From the moment I had heard those piercing words from Slovetski's
mouth, I had been obsessed with a vision. A Hell-bomb on the Home
Office. America's eastern seaboard split open. New York a hole in the
ocean, from Kingston to Sandy Hook; orange flames spreading across
Connecticut and the Pennsylvania corner.
That was gone--and in its place was something worse.
Radiocobalt bombing wouldn't simply kill locally by a gout of flaring
radiation. It would leave the atmosphere filled with colloidal
particles of deadly, radioactive Cobalt-60. A little of that could be
used to cure cancers and perform miracles. The amount released from
the sheathing of cobalt--normal, "safe" cobalt--around a fissioning
hydrogen bomb could kill a world. A single bomb of that kind could wipe
out all life on Earth, as I remembered my schooling.
I'm no physicist; I didn't know what the quantities involved might
mean, once the equations came off the drafting paper and settled like
a ravening storm on the human race. But I had a glimpse of radioactive
dust in every breeze, in every corner of every land. Perhaps a handful
of persons in Cambodia or Vladivostok or Melbourne might live through
it. But there was no question in my mind: If that bomb went off, it was
the end of our civilization.