“Secretary Kane doesn’t expect results until tomorrow at the latest.”
“What the hell is so goddamn difficult about counting how many nuclear weapons and where they are?”
“The DOD reasons are a mile long,” Dabrowski replied. “What they amount to is that there is no specific number so that no one can look at the weapons tally and say, ‘Oh, one is missing.’ There’s a climate of deep secrecy. And the weapons are scattered. It’s like an attic. Lots of boxes and barrels. And each box or barrel is sealed. Everything is top secret or SCI.”
Falcone motioned to the chairs in front of his desk. “Okay, let’s try to organize our thinking. We don’t know whether we’re trying to investigate an act of terror by an organization or a country; an act of evil by some wacko; or some kind of an extraordinary accident. And if it is an accident, was it caused by good people or bad people? We’ve ruled out some kind of long-range accident from one of the Georgia nuclear power plants, right?”
“Right,” Hawkins answered. “We’ve gotten a lot of DOE nuke experts out of bed, gave them what we know, and they absolutely rule out either of the plants being responsible. NNSA, which not only runs NEST but also keeps track of all transporting of nuclear material, says there was nothing dangerous moving in, through, or out of Georgia for the past year.” He hesitated, allowing a signal of doubt to enter his brisk delivery.
“But,” he continued, “‘nothing dangerous’ struck me as an odd phrase. I poked into NNSA’s installations. There’s something called SRS.”
“Never heard of it,” Falcone said.
“Let’s hope that’s true of the media, too. SRS means Savannah River Site. It’s about one hundred and thirty miles north of Savannah.”
“What goes on there?”
“NNSA—or at least the NNSA duty officer—says SRS processes tritium, an isotope of hydrogen gas used in nuclear weapons. NNSA’s Web site says tritium is a relatively low-risk radioactive source. That’s where the ‘nothing dangerous’ probably comes from.
“But tritium is in nuclear weapons and has to be replenished continually because it decays so quickly. The site recycles tritium from disassembled warheads and introduces new tritium by extracting it from rods irradiated in nuclear reactors. The rods come from an NNSA site in Tennessee. To do what it does, the Savannah River Site has to move a lot of nuclear material around.
“I called back, talked to the duty officer again. Not to worry, he says. It is keeping a careful watch on all this stuff, and that makes it nondangerous.”
A nuclear facility called Savannah River Site, Falcone realized, would be a natural target of speculation by any reporter trying to find a possible source of the radiation in Savannah. But, Hawkins told him, luckily few outside NNSA knew anything about the place.
“When things calm down,” Hawkins said, “maybe we’ll be able to take another look at SRS. But right now, moving forward, I think we should assume it’s benign.”
“Well, for now at least, that gives us an end point. It looks as if we can eliminate SRS along with the power plants,” Falcone said.
“To make an end is to make a beginning,” Dabrowski said.
“Aunt Eva?”
“No,” she said, smiling for the first time since the first Savannah report came in. “T. S. Eliot.”
Falcone, also managing a smile, said, “Okay, Anna. You’re up. Stockpile inventory.”
“There are three stockpiles,” Dabrowski said. “All told, we’ve got about nine thousand, nine hundred warheads. I have to say about because, at any given moment, the count can change. Warheads are being shifted all the time from one stockpile to the other.
“But how do we count the nuclear weapons that aren’t there? When the cold war ended, the United States had about twenty-three thousand nuclear weapons. There were not only obsolete missile warheads but nuclear oddities, like the SADM, the Special Atomic Demolition Munition, small enough for a soldier to carry in a knapsack and blow up places in the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe.”
“What happened to them?” Falcone asked. “They sound like those Russian suitcase bombs.”
“‘Accounted for’ is the basis for our treaties on nuclear weapons. Theoretically, when both sides started counting nuclear weapons for treaties, both sides dismantled—and accounted for—all the excess warheads, presumably including those suitcases and knapsacks. So, essentially they disappeared as weapons and their fissile material was recycled for use by nuclear power plants or stored away in waste tanks at NNSA sites like Hanford in Washington State.
“Then there are the nuclear weapons on various seafloors. They’re in the wrecks of U.S. and Russian submarines or were accidentally dropped from planes, and so forth. The experts I talked to insist that in these cases, ‘lost’ doesn’t mean ‘unaccounted for.’ Nor are they considered dangerous. So I didn’t get into detail about the so-called lost nukes.
“We also must demand accounting from the Russians. That would mean getting assurances from a lot of former and current nuclear warhead sites. About seventy sites, at last count.”
“To get a reasonable count fast, I think we should also ignore the storage sites right now and start with the existing stockpiles.
“I’ve asked for immediate stockpile information from three sources—a lot of people are losing sleep at the CIA, Department of Energy, and the Pentagon. And I drew up recommendations for dealing with each stockpile. If we can get NNSA people to give us their data—with three or four of our people asking questions and verifying the counting—we should be able to see if anything appears to be missing or suspicious. It’s all laid out in this.”
