The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

locked it. The second installment escaped soon thereafter, radiating in all
directions. This generated the two-phase pulse which is characteristic of
nuclear detonations.
The next energy effect was blast. This was actually a secondary effect. The air
absorbed much of the soft X-rays and was burned into an opaque mass which
stopped further electromagnetic radiation, transforming it into mechanical
energy that expanded at several times the speed of sound, but before that energy
had a chance to damage anything, more distant events were already underway.
The primary ABC video link was actually by fiber-optic cable – a high-quality
landline – but the cable ran through the 'A' van and was cut even before the
stadium itself was damaged. The backup link was through the Telstar 301
satellite, and the Pacific Coast was serviced by Telstar 302. ABC used the Net-1
and Net-2 primary links on each bird. Also using Telstar 301 was Trans World
International, which represented the NFL's world-wide rights and distributed the
game to most of Europe, plus Israel and Egypt. TWI sent the same video signal to
all its European clients, and also provided facilities for separate audio
uplinks in the various European languages, which usually meant more than one
audio link per country. Spain, for example, accounted for five dialects, each of
which had its own audio sideband-channel. NHK, broadcasting to Japan, used both
the JISO-F2R satellite and its regular full-time link, Westar 4, which was owned
and operated by Hughes Aerospace. Italian TV used Major Path 1 of the Teleglobe
satellite (owned by the Intelsat conglomerate) to feed its own viewers, plus
those in Dubai and whatever Israelis didn't like the play-by-play through TWI
and Telstar. Teleglobe's Major Path 2 was delegated to serve most of South
America. Also present, either right at the stadium or a short distance away,
were CNN, ABC's own news division, CBS Newsnet, and ESPN. Local Denver stations
had their own satellite trucks on the scene, their uses mainly rented to
outsiders.
There was a total of 37 active satellite up-link trucks using either microwave
or Ku-band transmitters to generate a total of 48 active video, and 168 active
audio signals, all feeding over a billion sports fans in seventy one countries
when the gamma and X-ray flux struck. In most cases, the impact generated a
signal in the wave guides, but in six trucks, the traveling-wave tubes
themselves were illuminated first and put out a gigantic pulse on exactly the
proper frequencies. Even that was beside the point, however. Resonances and
otherwise inconsequential irregularities within the wave guides meant that wide
segments of the satellites orbiting over the Western Hemisphere were being
worked by the TV crews at Denver. What happened to them is expressed simply.
Their sensitive antennas were designed to receive billionths of watts. Instead,
they were suddenly bombarded with between one and ten thousand times that on
many separate channels. That surge overloaded an equal number of the front-end
amplifiers inside the satellites. The computer software running the satellites
took note of this and began to activate isolation switches to protect the
sensitive equipment from the spike. Had the incident affected merely one such
receiver, service would have been restored at once and nothing further would
have happened, but commercial communications satellites are immensely expensive
artifacts, costing hundreds of millions of dollars to build, and hundreds of