The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

'Proceed,' Fromm replied, concentrating on his scope.
Ibrahim pressed the button. The structure disintegrated before their eyes. A few
sandbags survived, flying through the air, but mainly there was a shower of
dirt. On the O-scope, the peak pressure was frozen in place well before the
crump of the blast wave passed over their heads. Bock and Qati were somewhat
disappointed in the physical effects of the explosion, most of which had been
attenuated by the sandbags. Was such a small detonation enough to ignite a
nuclear device?
'Well?' Ghosn asked, as a man ran off to the newly deepened crater.
'Ten percent off,' Fromm said, looking up. Then he smiled. 'Ten percent too
much.'
'What does that mean?' Qati demanded, suddenly worried that they'd done
something wrong.
'It means that my young student has learned his lessons well.' Fifteen minutes
later, they were sure. It took two men to find it, and half an hour to remove
the tungsten casing from the core. What had been a nearly solid steel mass as
big around as a man's fist was now a distorted cylinder no wider than a cigar.
Had it been plutonium, a nuclear reaction would have taken place. Of that the
German was sure. Fromm hefted it in his hand and presented it to Ibrahim.
'Herr Ghosn,' he said formally. 'You have a gift with explosives. You are a fine
engineer. In the DDR, it took us three attempts to get it right. You have done
it in one.'
'How many more?'
Fromm nodded. 'Very good. We shall do another tomorrow. We will test all the
stainless-steel blanks, of course.'
'That is why we made them,' Ghosn agreed.
On the way back, Bock ran over his own calculations. According to Fromm the
force of the final explosion would be more than four hundred fifty thousand tons
of TNT. He therefore based his estimates on a mere four hundred thousand. Bock
was always conservative on casualty estimates. The stadium and all in it would
be vaporized. No, he corrected himself. That wasn't really true. There was
nothing magical about this weapon. It was merely a large explosive device. The
stadium and all in it would be totally destroyed, but there would be a great
deal of rubble flung ballistically hundreds, perhaps thousands of meters, The
ground nearest the device would be pulverized down to pieces of molecular size.
Dust particles would then be sucked up into the fireball. Bits of the
bomb-assembly residue would affix themselves to the rising, boiling dust. That's
what fallout was, he'd learned, dirt with bomb-residue attached. The nature of
the blast – being set off at ground level – would maximize the fallout, which
would be borne downwind. The majority would fall within thirty kilometers of the
blast site. The remainder would be a plaything of the winds, to fall over
Chicago or St Louis or maybe even Washington. How many would die from that?
Good question. He estimated roughly two hundred thousand from the blast itself,
certainly no more than that. Another fifty to one hundred thousand from
secondary effects, that number including long-term deaths from cancers which
would take years to manifest themselves. As Qati had noted earlier, the actual
death count was somewhat disappointing. It was so easy to think of nuclear bombs