She handed Falcone a one-page memo:
We must determine immediately if any U.S. nuclear weapons are missing. They are in three categories known as “stockpiles.” Here is the status of the stockpiles and recommendations for dealing with them.
Operationally Deployed: Fully operational weapons mated with delivery systems. Incidentally, there are eight types of nuclear warheads, and most of them have a dozen or so variations. These are combat-ready weapons whose warheads are regularly counted under arms-limitation treaties. Recommendation: No need for an independent count by us. We can assume that alarms would be going off if any warhead in this stockpile is missing. We should give priority to the other two stockpiles.
Active Stockpile: A mixed bag of weapons that are not “operationally deployed,” meaning, for instance, ballistic missiles on submarines that are not at sea (which is about two-thirds of their time). In this stockpile are also “spares” for active-duty warheads that are undergoing maintenance. And, at various bases, are warheads that are not officially deployed by treaty definition. These are just as ready-for-use as the weapons in the Operationally Deployed Stockpile, but, because they are not subject to treaty counts, they are scattered and inventoried under varying rules. Remember the B-52 bomber that flew across the central United States carrying six nuclear cruise missiles that had been accidentally attached to the bomber’s wing? Those warheads were real. They might but not have been “operationally deployed,” but each one had the power of as many as ten Hiroshima bombs. There were a half-dozen security breakdowns in that incident alone. And each one could have resulted in the theft of a nuclear missile. Recommendation: We can’t assume anything here. We need a rigorous, site-by-site count by the NNSA under our direct surveillance.
Inactive Reserve: These are weapons that are kept intact but not in operational condition. This is an in-between stage defined in treaties as “undeployable.” But they should still concern us because these are weapons that only need re-assembly. Recommendation: Get an NNSA expert to go over this category, site-by-site, also under our surveillance.
“We’ve got a huge job here, Anna,” Falcone said, after quickly reading the memo. “Bring in everybody you can from the NSC staff for the counting surveillance. We can’t leave this to the NNSA alone.” He handed the memo to Hawkins, who read it and nodded.
“And who d
id you wake up, Hawk?” Falcone asked.
“Proliferation specialists at State and the CIA mostly,” Hawkins replied. “Of the nine countries in the Nuclear Club—us, China, Russia, the UK, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—we obviously have to focus on three: a loose nuke in Pakistan or India or North Korea, and a real or rogue use by the North Koreans.”
“What about a loose one in the other countries?” Falcone asked.
“Analysts at State and CIA are drawing up a country-by-country intelligence assessment on the likelihood of a foreign source. They say they’ll have something for us by around noon.”
“Okay,” Falcone said. “When we get that, then State, through our ambassadors, needs to contact every country with nuclear weapons and demand that they verify the status of their stockpiles to make sure that nothing is missing or has been stolen. One of our Iraqi contacts can get through and warn Iran. And tell China that they have to lean hard on North Korea to give assurances or face the consequences.”
“Which will be?” Hawkins asked.
“God only knows. We’re going minute-by-minute. About that high-noon report, who are the analysts writing it?” Falcone asked.
Hawkins looked momentarily perplexed. “I don’t know their names, Sean. I worked through our State liaison, Mitsue.”
“Tell her I want their names and their job evaluations. I don’t want any goddamn contractors on this job. I want feds all the way.”
“Right, Sean,” Hawkins said. “But, remember that Washington Post series on intelligence? Hundreds of companies are putting their employees in the game. More than eight hundred and fifty thousand people—the overwhelming majority of them contractors—have top-secret clearance. I think the best you can hope for is that federal analysts will be the principal contributors, not the only ones.”
“Okay,” Falcone said wearily. “Let’s hope for the best from our many, many helpers. And let’s all try for a few minutes of rest and get back here to figure out what happens next.”
36
ON DAY one, television networks had little to show about the biggest catastrophe ever to strike the United States. Producers built their continuous coverage around the President’s speech and cautious estimates of the death toll. One anchor commentator said, “Thousands had almost certainly died.” Another said, “The toll may well be in the tens of thousands.”
After Falcone created the aerial exclusion zone, the only disaster videos available were GNN’s helicopter images. All networks picked up the GNN report, overriding Ned Winslow’s commentary with speculations and theories from pundits and nuclear-weapon experts sitting in studios and expounding on what they knew about nuclear explosions.
Every network produced similar images: Upon Google satellite views of Savannah, the experts placed circles in varying shades of red showing the probable area of destruction from nuclear weapons of varying size.
Everything in television and in newspapers and in countless new blogs was guesswork, for nothing was coming out of the White House, under siege by reporters, and Falcone had buttoned down every other possible federal source with dire warnings about jeopardizing national security. He continued to keep all of the reconnaissance imagery top secret. So no news medium was able to show what had been seen in the Situation Room.
The catastrophe was the strangest ever to challenge the media. Print reporters, along with television commentators and anchors, could not provide eyewitness reports. As in Japan during its nuclear reactor crisis, the exclusion zone kept changing. And fears of radiation poisoning haunted editors and television producers planning live coverage. A little research showed that the intrepid Russian journalist who made the longest immediate film of the Chernobyl disaster died shortly later of radiation poisoning. Because Homeland Security had temporarily closed down all airports, print reporters and television crews headed down U.S. 95, not knowing what was the edge of the danger zone.
