“This was not an easy decision to make,” he continued. “We now know that the German war economy was dependent upon Ploesti; destroying the oil wells would cripple their ability to… spend their cruise missile aircraft with such enthusiasm. We also know that Germany was working towards sending troops into the Middle East, through Turkey, to join the war there. If that had happened… the war might have been lost.”
He took a breath. “Radiation contamination should be minimal,” he said, “although we have broadcast a warning. The device” – such a harmless word, he thought – “was designed to limit radioactive spread; the mountains contained much of the blast. Civilian casualties should be minimal.”
He sat down and waited. There was a long pause, and then the Chair of the House of Commons Defence Committee stood. “Thank you for informing us,” he said. Howard Barleycorn was a Conservative, like Hanover, but the HCDC was intended to provide oversight of military affairs. “Can you give us any assurance that the Germans are unable to retaliate against us with their own nukes, or other weapons of mass destruction?”
It was a reasonable, if impractical question, Hanover conceded. “The Germans do not at present possess any nuclear bombs,” he said. “We have devoted considerable asserts to ruining any program that they might have tried to force forward. A chemical attack is possible, but we are now confident with the recent modifications to the air defences that we can hold off any chemical attack.”
Barleycorn coughed. “Thank you,” he said. “On a different note, will the Navy be holding a Court of Inquiry into Admiral Turtledove’s tactics in the Battle of the Indian Ocean? Various retired… defence consultants have pointed out that he unnecessarily risked his entire force, merely to close with the enemy force. Why was the Trafalgar low on ammunition; why did the other submarines not intervene?”
A low rumble ran through the House and Hanover cursed. Whatever the truth of the armchair admirals statements, Admiral Turtledove was a hero at the moment. Barleycorn had just damaged his own political career, just to prove that the HCDC was still relevant in a changing world. Inevitably, it would damage the Party.
“The Trafalgar, to answer one question, was ordered to defend Australia before sailing to meet the fleet,” Hanover said finally. “In the process it fired off some of its torpedoes at Japanese ships, many of which proved more able to handle a Spearfish hit than a modern ship. It required several hits to sink a battleship, for example; the hull of a 1940 ship is stronger than one of our ships.
“As for the issue of a Board of Inquiry, the battle will be analysed to death by the Navy and any such decisions will remain in their hands,” he concluded. “Under the circumstances, facing a completely-unexpected foe, I believe that Admiral Turtledove did well – and so do the Australians.”
“Well, I’m glad that’s over,” Hanover said, three hours later. Many MPs supported the nuclear strike, but a handful of backbenchers were furious about it, pressing for criminal charges.
“The Americans are quite impressed,” McLachlan said. They’d been informed as a courtesy. “The President is using it to wave in front of Congress, convincing them to support the war more. Some of them are asking why we don’t just threaten Berlin with them.”
“Hitler would call our bluff,” Hanover said. “And the public?”
“Some minor protests,” McLachlan said. “One demonstration, in Edinburgh, made the mistake of marching past the local shipyards in the Forth; they’re very hot on the war there as it’s bringing in shipping contracts. The ensuring riot saw the demonstrators in full retreat. The BBC is being supportive; some of the other news stations have adopted a cautious support policy.”
“Barton may have to leave us,” Hanover predicted. “There are a lot of MPs out there who want to move against nuclear war.”
“We’ve used one warhead,” McLachlan said. “One warhead, against an isolated target in Romania.”
“The first official nuclear strike since 1945,” Hanover said. “Which is kind of weird, when you think about it.”
McLachlan smiled. “I suppose that now we have the Americans, and we’ve sunk the Japanese Navy, we can start making plans to bring the war to a close.”
“War is peace,” Hanover said. “Don’t forget that.”
Undisclosed Location
Berlin, Germany
5th October 1940
The images of dead and dying Romanian children made Stewart want to retch. She staggered from the room, followed by Roth, and threw up in the toilet. Himmler felt sink himself; the pictures had been carefully faked from the images of Hiroshima, but they were all-too-real.
He waited while Roth took Stewart back to her room, and then returned to Himmler’s office. The tall SS officer didn’t look flustered; he seemed to understand the power of the weapon he was helping to build. Himmler knew that he hadn’t mentioned that to his girlfriend; even a trusted SS officer would disappear if he did that.
“I trust that she is convinced?” Himmler asked. “It would be a shame to waste all that effort.”
Roth nodded grimly. One particularly clever Einsatzgruppen, under the personal command of Reinhard Heydrich, had faked the scene. An entire village had been slaughtered for the effect; the images were being sent all over the world.
“I believe so,” he said finally. Himmler nodded; Heydrich might well have had traces of Jewish blood, but he was too useful to discard or send to the death camps. “If she sends those images back to Britain, it was have an effect on their public.”
Himmler shrugged. It struck him as stupid; even Churchill would not have been deterred by such effects. If he’d possessed the super-bomb, he would have used it; Berlin and Moscow would have vanished in balls of fire.
“I suppose that there is no doubt that it was a kern bomb,” he said finally. “The professors are convinced?”
“I have refused to allow them to visit the site,” Roth said. “Secrecy is all the more important now; the British will not hesitate to use a second bomb on the nuclear project if they suspect its location. For the moment, teams of Jews and Poles are working on clearing the site, according to the instructions in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
Himmler chuckled. Even Professor Horton had been unable to explain why the long-unborn Encyclopaedia Britannica authors had seen fit to include such information, even if the CDs did hold thousands of gigabytes of data. The same amount of data, focused on the war, could have forced German development forward faster than the British would have found comfortable.
“Some of them are suffering,” Roth admitted. “Still, there are plenty more where they came from. For the moment, we’ve blamed the entire blast on a lucky missile hit on a tank full of fuel.”
Himmler shrugged. “I have to make suggestions to the Fuhrer,” he said. “I suspect that we’re going to have to tighten our belts a bit.”
“They must be punished for this attack on our soil,” Hitler thundered, ignoring the fact that Ploesti was on Romanian soil. “We need to make them regret the use of the hell-weapons!”
Speer coughed. “Before it was… destroyed, Ploesti supplied nearly forty percent of our oil supplies,” he said. “For the foreseeable future, we will be dependent upon supplies from Soviet Russia, which leaves us with something of a problem.”