by James Philip
Suddenly, Walter realised what he was hearing.
The problem wasn’t his hearing, it was his brain.
There were warning sirens every few blocks in metropolitan Boston, fewer in the suburbs and once a year the authorities fired them up with a long anticipated fanfare. What never happened was somebody deciding to wind up the infernal banshee horns at...
He glanced at the alarm clock a foot from his head on the bedside table as the minutes hand clicked onto the half-hour. His ears still didn’t want to believe the rising pitch of the spine-tingling screech outside the house.
“Basement,” Walter croaked, throwing off the sheets. “We’ve got to get down to the basement, Jo!”
“What are you talking about, Walter?” His wife complained testily, burrowing under the sheets.
“That’s the attack alarm,” he told her calmly.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Walt,” she retorted sleepily, sitting up. “I know things are a bit tense with the Russians over this Cuba thing, but...”
“It is illegal to sound the alarm without twenty-four hours notice unless the attack is already under way, Jo!” He snapped, irritably, knowing he was somewhat embellishing the truth. “Bring blankets and grab some warm things. We’re going down to the basement until the all clear sounds.”
“You really think...”
“I do. I’d rather look stupid than be dead or seriously injured, okay!”
Chapter 4
03:35 Hours Zulu
HMS Talavera, 71 miles NW of Lowestoft
Commander David Penberthy felt naked on the bridge of HMS Talavera. His feeling of nakedness had nothing to do with the fact his ship was unarmoured, or because his magazines were empty. Even if his magazines had been overflowing with 4.5 inch rounds and Sea Cat surface to air missiles he’d have felt just as naked. His was the nakedness of a man who knows, with utter certainty, that the world around him has gone mad.
“This is the Captain,” he announced, swallowing hard. Painfully aware that he was clasping the microphone so hard his hand was twitching with spasms of cramp he forced himself to relax a fraction. “About half an hour ago CIC became aware of unusually intense unscheduled aerial activity over East Anglia and of what appeared to be a concerted, multi-frequency electronic jamming effort. Fifteen minutes ago we observed, visually, what appear to be the blooms of two large thermonuclear detonations. The first was on a bearing consistent with an explosion in the vicinity of the Medway Estuary. The second appeared to be in the vicinity of London. We have subsequently observed at least ten further strikes in a wide arc taking in probable V-Bomber and American air and missile bases in East Anglia, all the way south to the capital. We are picking up regular General War Order broadcasts and a large amount of emergency operational communications traffic from Allied forces. Until the situation becomes clearer Talavera will stand out to sea. I know that many of you will be worrying about family and friends ashore,” he paused, his mouth dry, “but all we can do for the moment is stand to our stations and do our duty to the best of our abilities. I give you my word that I will pass on any further information I receive as soon as is practically possible. Captain, out.”
Penberthy handed the microphone to the Bridge Speaker, an eighteen year old seasick boy who’d only joined the ship a week ago, one of a draft of fourteen new sea duty men straight from the completion of his thirteen week basic training at HMS Collingwood in Hampshire.
“Chin up, lad,” he murmured, patting the kid’s shoulder. “Chin up.”
Penberthy had turned Talavera onto a course that would take her out into the middle of the North Sea some twenty minutes before, now she was battering her away from the English coast at twenty-seven knots. He felt like a coward, running like a scalded cat with his tail between its legs. He’d asked himself what else he could do in the circumstances, no answer had come. Talavera was a warship in name alone. She had her seaworthiness, her radar and her communications suite and that was all. She had no ammunition, nor the trained crews to fight her guns and missile launchers even if her magazines weren’t empty. His first responsibility was the safety of his ship and plainly nowhere near land was remotely safe.
“What’s the news on our bunkers?” He inquired, grimacing at the ruddy-faced, four-square man who’d come onto the bridge as he was addressing the crew.
Lieutenant-Commander John Cook, Talavera’s forty-three year old Engineering Officer’s expression mirrored his Captain’s grimace. He’d served briefly with his captain many years ago in the Mediterranean on the fast minelayer Manxman. Those had seemed desperate days when the only way to transport vital supplies into Malta - besieged and starving and under constant aerial bombardment - had been to send Manxman and her sister Apollo on forty knot helter skelter night time sorties through the blockade.
“You can have another ninety minutes at these revs, sir,” the other man replied, taciturn as ever. As he spoke he wiped his hands on a rag he produced from his almost, but not quite, pristine uniform boiler suit. “After that we won’t have enough fuel to make land,” he shrugged, “anywhere.”
“Ninety minutes?”
“Aye, sir. That’ll run tanks three and four dry, sir.”
Penberthy nodded. Talavera had been tasked to be at sea forty-eight hours operating at no more than cruising speed; fifteen to eighteen knots. The galley had taken on seven days rations but the Dockyard Superintendent had allocated a typically miserly fuel reserve despite Penberthy’s angry complaints that in her new configuration, Talavera’s centre of gravity would be unnecessarily elevated – making her sea keeping motion worse – for the purpose of running radar trials unless she flooded several of her bunkers. The Dockyard Superintendent didn’t give a damn whether the reconstructed destroyer rolled like a barge or if her bunkers would have to be cleaned when she got back to port; Penberthy wasn’t going to have a drop more of his precious bunker oil than he absolutely needed.
