Page 273 of Never

All the same, she softened the details.In the first one-millionth of a second, a fireball is formed two hundred yards wide. Everyone within it dies instantly.She changed that to: ‘First of all, many people are killed instantly by the heat. They would know nothing about it.’

‘Lucky them.’

‘Maybe.’The blast flattens buildings for a mile around. Almost everyone in that area dies.‘Then the blast destroys property and brings down debris.’

Pippa said: ‘So what would the – like – authorities be doing?’

‘No country in the world has enough doctors and nurses to cope with the casualties from nuclear war. Our hospitals would be overwhelmed and many people would die for lack of medical attention.’

‘But how many?’

‘It depends how many bombs. In a war between the US and Russia, both of which have huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons, probably about a hundred and sixty million Americans would die.’

Pippa was bemused. ‘But that’s, like, half the country.’

‘Yes. The danger right now is a war with China, which has a smaller stockpile, but we still think something like twenty-five million Americans would be killed.’

Pippa was good at arithmetic. ‘One person in thirteen.’

‘Yes.’

She was trying to imagine it. ‘That’s thirty of the kids in my school.’

‘Yes.’

‘Fifty thousand inhabitants of DC.’

‘And that’s only the beginning, I’m afraid,’ said Pauline. I might as well give her the whole horror, she thought. ‘The radiation causes cancers and other illnesses for years to come. We know this from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the first nuclear bombs exploded.’ She hesitated, then added: ‘And what happened in Korea today is like thirty Hiroshimas.’

Pippa was close to tears. ‘Why did you do it?’

‘To prevent something worse.’

‘What could be worse?’

‘General Pak nuked two cities. The third might have been in the US.’

Pippa looked troubled. ‘American lives aren’t worth more than Korean lives.’

‘All human life is precious. But the American people chose me to be their leader, and I promised to protect them. I’m doing my damnedest. And I can’t think of anything, in the last two months, that I could have done that would have prevented what’s happening now. I averted a war on the Chad–Sudan border. I tried to stop countries selling guns to terrorists. I let the Chinese get away with sinking a Vietnamese ship. I wiped out ISGS camps in the Sahara Desert. I held back from invading North Korea. I can’t see one of those as the wrong decision.’

‘What about the nuclear winter?’

Pippa was relentless, but she was entitled to answers. ‘The heat from nuclear explosions starts thousands of fires, and the smoke and soot rise high into the atmosphere and block the sunlight. If hundreds of bombs go off, even thousands, the darkening of the sun will cool the Earth and reduce rainfall. Some of our biggest farming regions may become too cold or dry to grow crops. Therefore, many of the people who survived the blast and the heat and the radiation will end up starving to death.’

‘So it’s the end of the human race?’

‘Probably not, if Russia stays out of the war. Even in the worst case, a few people will probably live on in places where there is sunshine and rain. But in any scenario it’s the end of the civilization that we know.’

‘I wonder what life will be like then?’

‘There are a thousand novels about that, and each one tells a different story. The truth is that no one knows.’

‘It would be better if nobody had nuclear weapons.’

‘Which isn’t going to happen. It’s like asking Texans to give up their guns.’

‘Maybe we could all just have not so many.’