Final impact

Gologre watched as the first atomic bomb to be dropped on a city fell away from the dark womb of the Tupolev Tu-16.

After five seconds three enormous parachutes deployed and slowed its decent to a more measured pace. Lieutenant Gologre had used the latest bombsight to line up on the Lodz town hall, but a light breeze carried the egg-shaped, four-and-a-half-thousand-kilogram load slightly northward. He had been briefed on the effects of the device and knew only too well what he was about to unleash.

The device, modeled on the original Fat Man, was almost cartoonish in appearance, with a swollen body and oversized stabilizing fins. It was so very obviously a bomb that nobody would be foolish enough to stand staring at it as it descended, swinging gently beneath the triple canopy. A small web-cam in the nose sent pictures of the ground back to a mil-grade EMP-hardened flexipad on the Tupolev. Later, bomb damage analysts would be able to replay images of German troops and a handful of Polish civilians fleeing the gardens as the bomb dropped ever so slowly into their midst.

Code-named “Gori,” it was an implosion device. In the center of the bulbous casing sat six and a half kilograms of delta-phase plutonium alloy. Some of this had come from the reactors on the British vessel Vanguard, but most had been bred in the Kamchatka Sharashka. Shaped into a nine-centimeter sphere with a small cavity at its center, the pit-as it was called-was actually composed of two hemispheric halves, separated by a thin golden gasket to prevent premature penetration by shock wave jets that might trigger the bomb’s neutron initiator too early. While Beria’s researchers had not been able to find blueprints for a bomb in the Vanguard’s archives, there was still a wealth of detail about the construction of early atomic weaponry, the sort of thing that the Soviet Union would have had to ferret out with a massive espionage program before the Emergence.

Nearly half of Gori’s weight came from its trigger, a high-explosive casing that resembled a giant soccer ball nearly half a meter thick. The hexagonal pieces formed a lens around the plutonium that transformed a convex, expanding shock wave into a concave, converging one.

At six hundred meters off the ground, four radar antennae in Gori’s nose determined that it had reached the optimum height for discharge. Bridge-wire detonators fired every panel of the “soccer ball” trigger simultaneously, producing such powerful inward pressure on the plutonium core that it was squeezed into a supercritical condition.

Three effects manifested themselves immediately: blast, heat, and radiation. There was also an electromagnetic pulse, but it had a negligible effect in the primitive environment. Such systems as might have been affected, like those on the Tupolev, had been hardened to withstand the effect.

In the first few milliseconds energy was released in the form of high-intensity X-rays. The steel egg vaporized, and the X-rays expanded into the air above the parkland. Unfortunately for every living organism within the city and its surroundings, the air was not “transparent” to the X-rays, and so their energy was unable to freely propagate. The atmosphere began to heat up, and a ball of expanding plasma formed. Milliseconds after the initial explosion, its temperature could be measured in millions of degrees.

A few milliseconds later, by the time the fireball had grown to about thirty meters in width, it had cooled considerably-to three hundred thousand degrees Celsius, or about fifty times the surface temperature of the sun.

At ground zero the soil boiled and exploded, vaporized, and added its mass to the expanding plasma. So, too, every atom of organic and inorganic mater in the small park. Trees, grass, iron benches, granite flagstones, human beings, birds, insects, everything: it all fueled the atomic furnace. Even a kilometer away, solid stone buildings liquefied as the thermal shock swept over them. Lodz was crowded, and sixty-five thousand souls were consumed by the superhot plasma sphere, but the true destructiveness of Gori was still to be unleashed. A gamma ray pulse and neutron bath added their lethal effects to the light and heat of the small sun that bloomed over the city.

The air surrounding the fireball was massively compressed, then pushed outward. Unlike even the largest chemical explosions, the nuclear blast created a very wide shock wave still thick enough to entirely surround the city’s small buildings, crushing them from all sides. The medieval core of Lodz was entirely pulverized.