A-Bomb in Wardour Street

Thermal FLASH fiction inspired by The Jam and the film Threads

There's an A-Bomb in Wardour Street.

It goes off, unfortunately.

Time 0. Nothing happens, because time is required for things to happen in. That's what time is all about.

Time T+0.0000000000000000000000000000001 seconds. Let's not concern ourselves too much with the atomic physics of it all. Let's just say that the neutrons no longer love each other, so they've decided to split up. This gives rise to all kinds of delighful metaphors for fiction writers and poets to indulge in. Breakup traumas, rupture, broken hearts broken nucleus, and so on.

Time T+0.00000000000000000000000000000011 seconds. The first person to have the honour to be annihilated in the fireball is an undocumented migrant sleeping in a doorway. Name and age unknown. Gender unknown. The unknown soldier, as it were.

Time T+0.00000000000000000000000000000012 seconds. By now another 837 people have been atomized. We could go into their names, ages, occupations, hopes, dreams and fears, but what's the point? They're gone now.

Time T+0.00000000000000000000000000000023 seconds. Some interesting nuclear effects are taking place within the core, wild neutrons charging about and banging into other particles. It's a particle free-for-all. That's what fission's all about. By now the fireball has taken in all the West End and part of the centre. 211,564 dead. Oxford Street is literal glass, though still molten and iridescent. No more shopping, I'm afraid.

Time T+0.000000000000000000000000564 seconds. All of Central London gone. Palaces, splendour, squalid little backstreet nightclubs, toffs, city slickers, homeless folk. All equal in the way that one particle of incinerated matter is equal to any other. It's an equitable feast of democratic outcomes, all at last at one with their neighbour.

Time T+0.000000000000000000852 seconds. The River Thames does something unusual at this point. It wants to boil from the superheated temperatures, but it's prevented from going anywhere by the fantastic downforce of the pressure. So it actually turns into a superfluid channel of ultraheated steam, but at incredible temperatures of 4000ºC or higher, nearly a plasma. It creates jets moving at supersonic speeds on either side, racing the blast wave. Isn't that a curious thing? 1,328,488 people gone so far.

Time T+0.000000000039 seconds. The much-discussed mushroom cloud, which makes such a wonderful and enticing image in our popular entertainments, is beginning to form now. The fluid dynamics of it are fascinating, but time doesn't permit any detailed description. So much to do!

Time T+1 second. Congratulations! Normally we celebrate important anniversaries. With babies we might celebrate a month or a six-month anniversary, just for fun. With a nuclear blast, since things move so fast, we feel justified in celebrating an 'anniversary' at one second. Things cooling down rapidly now, a mere 6,000º degrees at the core of the fireball, which is swiftly losing power. 2 million plus gone, but here's the good news: the first survivors! Oh, they won't last for longer than a minute of two, but they made it past that critical one-second mark, which is still quite the accomplishment. Well done them!

Time T+1.2 seconds. At this point the government officials in the bunkers underneath St James Park are aware that everything outside is gone. They are the lucky ones, the ones who get to consider life in this new and exciting world. Right now they're a bit preoccupied with the newness of it all, but soon they'll be right back to work calculating surviving government services and trying to reestablish contact with the outside world. Disposal of bodies, waste water contamination, all that good stuff. So well done them!

Time T+2 seconds. The blast wave is well on its way to Dagenham, Staines, and Lewisham. Some rising ground to the north, Primrose Hill with its spectacular views, has slowed it down, so it's barely past Hampstead. The animals in Regents Park Zoo are gone, poor dears. And we so wanted to save them! Won’t somebody think of the pandas?

Time T+5 seconds. From this point on, the story becomes tedious and repetitive. So many millions, bla bla bla. What about the fallout? Oh, my dear, that's a story for another day. Right now the story is all about pressure thresholds and flash burns.

Did you know the human body can withstand up to 10 pounds per square inch overpressure, a windspeed of 294 mph? I mean a strong body, of course, not a weak child's one, or an old person's.

After that 10 psi I'm afraid it's squishington for even the most robust of chaps. Even the strapping young fellas in the Knightsbridge Barracks, the guardsmen, now with no Buckingham Palace to guard anymore, burst and flash-fried to a man, sorry to say. Horses too.

So the A-bomb which landed in Wardour Street caused quite the sensation! Almost certainly the most noteworthy thing to happen in the West End since the Swinging Sixties, the ‘66 World Cup, Twiggy, The Rolling Stones and the original Mini with a Union Jack on the roof.

Still, we showed those Russkies we're not frightened, did we not? Made the Prime Minister (currently in an undisclosed location) proud. So well done us!

---

NOTES

For nuclear weapon effects, see
https://www.icanw.org/catastrophic_harm

For blast pressure tolerances of the human body, see https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docket/archive/pdfs/NIOSH-125/125-ExplosionsandRefugeChambers.pdf

For details on how Boris Johnson and other UK hawks pressure Keir Starmer to deploy British missiles in Ukraine for use inside Russia, see
https://www.reuters.com/world/british-pm-urged-allow-ukraine-use-long-range-missiles-sunday-times-2024-09-14/

---

For details on how the Russian nuclear threat is not a ‘a bluff’ as claimed by the West, but part of a calculated strategy to increase the risk of Western intervention and escalation to intolerable levels, see The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists.

Russian nuclear policy is not built on a series of bluffs. Rather, it captures a fundamental pillar of deterrence theory dating back to the heyday of the Cold War: Threats that leave something to chance and force the adversary to face potentially uncontrollable risks that entail unacceptable costs.

All this is the calculus of risk and annihilation, the risk of annihilation, that formed part of the background music of the Cold War. Now we’re in a new Cold War, Putin still remembers the rules that applied back then and kept that fragile equilibrium stable.

Glory-thirsty weaklings Keir Starmer and Emanuel Macron, leaders of decrepit post-imperial nations with crumbling prestige, have no understanding of any of that. Only movie-mediated fantasies of Churchill. Leaving the exceedingly strange situation that, with regard to Ukraine, the Americans turn out to be the only adults in the room!