The First Hour

The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Nuclear Holocaust and Christian Hope by Ronald Sider and Richard Taylor. The book was released in 1982.

An instant after the one-megaton warhead exploded over Moscow a huge fireball burst upward. At its center the temperature was 150 million degrees Fahrenheit, more than eight times the heat at the center of the sun.

In central Moscow, life came to an end. The fireball itself was three-fourths of a mile wide. It vaporized steel and concrete buildings, roads and bridges, and hundreds of thousands of people. Mingled in a raging caldron, the structures and bodies--pulverized and reduced to cinders--were sucked up into a quickly forming, towering, mushroom-shaped cloud. Moments later, heavier rubble, now highly radioactive, fell back onto the flayed shambles below. Lighter particles rose with the mushroom cloud into the upper atmosphere, from which they would later descend as radioactive dust.

The American rocket, the first to break through Moscow's antiballistic missile system, was launched by Major Raymond Butts and Captain James Mercer, combat missile crewmen at the 390th Strategic Missile Wing, Malmstrom Air Force Base, Great Falls, Montana.

A year before World War III erupted, a Montana reporter had researched a newspaper story on U.S. rockets. The reporter had heard Major Butts in a chance remark describe himself as a Christian.

"How can you square your faith with the frightful power of these weapons?" the reporter asked. "You have more killing power at your fingertips than Alexander, Attila, Genghis Khan, Napolean, and Hitler combined!"

"Yes," the major had replied, "with the turn of our keys, Captain Mercer and I could fire this missile and destroy a Russian city. But that's not my source of power. My power as a Christian comes from Christ. My mission here is to prevent war by helping to keep American nuclear forces combat ready so that the Soviet Union will be afraid to attack. In an imperfect world, that seems to me a valid way to exercise power and to serve Christ."

Major Butts had insisted that he would launch his weapon if he ever received the president's order. When the order came, he followed instructions and fired. So did hundreds of other American missile crewmen in underground silos and submarines. Soviet missile crewmen, of course, did the same.

The eye-stabbing flash of the incandescent fireball blinded the pilot of a Soviet Aeroflot jetliner on its approach to Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, 20 miles north of Red Square. Moments later, the plane lurched violently under the impact of the blast's shock wave. The copilot, who had not looked into the searing light, took the controls and banked the jet sharply away from Moscow. Passengers watched dumbfounded as a white-hot ball of fire surged up over the city like an enormous hot-air balloon.

In central Moscow the blast and heat of the first bomb were stupefying. It was as if 100,000 trucks, each loaded with 10 tons of dynamite, had been parked in Red Square and then detonated simultaneously. It was as though more than 70 of the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima had been set off at the same moment in the same place. People were vaporized, squashed, blown apart, turned to dust.

Vasily Solunsky, an art student from Kiev, who was visiting Moscow on a class trip, was one of them. At age 16, Vasily was a confirmed atheist and an officer in the Young Communist League. Because of this he felt a twinge of guilt at his admiration for the church icons the class had been studying at the Tereshkova Art Gallery, across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. Hadn't Lenin taught that every religious idea, every idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is utter vileness? Why, then, was the class spending so much time with these religious paintings?

Vasily's teacher had said, "In our modern society, science has replaced religion. But you should still appreciate these religious masterpieces as part of our national treasure. Many were painted by humble serfs oppressed by the Star. Comrade Lenin himself demanded the protection of all our artistic monuments of the past. Tereshkova Gallery now contains one of the world's greatest collections of religious icons, plus dozens of paintings and mosaics. They show scenes from the life of Jesus, the saints, and Bible figures. The gallery has more than 5,000 canvases, 900 sculptures, and nearly 30,000 drawings and engravings."

The class had moved down the corridor, leaving Vasily standing pensively in front of a painting called "The Dormitian of the Virgin." The 14th-century icon, painted in vivid, pure colors of red, blue, orange, brown, yellow, and black, showed Jesus' disciples weeping over Mary's dead body. Their sorrow touched Vasily. The disciples' devotion reminded him of the look on his grandmother's face long ago when she had taken him to church and knelt before a statue of Mary. A figure of Christ, clothed in a shimmering golden robe, stood in the painting's background.

Suddenly, the entire gallery filled with a blue-white flash, as if a thousand flash bulbs had exploded. Vasily felt a sharp pain on his back. He was astonished to see smoke begin to rise from the icon. An instant later, he was thrown violently into the painting and both were buried in twisted steel and jagged bits of marble.

On the northern side of the Moscow River, Pastor Gregor Yusupov was walking hurriedly past the Kremlin wall to a meeting. He was especially looking forward to the two-hour communion service that would follow the meeting. It would be attended by more than a thousand believers at the packed Moscow Baptist Church. He loved to assist the deacons in breaking the large, sweet-smelling loaves and passing them to the congregation, many of whom would be moved to tears. Then he would step to the simple wooden pulpit and offer his prayer. As was the custom, worshipers would at the same time fill the church with their own whispered petitions and praise. This reverent mingling of voices bound everyone together in a deep sense of Christ's presence.

