond belief.

Radiation, however, will already have sluiced in every direction at light's speed from the first instant of burst. That, alone, will have destroyed all life and all semblance of livingness in all creatures within the closest miles. Heat, too, hundreds of thousands of degrees of out-charging temperature, will have reduced everything to gases, alive or not, within a comparable range.

In a roughly circular area, miles across, underneath this thing, all buildings will have been vaporized. Farther out, for more miles the thrusting ram of steel-hard air will topple the mightiest structures and sweep all lesser edifices to earth, as if their brick and stone, girders and beams were tissue paper. Locomotives, even cathedrals, will be tom from the ground and pitched perhaps a far, far way, in hundreds of square miles of further-out regions where, still, the blast marches, tearing, rending, breaking, and splintering. If a million people happen to be behind a million windows in any such enormous area, glass alone will carve them up in the way of ancient Chinese torturers.

And still the capacity for ruin of just one such weapon is but fractionally spent.

Its light, alone, has peculiar horror. In clear weather all persons with unprotected eyes who are in a position to look will do so involuntarily, before they have time to think they must not look. These, upon staring with naked pupils at the white expansion, will be blinded--their retinas scorched--and they will remain forever blind if they even glance at such a thing in such lucid weather from twenty miles away, or thirty.

So all the men and women and children who look, without any chance of not doing so, will experience dazzlement and pain and tum away reflexively, but too late.

Then all of them who looked, even though they are not otherwise injured, will cease to see. These will everywhere probably be tens of thousands, driving cars and trucks and buses; they will be locomotive engineers and the pilots of commercial planes . . . struck blind, in an area of a thousand square miles or more.

Hence, myriads of cars and trucks and buses in a populous area where one weapon opens the sky, though beyond the range of other immediate damage, will stop, collide, skid into each other, and roll off bridges. Planes in hundreds will crash, no matter how long their blind pilots can keep them hopefully aloft. Trains will run through signals and be wrecked. Hence people hoping to evacuate cities, and people who merely happen to be leaving or approaching struck areas, even if they are shielded from each such sky-glare, will be trapped in miles of vehicular disaster, of fire and blood and blinded agony.

Next, the
heat
of the thing will set alight every desiccated, flammable object--leaf, bit of paper, shingle roof, telephone pole, bam, fence, tree, and wooden box--in
instants,
and over an area, again, of a thousand square miles or more. The wave of the city-toppling blast that follows will surely blowout multitudes of such millions of instantaneous fires; but not all; thousands will continue to bum. Near the hot vortex of the phenomenon, if a city lies there, it will now be ruins. Within its jagged shambles other fires will start, where pipes leak gas, wires spark, blowtorches fume under the rubble, electric stoves glow, gasoline-station hoses meet cigarettes, and where all similar flame-points find any fuel.

Soon those fires will coalesce and become one great pyre, city-wide and suburbs-wrapping. This blaze will rise from each area of urban residue for miles into the sky. And air will come hurtling to supply oxygen for that firestorm--air to feed the appetite of this giant crematory--air sucked at a speed, around the unlit perimeter, of a hurricane. Men and cars and implements for fighting fire will hardly dare approach the incandescent edge; if they do so, they will be tornadoed, bodily, into the roaring, miles-high blaze of a city afire in its wrecked totality where rushing wind would snatch even the heaviest fire trucks into the appalling mountain of flame.

People in shelters under these holocausts, people in subways, even miners, if their mines run beneath these H-hit areas in firestorm, will soon die hideously, deprived of oxygen, as every breath of underground air is pulled out to hotten every Everest-tall blaze. Or else the sheltered will be smothered, or baked alive, with the replacement of subterranean air by carbonic gases heated to such temperatures as wilt steel.

By that time each mushroom cloud will have lofted itself to the upper atmosphere and commenced to dissipate on whatever wind prevails at the moment, hiding the sky as if a dirty banner had replaced the blue vault: a banner moving outward and downwind, a bunting of many, darting hues, each miles-long and sullied by its burden of vaporized buildings and earth and rock that was heat-stolen from the crater left behind.

In an hour or so, from each such "banner," the heaviest particles will fall, then the finer particles, so that a seeming "snow," and soon an invisible "snow," will gently descend on a great oval tract, downwind. That is "fallout," highly radioactive, even if invisible, and it may cover an area of some five thousand square miles per bomb. In each average square foot of such region, for a day or so, the earth, however unaltered it appears, and all streets, roofs, walks, tops of trees, and every place where the hot dew rests, will emit so much radioactivity that a man exposed for fifteen minutes, anywhere, will likely die in days, or a week, or perhaps two.

