Termination Shock полностью

Simon nodded. “The Russians set it off about ten months before Mr. Dyson wrote this.” He put his hand on the document. “The interesting takeaway was that despite its fifty-megaton yield, it didn’t do as much damage as expected. Why? Because the earth is hard and the atmosphere is quite yielding—and only gets more so the higher up you go. So the explosion sort of ricocheted off the ground and went the only way it could go and basically punched a hole through the atmosphere and dissipated its power into the void. For those in the know, the lesson learned was that making bigger bombs was a waste of resources. But Freeman Dyson understood that large bombs could still have military effect provided you worked out a way to detonate them in a medium that would contain the blast and absorb its energy, rather than just venting it into outer space. Such a medium is water. The scenario he describes here, starting on about page 6, is that a very large hydrogen bomb—much bigger than the Tsar Bomba, even—is deposited on the floor of the ocean offshore from the coastal region to be attacked. This is easy to do covertly using a submarine or just kicking it off a ship. When the bomb is later detonated, all its energy is deposited into the surrounding water, creating an artificial tsunami that crests over the nearby coastline and, to borrow a homely phrase from the Yanks, breaks a lot of things and hurts a lot of people. And I do mean a lot, in Dyson’s scenario. No one ever accused that man of not thinking big.”

“Are you working up to tell us that we got nuked the other day?” asked one of the Dutch intelligence analysts, half serious.

“No. As you know, a nuclear explosion would have left isotopic evidence. It also would have done a lot more damage than just wrecking one half of the Maeslantkering.”

“Then how is this old document relevant?”

“If you scan down to the bottom half of page 7 you’ll see that Dyson says that the techniques for carrying out such an attack could be developed and rehearsed using H.E.—high explosive—charges in place of nukes.” Simon adjusted his glasses and found the relevant quote: “‘This part of the enterprise would not be expensive and would not require a high level of technological sophistication. Moreover, the installation and testing program could rather easily be camouflaged and kept secret.’”

Simon flipped the document over facedown, as if to emphasize that he was now going off Dyson’s script. “So. Let’s take nukes off the table altogether and talk about that ‘part of the enterprise’ to use his wording. He’s envisioning a relatively small, cheap pilot program that consists, for example, of packing ANFO or TNT into a shipping container and shoving it off a ship at sea.”

Since this meeting was being held in a shipping container, everyone looked around and tried to imagine every cubic centimeter of the space packed full of high explosive.

“Later,” Simon continued, “you set it off and measure the result. What is the result? Well, the water above the explosion is going to bulge up. From there, waves are then going to spread outward. To give you a feel for magnitude, a standard shipping container full of TNT gives you rather more than a tenth of a kiloton of explosive yield. In round numbers, it would require a hundred of those to give you a Hiroshima-sized explosion. But even a single one, if the water isn’t too deep, will produce a bulge and a system of waves.”

“Spreading outward in all directions,” Willem said, “if I’m following you correctly.”

“You are, Dr. Castelein,” Simon confirmed.

“Then it seems to me that the waves would spread out and dissipate.”