Mark Lynas Looks at a Worst-Case Scenario—and How to Prevent it From Becoming a Reality |
The day of the war dawns like any other. There is no warning, and across New York people are beginning their daily routines. No air raid sirens wail and no early-warning messages flash on screens. Cars are being backed out of garages in the suburbs, while kids wearing colorful backpacks wait for school buses outside the shops. Harassed moms stuff sandwiches into packed lunches while a million espresso machines grind on kitchen counters. Outside an inner-city school, a group of 10-year-old girls wait to cross the road.
Looking up at the sky, one of the girls sees a brief metallic flash high up near the sun, far above the chrome spire of a Midtown skyscraper. She does not know it, but she has seen a re-entry vehicle from a 5 megaton (Mt) intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and has only a few seconds left to live. Thinking about an upcoming maths test she has been working hard for, she looks down when the road-crossing signal turns to green. The girls are not even halfway across when the bomb explodes.
Across the city a brilliant white light, thousands of times brighter than the desert sun at noon, floods the scene from above. Everyone who looks at it is blinded. Rebounding from clouds and within the atmosphere, the light is visible from hundreds of kilometers away, and even projects an unearthly glow through the curtains of the Oval Office and into the White House itself. The light contains both intense heat and a flux of neutrons and gamma rays that pulverizes the DNA of any living creatures not protected by several inches of concrete. Within a few hundredths of a second, a fireball roughly the width of Manhattan Island spreads across the tops of the buildings about 1.5km off the ground.
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