The thermonuclear warhead of the SS-5 medium range ballistic missile (MRBM) that detonated some seven miles due east of Dreadnought’s dry dock at an altitude of two thousand feet, had a yield of 1.14 megatons. The missile was one of only a handful recently added to the inventory of the Soviet Strategic Missile Command and had been moved to an advance base in Latvia just three weeks previously. The missile was so brand new that the units equipped with it had not yet fully familiarized themselves with its systems and operational parameters. Designed to strike targets up to 2,200 nautical miles distant with a circular error probability (CEP), of 0.5 miles, it had probably been targeted at a V-Bomber base in Yorkshire, or a centre of population such as Liverpool or Manchester, or perhaps, even the Vickers Industries Shipbuilders yard where HMS Dreadnought was known to be fitting out in preparation for her maiden voyage in the spring. Nobody would ever know its intended target although, self-evidently, it was reasonable to assume that the dead Soviet missile men who’d launched it minutes before they themselves were swept to oblivion in a storm of thermonuclear fire, would not have had any reason to specifically target the middle of Morecambe Bay.
The fifty million degree ignition flash of the warhead lit up hundreds of square miles of sea, land and sky more brightly than any summer day in human history. The flash burned for over twenty seconds. Within ten seconds the fireball was a mile across and its temperature, although reduced by nearly eighty percent, still between ten and eleven million degrees. Anybody within twenty miles who had looked into the heart of the raging nuclear fire would have been blinded, and anybody out in the open within ten miles would have suffered second degree burns to exposed flesh.
The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had exploded with a force equivalent to approximately 12,500 tons of Trinitrotoluene (TNT), or 0.0125 megatons. The bomb that detonated over Morecambe Bay that night had an explosive power of at least ninety times that of the Hiroshima bomb. If it had exploded on the ground it would have excavated a crater over one hundred feet deep and over a thousand feet in diameter. The walls of that crater, lethally irradiated, would have stood several stories high above the surrounding countryside, and the fast rising mushroom cloud would have been heavily laden with pulverised soil and debris which would later return to earth, possibly hundreds of miles away as lethally radioactive fallout.
The Morecambe Bay bomb was, like the majority of the warheads deployed that night by all sides, configured to air burst. Unless a target was buried deep underground like a missile silo or a command bunker, or a specific runway or piece of vital ‘hardened’ infrastructure such as a dam or a port, a surface blast was the least efficient way to employ any nuclear weapon. An air burst was, all things being equal, at least twice as destructive as a ground blast and it sucked up significantly less radioactive fallout. Simply stated; in an air burst the blast overpressure created by the explosion is spread over a much wider area. In an environment where pinpoint accuracy cannot be relied upon, and where the initial blast and radiation cannot be guaranteed of itself to destroy a given target the great thermonuclear killer is blast overpressure.
Blast overpressure is a shock wave travelling at over seven hundred miles an hour, one mile every five seconds outwards in every direction from the epicentre of the blast. Two miles away from a one megaton air burst local overpressure is over ten pounds per square inch; every building is destroyed with only the traces of concrete foundations surviving. Within this radius of the explosion almost everybody is killed instantly. Four miles away, overpressure is 6 pounds per square inch, and everything above ground implodes or is blown away except the steel and concrete frames of buildings on the edge of the zone. An overpressure of 5 pounds will rupture eardrums, lungs, and transport a human body through the air like a rag doll in a two hundred mile an hour wind. Just 2 pounds of overpressure will flatten — literally flatten — a normal house. Between five and six miles away all windows will splinter explosively and hundred-mile-an-hour winds will blast into damaged buildings and scour the landscape. Ten miles away from the blast epicentre normal windows will disintegrate and rain deadly dagger-like slivers of glass onto anybody who has not taken shelter.
The mushroom cloud ascends to fifteen or sixteen miles high, at which time it will be around thirty miles across. Within six miles of a 1 megaton air blast, nearly everybody with be dead or seriously injured, between six and ten miles perhaps twenty to thirty percent of people will be injured, and as many as ten percent as far out as ten to twenty miles. Anybody caught in the open out to the twenty mile radius will probably have been killed or seriously injured and suffered first or second degree burns to exposed flesh; anybody unfortunate enough to have been looking directly at the airburst will also be blinded for life.
On the eastern side of Morecombe Bay the seaside town of Morecombe was wrecked, as was Lancaster several miles inland. The thermal pulse of the detonation ignited fires that quickly took hold in the ruins. In Morecombe the few survivors of the initial overpressure died trapped in the fires. In Lancaster, two to three miles inland, fires were slower to take hold and perhaps thirty percent of the population survived the first few days after the air burst. Down the coast Heysham was destroyed, north of Morecombe the village of Bolton-le-Sands and the town of Cairnforth were virtually wiped off the face of the earth. North of the air burst Cartmel, Flookburgh, Grange-over-Sands and practically every other sign of human habitation above ground ceased to exist, blown away by the fires from Hell. Ulveston, north-west of the air burst, and several communities on the Furness peninsular — by some fluke of thermodynamics — suffered less total destruction than places as close to the epicentre of the maelstrom to the east. In Ulveston some buildings still stood, fires didn’t take hold everywhere and perhaps fifty percent of the citizens survived the initial blast. Barrow began to burn within minutes of the air burst. In the dockyard debris rained across HMS Dreadnought’s pressure casing like bullets.
In the crowded control room Lieutenant-Commander Simon Collingwood waited until the noise stopped. He rose to his feet and slowly turned, attempting to make eye contact with the terrified civilians, men, women and children and with his own people.
“Do we still have power from the external; generators?” He asked, wondering how he could be so calm.
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good. We’ll continue to charge our batteries while we can.
There were portable radiation monitors in the reactor compartment. For a moment until he thought better of it he toyed with the idea of placing the devices near the open hatches. No, let’s not panic everybody quite yet.
There will be plenty to panic about soon enough.
Chapter 5
We know what happened. Or do we? We have causality, an approximate timeline, and half-a-century of intensive military-industrial and academic research with which to deconstruct the catastrophe. But do we really know what happened?
Several key questions remain unresolved. Partly this is because many of the key documents on the American side are still classified and likely to so remain for at least another fifty years. Partly, this is because America’s allies — or more correctly, unwilling co-belligerents — have, over the years, wearied of the hand-wringing and the self-justifying politicking in Washington and in effect, withdrawn from the debate. For the Europeans, who after all bore the main cost of the seemingly absolute American — later pyrrhic — victory, until the question of culpability and reparations is unequivocally resolved there is nothing to discuss. Partly, there can be no definitive history of the October War because it was the only war in the modern age when a continental enemy was not defeated, but annihilated.