Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [75]
“We went eyeball to eyeball with the Russians,” Rusk would say when it was all over, “and the other guy blinked.”
Well, maybe, Dean. Or maybe this: you and the Russians were like two guys in a cellar, up to their waists in petrol, arguing about who’s got the bigger box of matches.
And besides, the truth is that the face-off, with my life and Frankie’s and the planet’s at stake, wasn’t between Kennedy and Khrushchev. It was between Kennedy and his bomb-happy generals, in particular, a cigar-chomping maniac called Curtis LeMay. I, we, owe our continuing existence to the fact that JFK held his nerve against his own armed forces. Or, to put it another way, that he had the courage to show fear when his generals hadn’t.
I’ll get to that, and LeMay, in a minute. First, we need to have a stab at the mental arithmetic of annihilation.
YOU’LL HAVE SEEN the photos of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the American atomic bombs hit them in August 1945. Those black-and-white pictures of what looks like an archaeological dig: the husks and shadowy traces of an ancient civilization revealed by scraping the surface of the earth away. The grid of streets traced in pale ash. Here and there, rectangular shadows that might have been houses, office blocks. Black holes, pits, that once had a purpose, once had been part of something. Scorched wisps of what look like hair but are congealed tangles of steel. Of human beings, those frail things, there is no sign or remnant.
Strangely, Hiroshima and Nagasaki look gray and frozen, as though they’d been scoured by some awful polar wind. Actually, they were purged by a fire so intense that their inhabitants were vaporized by it. Their last breaths set fire to their lungs as their eyeballs melted.
A mother takes her baby to suckle her breast; the world roars, explodes; for a microsecond, they are linked joints of cooked meat; for another, white-hot bones; then they are gone, particles of dust whirled away in the exhale of the holocaust.
At the square-mile epicenter of the blast, the heat would have melted granite. Most of the buildings in Hiroshima were made of wood.
Twenty minutes after the initial explosion, while the mushroom cloud towered and boiled above the city, while the fires raged, rain began to fall on the remains of western Hiroshima. It was black rain, and radioactive, and it continued for two hours.
One hundred and forty thousand or so people were killed by the bomb. Most died either during the impact or within the following two weeks, of burns or other radiation injuries. For several days, a southerly wind blowing across Hiroshima carried with it a smell like burning fish.
There were survivors, of course. Some were unwise enough to flee southwestward to the city of Nagasaki, upon which, three days after Hiroshima, the Americans dropped an even bigger bomb.
Nuclear weapons go on killing long after the fires have gone out and the toxic fallout has settled. Within weeks of the bombings, people in the environs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began to sprout keloids, grotesque rubbery scars that claw and spread across the surface of the body and face. The incidence of these disfiguring growths peaked in the years 1946 and 1947, after the war was over. Babies of mothers exposed to radiation were born deformed or were condemned to early death from diseases of the nerve and brain tissue. Eye disorders, especially cataracts, became increasingly commonplace. The long legacy of nuclear bombing is, of course, cancer. By the mid-1950s, Japan had more people dying from leukemia than anywhere else in the world. And for a very long time, the fields around the two cities produced poisonous harvests.
For all this, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were feeble squibs compared to the infernal firecrackers that Kennedy and Khrushchev had at their disposal in 1962. Nuclear warheads are measured in tons, kilotons, and megatons. A ton, here, is not a measurement of weight; it’s a