His musings were interrupted by when one of the Luftwaffe controllers suddenly screamed and fell forward over her work station, holding her ears and wailing. Everybody had heard the reason, even through the thick insulation of her earphones. A - literally - ear-shattering howl followed by a brief roar of static then silence. Already the women either side of her were comforting her, fussing over her and making clucking noises. Herrick doubted she could hear them or, indeed, would ever hear anything again. From the volume of that electronic howl, the poor girl's eardrums must have met in the middle of her head.
“Sir, Aachen Regional Control Center is on the line again.” That was good, their last communication had been to report an American aircraft shot down. “They are reporting a huge explosion over Duren. The flash was very strong even in Aachen and they can see the cloud rising from there. A mushroom-shaped cloud. They say it's reached over 10,000 meters now and is a dull glowing reddish in color. They've tried to get through to the Local Control Center but all communications with Duren are down. They are having bad communications all over the region sir. They also report three American aircraft are making a direct approach on Aachen.” Suddenly the girl's eyes widened and she tore her earphones off. She just made it in time, she'd thrown them on her desk as if they were some sort of poisonous snake when they erupted into the same screaming electronic howl, a burst of static and then - silence.
Herrick looked at the situation display. The girls maintaining it had put a red circle over Duren to mark the site of the first explosion. Now, they were putting one over Aachen. Suddenly everything dropped into place. The half-memory of a cat that had been troubling him. A cat in a box. Schrodinger's cat. He'd been told about it at a meeting, an illustration of Heidelburg's uncertainty principle. Not Heidelburg, Heisenburg. That was it. The meeting had been in 1943, Heisenburg had chaired it. It had been to announce the cancellation of the German atomic bomb project, the studies had shown that the weapons were an engineering impossibility.
Suddenly he remembered the description of the impossible atomic bomb. A single bomb that would have the power of hundreds or even thousands of tons of conventional explosive. A bomb that could destroy a whole city with a single blow. A bomb that could be carried by a single aircraft. Herrick looked at the situation display, saw the small groups of American bombers closing in on cities all over Germany. There was only one possible explanation. Heisenburg had said it was impossible but the Americans had gone and built it anyway.
“OH DEAR HOLY MOTHER OF GOD NO!”
The scream of protest torn from him was a cry compounded of rage, of fear, of despair, of anger, of humiliation, and of frustration. Of the knowledge of total failure and of impending, certain destruction. Herrick slumped into his chair, his head down on his arms. With words much, much quieter than his anguished scream he begged. “Dear God, have mercy on us.”
God wasn't listening.
Duren, Germany, Intersection of Schenkelstrasse and Philippestrasse, AKA Ground Zero
The air raid sirens had started their warnings a couple of hours earlier but few people had taken them seriously, After all, Germany had been at war for eight year now and no enemy aircraft had been seen over the Reich for the last six. Old Fatty had kept his promise, hostile aircraft over the Reich were unknown and the head of the Luftwaffe was still named Goering not Meyer. Besides, those in the know had said that only a handful of aircraft were heading towards the cities. There were reports that one of the giants had been brought down just west of the city so surely the rest would soon be punished for their impudence. The skies were mostly clear, just some scattered clouds, and the contrails of the two American aircraft were clearly visible against the bright blue sky. A few unfortunate people had even gone outside to watch them as they flew overhead, perhaps hoping to see another one shot down. Of these people, the luckiest were standing on the intersection of the Schenkelstrasse and Philippestrasse when the device released by Colonel Cunningham's Christine arced down over their heads.
As the device descended, signals from both radar and air pressure sensors prompted an electronics package to begin the initiation process: from this point on, Duren's life was measured in microseconds. An electrical impulse was sent and divided to travel down 32 different wires. After 0.003 microseconds these impulses reached detonators, positioned at 32 points on a hollow sphere of high explosives. This was a mixture of curved shapes of two different types of explosives, one fast-detonating the other slow. They were arranged so that the 32 separate explosions converged into a perfectly spherical explosive wave traveling inward—with the force of a third of a ton of dynamite. After 10 microseconds the explosive wave began to compress the “pit” a sphere of uranium 5 inches in diameter, compressing it to a fluid mass 2 inches across.
At that time, 19 microseconds after initiation, a small beryllium-polonium particle accelerator in the center of the pit was crushed by the Shockwaves and fired neutrons into the uranium sphere. The first of these neutrons were absorbed by uranium atoms and promptly caused those atoms to decay. Until then, the decay products had generally left the sphere; now, the compression caused by the explosives meant that the uranium atoms were so tightly packed that those decay particles tended to find other uranium atoms and caused them to take part in an accelerating chain reaction. This cycled about 60 times in the next microsecond.
Twenty microseconds after initiation, the process was complete and the outside of the warhead was just beginning to disintegrate from within. Gamma radiation from the nuclear reactions had already radiated up to 400 yards in every direction. A region of space over Duren the size of a truck contained the equivalent explosive energy of 35 kilotons -35,000 tons of TNT. The sphere of uranium had reached a temperature of 40,000,000° F, hotter than the center of the Sun. The gamma rays given off by the nuclear reactions radiated through the exploding mass at the speed of light. This enormous release of gamma radiation was absorbed by the surrounding air, heating it to a point where it released radiation itself.
The result was a fireball — a glowing ball of gas—that emitted every imaginable type of radiation including gamma rays, x-rays to ultraviolet, visible light, infrared and radio waves. An electromagnetic pulse-a very brief pulse of radio waves—was emitted, collecting in metal objects and created a power surge that damaged or destroyed electrical equipment, power lines and communications. Fifty microseconds after the initiation, nearly every telephone and radio transmitter in Duren had been disabled. After 70 microseconds the fireball was 220 yards across and was continuing to expand at many times the speed of sound.
By now, the fireball had formed two distinct regions: the center remained extremely hot while the temperature of the outer part had fallen as it pushed the surrounding air away. The fireball brightness decreased until 800 microseconds after detonation, when the fireball was as bright as the Sun. At that point, breakaway took place, a blast wave separated from the fireball's surface. That blast wave was an expanding sphere of highly compressed and fast moving air, initially traveling at ten times the speed of sound. The wave pushed the air away before it so that a partial vacuum was created behind it. As a result, the passing wave produced enormous pressures and severe momentary outward winds, followed by less intense inward winds. The blast wave was reflected from the ground and thereby reinforced itself. It was partly cloudy over Duren, but the blast had seemed to push the clouds away. At a distance of 1.5 miles the blast wave finally dropped to the speed of sound, 19 seconds after initiation.