Google showed that a little town called Ridgeland, South Carolina, was the highest point between Charleston and Savannah. So Ridgeland became a media center. Motels and restaurants filled. Trailers arrived to house anchormen and anchorwomen. TV camera trucks cruised the area looking for vantage points to position cameras with long-distance lenses aimed in the general direction of Savannah, thirty-six miles to the south.
They were trying to cover a catastrophe that was both invisible and silent. The electromagnetic pulse, which knocked out all radio and television stations, also severely damaged the electric grid centered in Savannah, and silenced the landline phone system. NBC found an electrical engineer who speculated that the blackout could last for a long time because the pulse probably had destroyed countless high-voltage transformers serving the grid.
“They handle enormous amounts of electricity,” he said. “But they are very sensitive. A pulse can fuse their copper wiring, ruining them beyond repair. The transformers weigh as much as a hundred tons. They’re made in Europe and Asia, and there’s about a three-year waiting list for new ones.”
Unable to show Savannah and deciding that scenes from the 2011 Japanese nuclear disaster were too static, television news producers drew on grainy, panicky film from the 1986 explosion and meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. On CBS, while images of sickly children appeared in the background, a George Washington University physicist talked about “Chernobyl’s long shadow,” quoting a United Nations report that more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer were reported in children and adolescents exposed to radiation at the time of the accident.
On GNN, Ned Winslow tried to keep coverage centered on the need for dependable information. “We really have no idea what happened in Savannah,” he said. “We must wait for information from people on the ground.” He predicted that the incident commander and NEST experts would soon be producing reports. But he lost control of his panel of experts as the giant screen behind them broke into squares, each one showing scenes from an American city.
New York: Mobs fight in Grand Central Station as people seek to flee the city by train because the airports were closed.
Chicago: The Nation of Islam’s mosque is in flames. White youths throw bottles and bricks at firefighters. White and black rioters clash in a haze of tear gas. The blaze was kindled by a radio talk show host who claimed that black Muslims possessed nuclear bombs and planned to set them off in every state that had supported the Confederacy.
Detroit: A mob on the suspension bridge to Canada struggles with Canadian Army soldiers manning hastily erected barriers. Shots are fired at the soldiers. They fire back, killing at least eight Americans.
Miami: Six mammoth cruise ships, ordered into port by the Department of Homeland Security, jam the Miami waterfront. Thousands of passengers, unable to get rooms, vandalize luxury hotels. The Red Cross sets up cots and a soup kitchen at the Miami Beach Convention Center.
Los Angeles: A massive traffic jam paralyzes the city. Dozens of fights break out. Hundreds of men, women, and children—many of them in white robes—line up on the Santa Monica Pier, awaiting the end of the world.
Atlanta: In the atrium of City Hall, the mayor addresses members of families with relatives in Savannah. “We know nothing more. We can only pray,” he says, his voice nearly drowned out by angry shouts: “Liar! Liar!” and a chanting “Tell us truth! Tell us truth! Tell us truth!” Police officers in riot gear push their way through the crowd, surround the mayor, and escort him into the building. Police stand shoulder-to-shoulder, guarding the doors of City Hall.
As the networks began focusing on cities of choice, the Associated Press in Lebanon transmitted a bulletin, instantly read by television reporters: “In an audio message broadcast on the Arab television network Al Jazeera, Al Qaeda leader Tariq Bhutani claims responsibility for the destruction of Savannah. He warned that other American cities were targets of ‘Al Qaeda’s many nuclear weapons.’ He also vowed that more attacks would be launched. There was no way to confirm the voice was actually that of Bhutani.”
In the realm of bloggers, the two leading explanations for the disaster were government conspiracy and God’s wrath. An FBI analysis of the most frantic blogs showed no foreign origin. One blog said that God had destroyed Savannah because it was “a city of sin and extraordinary evil, full of voodoo, homosexuals, devils, and ghosts.” That blogger claimed to be a member of The Brethren. Mindful of Dake’s “donation,” Falcone put that report aside for later investigation.
*
AROUND noon came television’s first human connection with Savannah. GNN televised it first, driving all else off the screen. Then, quickly, every network showed it: the image of a blond teenage girl in a yellow Georgia Tech T-shirt. She had aimed her smartphone camera at herself and the black-and-white cat in her lap. She was smiling a strange, trembling smile of survival. Behind her, not quite in focus, was an upside-down, mud-streaked blue car.
The image also appeared on the wall screens in the Situation Room interrupting an ExComm videoconference presided over by Falcone.
“My God,” he said, stunned. “Is that real?”
After a moment’s silence while participants looked at each other and shrugged, Penny Walker said, “It certainly is. I saw it on Facebook late last night.”
“Facebook?” Falcone asked. “What the hell were you doing on Facebook?”
Blink of an Eye Page 21
