warheads got past us. This time, I guarantee you he’s not aiming at the water.”
Brenthoven nodded. “I’m sure you’re right about that, sir.”
Hydraulic pumps moaned, and the armored covers slid aside from four of the missile silos. The reinforced concrete silos were octagonal pits of shadow under the dark pre-dawn sky.
Billows of smoke boiled up out of each silo, and four Lockheed Martin booster rockets blasted into the air on snarling trails of fire.
More than 2,000 miles northwest of Vandenberg, three more interceptor missiles climbed away from the Army missile complex at Fort Greely, Alaska, and hurtled toward the fringes of space.
Seventeen minutes later, and more than a thousand miles to the west, Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle #1 collided with the first reentry vehicle at 25,000 miles per hour. Millions of Newton-meters of kinetic energy were translated instantly to several hundred megajoules of thermal energy.
With a flash that would have dazzled the eyes of any human observer, the EKV and its target were annihilated.
A hundred and fifty miles below, and four time zones to the east, the morning watch team in the Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications Control Center witnessed the destruction of EKV #1 and its target on the tasking screens of their consoles.
Less than ten seconds later, EKV #4 killed another warhead, followed almost immediately by another successful kill as EKV #2 performed the task for which it had been built.
The Air Force personnel held their collective breath. They needed a miracle. And maybe … just
A dozen or so seconds later, EKV #5 scored a bull’s-eye, bringing the score to a perfect four out of four. Just two more successful intercepts, and the nightmare would be over. Just
EKV #6 slammed home, and another of the Russian reentry vehicles disappeared in a flare of thermo-kinetic destruction.
If the unfolding situation had been an Ian Fleming movie, James Bond would have clipped the red wire at the last possible instant, staving off the threat of nuclear desolation until the super-spy’s next on-screen adventure. If it had been a Tom Clancy novel, President Jack Ryan would have ridden out the attack aboard a guided missile cruiser, lending moral support to the crew and cadging cigarettes as the plucky Sailors blotted the falling warhead from the sky.
But this was not a movie, and it wasn’t an adventure novel. EKV #3 missed its target by less than ten meters. It might as well have been ten million miles.
The last reentry vehicle fell tail-first into the atmosphere, streaking across the darkened sky like a shooting star.
Within the fat little cone of the heat shield, a relay clicked open, routing electrical power to the ring of high- voltage capacitors that encircled the core of the warhead. The capacitors began ramping up to full charge as the Soviet-built nuclear warhead armed itself for detonation.
As the warhead fell past the 3,000-meter mark, ninety-six electrical initiators fired simultaneously, detonating ninety-six trapezoidal charges of high explosive encapsulating a hollow sphere of plutonium 239. Driven inward by the implosion, the shell collapsed toward its own center, super-compressing an envelope of tritium gas and triggering the secondary stage of the bomb.
The local time was 2:38 AM and seven seconds. Dawn was still four hours away, and a yellow three-quarter moon was just climbing above the horizon, when the air above Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was shattered by a flash more than ten times as bright as the sun.
Every eye that happened to be looking toward that portion of the sky was instantaneously blinded. Tourists taking moonlight strolls on Waikiki beach saw an instant of unbearable brilliance and then their vision went dark as their retinas were cauterized. Cab drivers, homeless people, college students, dogs, and seagulls were struck blind without warning. There wasn’t even a sound yet, as the nuclear flash traveled at the speed of light, but the noise of the explosion was limited to the speed of sound, which was many thousands of times slower.
The aircrew of a Qantas 737 were facing directly toward the detonation as their plane was on climb-out from Honolulu International Airport. The sightless captain scrambled to set the automatic pilot by touch, while his First Officer made frantic mayday calls over the radio. Their efforts were useless. The electromagnetic pulse from the detonation fried every microchip and transistor on the plane.
Without computers and flight controls, the 737 ceased to be an aircraft, and became a hurtling collection of unflyable parts. It tumbled out of the air and plowed into a suburban neighborhood, gouging a flaming path of destruction through the homes of the sleeping residents. The aircrew, their eighty-five passengers, and the occupants of the mangled and burnt houses became the first human victims of nuclear attack in nearly three- quarters of a century. But the carnage was just beginning.
The atomic bomb that had devastated the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 had yielded an explosive force of 13 kilotons. The warhead that struck Oahu on the morning of March the 7th was more than fifteen times as powerful.
Two hundred kilotons of nuclear energy were converted to nearly a billion megajoules of radiant heat. Thermal radiation burst outward from ground zero in an expanding wave that burned people, buildings, animals, plants, and vehicles with equal efficiency. The firestorm swept through Naval Station Pearl Harbor, and the surrounding communities of Pearl City, ‘Aiea, and Waipahu, searing everything and everyone in its path.
Gamma rays, neutrons, and x-rays shot out from the center of the chain reaction, bombarding everything in the area with lethal ionizing radiation.
Less than a second behind the thermal front came the shock wave, lashing out with the explosive force of 440 million pounds of TNT. Anything not already incinerated by the firestorm was ripped apart, or pulverized by the monstrous overpressure of the mechanical wave front.
Again the Naval Station and the surrounding cities were hammered by a destructive force that nothing and no one could withstand. Miles upon miles of buildings were crushed into powder or torn into minute fragments. Vehicles fluttered through the air like leaves in a hurricane. Roofs were peeled away; walls imploded; steel melted; stone shattered; and concrete crumbled. Airplanes and helicopters were swatted out of the air. Telephone poles, mailboxes, guardrails, fence posts, bodies, dirt, and broken window glass all became part of the roaring maelstrom of debris.
At two-thirty in the morning, the manning level of the naval base was at its low point. Slightly less than a thousand civilians and military personnel were on the base when the bomb exploded. Not one of them survived.
Eighty-percent of the residents of Pearl City, nearly 30,000 people, were dead or dying within five seconds of the blast. The adjoining towns of Waipahu and ‘Aiea were burned to cinders and smashed flat, killing another 40,000 people within seconds.
The hypocenter of the explosion occurred over the harbor itself. Thousands of tons of water were flash- vaporized, forming steam and radioactive water droplets that recondensed and drizzled from the sky like poison rain.
The rapid formation of super-heated low-density gases at low altitude created a Rayleigh-Taylor instability. An enormous volume of hot gas rose rapidly, causing turbulent vortices to curl downward along the outer perimeter of the rising column. Fire, smoke, dirt, debris, and water vapor were drawn upward by the same principle of physics that causes hot air to rise up a chimney.
