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Page 327
anyone but our technicians from deactivating the trigger mechanism. Two minutesno, two minutes and thirty-seven secondsafter initialization, the warhead will detonate." He looked around, pleading for understanding. "It was to have flown so high, they said. They said it wouldn't hurt anyone, only the machinery."
For a moment, everyone and everything in the room was absolutely still and silent.
Cherny felt as though a fist had struck him over the heart. His mind whirled. An eighty-megaton nuclear explosion underwater in central Canada? The blast would kill or injure almost everything within a hundred kilometers of ground zero. Fish, game, birds, and human beings within twenty kilometers of the explosion would die at once. Beyond that radius, the secondary effects would kill more slowly. There would be a lethal column of steam, mist, and debris, boiling into the stratosphere, to be caught by the jet stream and carried across eastern Canada, the northeastern United States, the Atlantic, the British Isles; then across the Channel to northern Europe, to Germany, to Poland, and finally, into Russia itself.
It would be a disaster, Chernobyl a thousand times over. It would brand the Russian people as the greatest mass killers in human history, pariahs forever.
Oleg Yadanov said eagerly, "The warhead can be deactivated, Honorable President. We had the forethought to provide a mechanism that allows for the timing device to be turned off. Of course, it would be difficult. But if properly briefed, one trained diver could do it."
Lykov chimed in eagerly, "It is dangerous, of course, but technically possible. That must be why the Americans and Canadians are demanding a Russian nuclear accident team."
Cherny glared at the two academicians. "How clever of you to make the connection." He spoke sharply to Colonel Zenobiev. "Put our prisoners into isolated custody, Colonel, including Marshal Suvorov. They are to speak to no one, see no one. This hearing is recessed for three hours."

 
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