Fifteen of such warheads, then, exploded over and around Baltimore and Washington within a period of nineteen seconds. Eight others, also aimed at those targets, were either intercepted by American defense rockets or--in four cases--detonated over or pitched into the Atlantic, miles from the coast.

But these were two areas only, of hundreds under attack.

Weapons aimed at hardened missile bases in America destroyed sixty-five per cent of such retaliatory installations before they could be used for a single launch. From a merely military viewpoint that was not of great moment: the remaining thirty-five per cent of bases flung up missiles that did, as calculated, approach the Soviet Union in their outer-space trajectories. The U.S.S.R., like the United States, intercepted only a third of them. The rest were sufficient to accomplish their retaliatory intent, and more.

In all, during the initial hour of attack, approximately one thousand enemy missiles of an average caliber of five megatons reached their targets, or a nearby area, in the United States.

Few airfields were left, fit for launching supersonic bombers. But many American planes, at that time, were already on the way to the enemy. These carried twenty-megaton bombs, three or four to a plane. When their long-trained pilots drew within range of the calculated borders and enemy rockets rose toward them, they followed their gallant, necessary procedure. They launched their own, aimed, long-range missiles. Then, one by one, like giant descendants of the kamikazes of another war, the planes dived in the twilight, toward their attackers, and set their triads and quartets of H-bombs hurtling, under separate rocket power, toward the enemy bases. The first dozen, of most of the many invading files of planes, missed some of their targets and were themselves blown to sun-hot gas by A-weapons, or in a few cases were destroyed when their own weapons were detonated by the defenses of a still-distant foe.

But each invading American plane was able to approach closer to the enemy frontiers than its leader and each, in perishing, shook the defenders more savagely and made possible a nearer strike for the plane behind. So, plane by plane, as crews died in the prodigious burst of enemy weapons and their own, corridors were cut through the Soviet defenses until planes somewhere in each strung-out squadron and all those beyond were able to penetrate the last defenses and reach the Red military bases and Russia's cities.

These, for the most part, had by then already been turned into separate mountains of fire by American missiles, launched from far and near, land and sea. The subsequent bombers blasted fire deeper into the gigantic nation, seeking out the hidden industrial complexes in Siberia and leaving them in conflagrations that towered higher than the night-hung Ural Mountains. They flew on then to hunt for lesser targets if they had unspent bombs. At last the surviving planes turned, but not back to America. Their crews knew that what they witnessed on Russian earth was happening at home. They had not actually expected or intended to return. There was nothing to go back to.

By midaftemoon that Friday two-thirds of the surface of the United States had become--irregularly and unpredictably--so radioactive it might as well have been molten rock. Not one major city and few suburban areas of any size remained standing; and nearly all were in firestorm.

In those command posts undestroyed by nuclear fire, in many naval vessels, and in certain far-flung, deep-secreted, retaliatory bases--secure, still, because enemy agents had never learned of them--haggard commanding officers waited, aware, even where their communications had failed, owing to a thousand factors, that their nation had been reduced, in hours, to a fraction of its population. Reduced to a scattered minority who, even if they lived through the weeks ahead, would generally be in shock or madness and beyond sensible reorganization, for an unguessable time. They would also lack the most rudimentary means of sustenance, nearly everywhere.

Most commanders (who thus waited for anticipated orders) had come to share the commonest military view of any potential thermonuclear assault: that it would be designed to limit America's reaction and, at the most, to destroy a large enough part of America's industrial power to prevent speedy recovery.

No other enemy intent had seemed sane. Mere city-smashing had been semiofficially declared senseless, since the population and their facilities would expectably be spared to serve as productive agents for the conqueror. Because no method could be devised for assuring the safety of city populations under thermonuclear attack, the military effort had been concentrated upon hardening and dispensing ever more

"sophisticated" systems of defensive and retaliatory weapons.

American military "assumptions," furthermore, had always envisaged as the most appalling possible form even of a "first strike," enemy use of mere hundreds of megaton weapons. The fact that the United States had made it known, as long ago as 1961, that it had in being and ready for use " tens of thousands" of nuclear weapons, had not impressed upon the Pentagon another obvious fact: that the U.S.S.R. doubtless possessed near-equal numbers, even that long ago. One additional datum had been long known even to that part of the American public interested in such matters and informed enough to comprehend its implications. That datum, announced in the mid-Fifties, when the earliest practical H-bombs had been tested, revealed such weapons were "open-ended" and so could be built in any megatonnage desired. But again the official American view had been that a twenty-megaton weapon-large enough to wreck a city, set it and its environs into firestorm, and powder ten thousand square miles downwind with radioactive death--