a spaceship launches a missile at a planet;
the sound of the missile through the atmosphere shatters crags and causes landslides;
in the dawn light, the missile resembles a silver comet;
detecting the city towers that it has been sent to destroy, it plunges towards them;
there are no ground defences;
the tall, wide fireball outshines suns;
the top of the atmosphere is its roof;
it remains visible for several minutes on the curve of the planet;
dust makes night above a crater full of molten stone;
the explosion is audible around the planet;
that is only the first of many strikes, from a fleet of ships, which last for an hour.
No wonder the Merseians found no evidence of conditions on the planet before the bombardment.
A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, Chapter XX.
12 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Perhaps regrettably, I can see a terrible, sinister beauty in the picture you gave of a flaming mushroom cloud after a nuclear bomb's explosion.
Yes, it's no surprise the Merseians who investigated the ruins after the Dennitzans departed found no evidence of what the actual situation had been. And I think Flandry and the Dennitzans took steps to keep that knowledge secret.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
In fact I recall how Anderson sometimes described the terrible beauty of a nuclear explosion.
Sean
Incidentally, my father was in a slit trench 1.8 miles from the ground zero of a fusion bomb explosion in 1957. (He died at the age of 92, of unrelated causes.)
Dear Mr. Stirling!
I'm amazed! MY understanding was that safe observation of a fusion bomb's explosion should be from MILES way in a shielded bunker. I'm glad your father beat the odds and suffered no bad consquences from being so near such an explosion!
Sean
The gamma-ray burst from a fusion bomb is easily stopped by a couple of feet of earth, and the heat-flash ditto at that range. Apart from that, the dangers are blast overpressure (which decreases according to the inverse-square law), and then getting caught under the fallout plume, which is only a danger if you're downwind.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you for technical details!
Paul.
People tend to think of nuclear weapons in supernatural terms. I try to keep in mind that they're actually just very powerful explosives with some temporarily toxic by-products.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Thanks for the technical details and the hard headed, common sense attitude. Only goes to show I need to reread Poul Anderson's THERMONUCLEAR WARFARE, where he discusses such things in detail.
Sean
The much-derided "duck and cover" actually works, if you're in the right place. If you're under the ground zero of a fusion bomb, the only thing that helps is having a mountain over your head. But the effects drop off quite rapidly, and there's a broad area where quite modest protection will mean the difference between life and death, or between injury and no injury.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
That does fit in with what I recall reading on this subject. Probably, in fact, the Anderson book I mentioned above. I recently started rereading his A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS after I finished your THE PROTECTOR'S WAR. Think I will reread PA's THERMONUCLEAR WARFARE after KNIGHT.
Sean
Re: "temporarily toxic by-products."
My father was working in another building at the Chalk River nuclear labs when the NRX reactor had its accident in 1952.
https://www.cns-snc.ca/media/history/nrx.html
He was involved with the cleanup. He died at age 89 in 2012.
So the fathers of two commenters on this blog lived long lives after radiation exposure.
Kaor, Jim!
I think, however, both your father and Stirling's, did not suffer from undue radiation exposure if certain sensible precautions were taken.
Ad astra! Sean
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