“What about revs for twenty knots, John?”
“Two hours, maybe.” The other man hesitated. “Two-and-a-half, perhaps.”“
Penberthy contemplated the options. No, he decided, they’d continue out to sea at their best speed for as long as they could. As if to emphasise the urgency of putting as much sea room as possible between the ship and the land the enclosed conning bridge briefly filled with blinding light through the aft viewing scuttles.
“Very well. We shall continue at present revs for one hour, Chief.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” The other man departed back down into the bowels of the destroyer.
Almost immediately, Penberthy was handed another comms handset.
Lieutenant Peter Christopher sounded calm, pragmatic.
“May I have permission to operate at a reduced EWO status, sir?”
“Is there a problem, Peter?” Penberthy asked, his mind still turning over the critical fuel situation.
“I’d like to secure as much kit as possible, sir,” the younger officer explained, very patiently. “In case we get too close to one of those strikes.”
Penberthy’s mind clicked back into gear.
Much of Talavera’s electronics suite was theoretically, at least, hardened to survive the EMP – electro-magnetic pulse – from the atmospheric detonation of large thermonuclear warheads but this wasn’t the time or the place to be respecting theoretical promises.
“Go ahead and secure everything except ship to shore communications and the main search radar.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
In the CIC Peter Christopher didn’t turn from his seat behind the main repeater operator. He put down the handset. “Everything off except the Type 965 and its repeaters,” he declared. The rest of the team had been hanging on the edge of their seats waiting for the order. Screens started fading, the compartment grew dimmer. He listened to the reports, sighed with relief when the last one came in.
“EWO to bridge,” he called, lifting the speaker handset to his face. “All non-essential search, targeting and com
munications gear has been secured.”
For the first time in many minutes Peter Christopher became aware of the surging, bucking, violent progress of the destroyer across the stormy sea. Talavera was charging into the short, steep North Sea swells, and every now and then her propellers almost breached into thin air as she alternatively sliced through or rammed into each new wave, digging her bow deep one moment and racing forward, stern buried the next. If he hadn’t been so terrified he’d probably have been being violently sea sick by now.
03:42 Hours Zulu
HMS Dreadnought, Barrow-in-Furness
Lieutenant-Commander Simon Collingwood guessed Dreadnought’s cluttered pressure hull now sheltered at least two hundred souls. Most of her fitting out crew, some forty officers and men had reported to the boat within the first few minutes of the alarm being raised. Others, local dockyard workers, civilians, families from the bed and breakfast houses outside the dockyard gates, men from other ships, had quickly coalesced around the great beached whale in the main graving dock. When he’d seen the first lightning-like strike on the southern horizon Collingwood hadn’t hesitated, he’d had a speaker mounted in the cockpit at the top of the submarine’s sail and ordered everybody still above ground to come aboard Dreadnought.
The horrible quietness in the crush of bodies in the uncompleted nuclear submarine was punctuated by the cries of a baby, the occasional whispered order. Otherwise a fog of despair began to settle.
Collingwood stood by the periscope, sweeping the horizon with the scope set at minimum magnification with the red filter on the lens. He didn’t know if that would protect his sight if he happened to focus on the vicinity of a detonation. Right now he wasn’t sure if he cared. Nearby buildings and cranes obscured some ninety degrees of the eastern horizon so it was difficult to get accurate bearings of each successive strike and in any event, it was not a clear night. Heavy banks of cloud rolled over Furness, gaps in the overcast tended to be narrow, fleeting. It was like watching an intermittent distant firework display through a blindfold.
Albeit the most terrible firework display on earth.
He was scanning the northern sky when the whole world lit up like a nightmare.
“Fuck!” He muttered, tearing his face away from the eyepiece. He shook his head, blinked, discovering to his surprise that he wasn’t blind. The periscope must have been pointed directly away from the airburst. “Count!” He demanded.
Eleven seconds later the blast over-pressure wave of the detonation across the other side of Morecombe bay smashed into the casing of HMS Dreadnought...
The thermonuclear warhead of the SS-5 medium range ballistic missile (MRBM) that detonated some seven miles due east of Dreadnought’s dry dock at an altitude of two thousand feet, had a yield of 1.14 megatons. The missile was one of only a handful recently added to the inventory of the Soviet Strategic Missile Command and had been moved to an advance base in Latvia just three weeks previously. The missile was so brand new that the units equipped with it had not yet fully familiarized themselves with its systems and operational parameters. Designed to strike targets up to 2,200 nautical miles distant with a circular error probability (CEP), of 0.5 miles, it had probably been targeted at a V-Bomber base in Yorkshire, or a centre of population such as Liverpool or Manchester, or perhaps, even the Vickers Industries Shipbuilders yard where HMS Dreadnought was known to be fitting out in preparation for her maiden voyage in the spring. Nobody would ever know its intended target although, self-evidently, it was reasonable to assume that the dead Soviet missile men who’d launched it minutes before they themselves were swept to oblivion in a storm of thermonuclear fire, would not have had any reason to specifically target the middle of Morecambe Bay.
