Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich Page B

dim the sun and cause global crop failure. A billion people would starve to death. Buried beneath the Ural Mountains, in the heart of Russia’s nuclear command and control system, there existed a doomsday device code-named PERIMETR. Though it was built during the Soviet era, it remained operational. Should Russian leadership be overthrown, a computer would automatically send launch orders throughout the country to nuclear missiles that would fire to all corners of the world. Half of mankind would be vaporized.
    He then turned to public health scares: the mass production of tainted meats; the poisoning of the water supply; a gas explosion in the sewers; an airborne toxin that escapes from a chemical factory on a windless day and floats into a major city; an explosion at a nuclear power plant, such as Indian Point, just thirty-five miles from New York. Indian Point sat on the intersection of two active seismic zones—a fact that was not known when the plant was built in 1962. Then there was the possibility of a pandemic. It would originate in Asia, perhaps Thailand. A little girl who tends the chickens on her family farm wakes up with a fever and a headache. The next day she can barely move; by evening she has developed a painful cough, vomits blood. The desperate parents roll her in a wheelbarrow to the nearest hospital, where X-rays show a shadowy white mass, about the size of a penny, in one of her lungs. The girl dies, horribly, two days later, but not before she has sprayed billions of viral particles into the air around her. Hospital workers carry the disease home to their families and transmit it to fellow commuters on the public buses. A few days after that a woman boards an airplane at Suvarnabhumi Airport headed for San Francisco. She has a headache and a mild sore throat. Within two weeks, sixty million people are dead.
    Mitchell segued gracefully into a special feature on terrorism: attack by post; bombing by shoe, suitcase, or truck; air attack; attack by radioactive agent; suicide bombings on Fifth Avenue and Wall Street. A cyberattack releases the account numbers, passwords, and holdings of the clients of a major international bank. A cyberattack reveals corruption in the Supreme Court. A cyberattack launches bombs (see War, above).
    Then earthquakes, floods, wildfires, and tsunamis. He learned that scientists had detected fault lines in a five-mile-wide volcano situated on La Palma, one of the westward Canary Islands. When an eruption causes the crater, and its half-trillion tons of rock, to break apart and slide into the ocean—and this is a geological inevitability, only a matter of time—it will trigger the largest tsunami in recorded history. The great wave will travel across the ocean faster than an airplane. It will take eight hours to reach the Atlantic Seaboard, by which time the crest will be half a mile above sea level—more than twice the height of the Empire State Building. And then that wave will crash.
    There were also the threats of a solar storm that would reset the planet’s magnetic field, a deep freeze, hailstorm, hurricane, tornado, asteroid, volcano.
    “There is no volcano in New York City,” said Nybuster.
    “That’s what you’d like to believe,” replied Mitchell. “You would like to believe that very much.”
    A few sessions—a reprieve, really—on minimal, localized assaults: employee sabotages company’s finances; employee leaks industry secrets to competition; employee blows his brains out at his desk; employee goes on office-wide shooting rampage. A gun is fired in the United Nations. Sarin gas is released into the subway system. An aqueduct that supplies drinking water to the city is poisoned. The complications he explored were extravagantly detailed, tendinous, delicious.
    Finally, large-scale fiscal fiasco: the dollar collapses; a major foreign currency fluctuates violently; the real estate market slides eighty percent; the World Bank files for bankruptcy;