The fifty million degree ignition flash of the warhead lit up hundreds of square miles of sea, land and sky more brightly than any summer day in human history. The flash burned for over twenty seconds. Within ten seconds the fireball was a mile across and its temperature, although reduced by nearly eighty percent, still between ten and eleven million degrees. Anybody within twenty miles who had looked into the heart of the raging nuclear fire would have been blinded, and anybody out in the open within ten miles would have suffered second degree burns to exposed flesh.
The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had exploded with a force equivalent to approximately 12,500 tons of Trinitrotoluene (TNT), or 0.0125 megatons. The bomb that detonated over Morecambe Bay that night had an explosive power of at least ninety times that of the Hiroshima bomb. If it had exploded on the ground it would have excavated a crater over one hundred feet deep and over a thousand feet in diameter. The walls of that crater, lethally irradiated, would have stood several stories high above the surrounding countryside, and the fast rising mushroom cloud would have been heavily laden with pulverised soil and debris which would later return to earth, possibly hundreds of miles away as lethally radioactive fallout.
The Morecambe Bay bomb was, like the majority of the warheads deployed that night by all sides, configured to air burst. Unless a target was buried deep underground like a missile silo or a command bunker, or a specific runway or piece of vital ‘hardened’ infrastructure such as a dam or a port, a surface blast was the least efficient way to employ any nuclear weapon. An air burst was, all things being equal, at least twice as destructive as a ground blast and it sucked up significantly less radioactive fallout. Simply stated; in an air burst the blast overpressure created by the explosion is spread over a much wider area. In an environment where pinpoint accuracy cannot be relied upon, and where the initial blast and radiation cannot be guaranteed of itself to destroy a given target the great thermonuclear killer is blast overpressure.
Blast overpressure is a shock wave travelling at over seven hundred miles an hour, one mile every five seconds outwards in every direction from the epicentre of the blast. Two miles away from a one megaton air burst local overpressure is over ten pounds per square inch; every building is destroyed with only the traces of concrete foundations surviving. Within this radius of the explosion almost everybody is killed instantly. Four miles away, overpressure is 6 pounds per square inch, and everything above ground implodes or is blown away except the steel and concrete frames of buildings on the edge of the zone. An overpressure of 5 pounds will rupture eardrums, lungs, and transport a human body through the air like a rag doll in a two hundred mile an hour wind. Just 2 pounds of overpressure will flatten – literally flatten – a normal house. Between five and six miles away all windows will splinter explosively and hundred-mile-an-hour winds will blast into damaged buildings and scour the landscape. Ten miles away from the blast epicentre normal windows will disintegrate and rain deadly dagger-like slivers of glass onto anybody who has not taken shelter.
The mushroom cloud ascends to fifteen or sixteen miles high, at which time it will be around thirty miles across. Within six miles of a 1 megaton air blast, nearly everybody with be dead or seriously injured, between six and ten miles perhaps twenty to thirty percent of people will be injured, and as many as ten percent as far out as ten to twenty miles. Anybody caught in the open out to the twenty mile radius will probably have been killed or seriously injured and suffered first or second degree burns to exposed flesh; anybody unfortunate enough to have been looking directly at the airburst will also be blinded for life.
On the eastern side of Morecombe Bay the seaside town of Morecombe was wrecked, as was Lancaster several miles inland. The thermal pulse of the detonation ignited fires that quickly took hold in the ruins. In Morecombe the few survivors of the initial overpressure died trapped in the fires. In Lancaster, two to three miles inland, fires were slower to take hold and perhaps thirty percent of the population survived the first few days after the air burst. Down the coast Heysham was destroyed, north of Morecombe the village of Bolton-le-Sands and the town of Cairnforth were virtually wiped off the face of the earth. North of the air burst Cartmel, Flookburgh, Grange-over-Sands and practically every other sign of human habitation above
ground ceased to exist, blown away by the fires from Hell. Ulveston, north-west of the air burst, and several communities on the Furness peninsular – by some fluke of thermodynamics – suffered less total destruction than places as close to the epicentre of the maelstrom to the east. In Ulveston some buildings still stood, fires didn’t take hold everywhere and perhaps fifty percent of the citizens survived the initial blast. Barrow began to burn within minutes of the air burst. In the dockyard debris rained across HMS Dreadnought’s pressure casing like bullets.
In the crowded control room Lieutenant-Commander Simon Collingwood waited until the noise stopped. He rose to his feet and slowly turned, attempting to make eye contact with the terrified civilians, men, women and children and with his own people.
“Do we still have power from the external; generators?” He asked, wondering how he could be so calm.
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good. We’ll continue to charge our batteries while we can.
There were portable radiation monitors in the reactor compartment. For a moment until he thought better of it he toyed with the idea of placing the devices near the open hatches. No, let’s not panic everybody quite yet.
There will be plenty to panic about soon enough.
Chapter 5
An extract from ‘The Anatomy of Armageddon: America, Cuba, the USSR and the Global Disaster of October 1962’ reproduced by the kind permission of the New Memorial University of California, Los Angeles Press published on 27th October 2012 in memoriam of the fallen.