Just as the pastor rounded a corner and saw the church in the distance, the street and buildings flashed whiter than anything he had ever seen. A moment later, the bomb's fiery wind consumed him.

To the north, the Bolshoi Ballet troop was rehearsing for Swan Lake. Prima ballerina Marina Popova, dressed for the part of Odetta in a white tutu and jeweled tiara, was crushed with the other dancers in the collapsing golden balconies and shattered crystal chandeliers of the theatre.

Four blocks east of the Kremlin, Trinity Church and the Moscow Synagogue were churned together as if caught in a malicious food grinder. To the northwest, the children's department store and Children's World were leveled. Children laughing at a puppet show in Gorky Park, one and a half miles southwest of the Kremlin, burned to death in the fireball's heat. The park's Rocket Sled roller coaster, full of vacationing families, careened from its track and landed upside-down.

Thousands of downtown subway riders were buried alive under the crumpled marble walls and columns of the ornate Moscow subway. Above ground, 500 mile per hour winds sent scorched bodies sailing through the air like waste-paper, somersaulting, ripping apart, piling up like logs, slashed by splintered wood, glass, and metal, which flew about like shrapnel.

The warhead had exploded directly above the Kremlin. Top Soviet leaders used the half-hour warning provided by their reconnaissance satellites to escape by helicopter to command posts away from the city. Bureaucrats not on the priority list died in the Kremlin's deep underground bomb shelters when all the oxygen was sucked away by the bomb's immense heat.

The Kremlin's 19 towers, its belfries, ramparts, ancient battlements, and monumental buildings were instantly destroyed. Also pulverized, melted down, and swept upward were dozens of shimmering gold crosses which had topped the onion-shaped cupolas of the Kremlin's ancient cathedrals. These magnificent churches had been built in the 15th and 16th centuries by the tsars, such as Ivan the Terrible.

The Kremlin's main open area was called Cathedral Square. The cathedrals, which had been used by the Communist government as art museums, stood alongside the government buildings inside the Kremlin's walls.

The blast and heat immediately and totally demolished the 15th-century Assumption Cathedral, whose architectural proportions were considered perfect, and whose southern doors had been covered with black lacquered copper sheets overlaid with 20 biblical scenes wrought in gold. It also destroyed the Cathedral of the Annunciation, whose priceless Byzantine frescoes, restored in 1947 by Soviet artists, were found to be mostly themes from the Apocalypse. The only evidence of the former Kremlin was a ragged, triangular heap of stones showing where the massive, 12- to 16-foot thick walls once had stood.

On the south side of Red Square, the grandiose, lavishly ornamented Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed, with its exotic, multicolored steeples and domes, was twisted like taffy and smashed to the ground. (According to legend, Ivan the Terrible blinded the architect of St. Basil's to prevent him from ever again designing anything so beautiful.)

Of the one million people living, working, and shopping in the area, 98 per cent were killed by heat, blast, or radiation. Nearly all the 20,000 who survived had received multiple injuries and radiation poisoning.

In the area between one and a half and three miles from the center of the explosion, winds of 300 miles per hour hurled burning trucks and autos end over end, splashing gasoline and igniting new fires. Only the strongest steel and reinforced-concrete structures survived the blast, but their windows and walls were completely blown out. Fifty per cent of the one million people in the area died immediately. Forty per cent were badly injured. Only ten per cent remained unhurt.

The few who escaped injury were overwhelmed by the devastation and the casualties around them. Unspeakable horrors met their eyes. Seated in little clumps were people who had gazed directly at the flash, their faces charred and black, their eyesockets left hollow. Others staggered about aimlessly, with fixed, cataleptic stares, their clothes thrown off by the force of the blast, their lacerated bodies drenched with blood.

Everywhere in the wreckage were nightmarish piles of charcoal cadavers, some with blackened arms raised stiffly upward, hands clutching the air, as if in prayer. People with singed hair and broken bones sat or limped with their limbs hanging askew. Some people, as though carrying something, held out arms with oozing, raw skin, torn and hanging down like rags. Others, sickened from radiation, bent over double, vomiting blood and foam.

Around them their familiar physical world was gone. A moment ago there had been broad boulevards, green parks, and stately buildings. There had been gardeners tending brightly colored flower beds; students hurrying toward school; soldiers marching with rifles slung over their shoulders; stooped, wrinkled babushkas (grandmothers) with puffed cheeks and scarfs tied under their chins pushing children in baby carriages; street vendors selling ice cream and fruit.

Now everything was a nightmare of rubble, yellowish smoke, cinders, and ashes. The earth itself seemed convulsed in flames. The wide roads had become narrow trails snaking through huge piles of ruptured concrete and tortured steel. Telephone poles leaned at crazy angles, their wires tangled like spider-webs on the ground. Torn-up trolley tracks jutted and twisted in the air like snakes. Trees were pulled up by the roots, stripped of branches and leaves; their trunks mutilated as if hit by lightning, they hissed and smoked in the dense choking air. Splinters of glass by the millions glittered red, reflecting the dancing sparks.

Survivors' ears were assaulted by the groans and cries of the injured, the screams of those caught in the fire, the voices of lost children calling for their parents. Even more terrifying were the crumbling sounds of weakened buildings and highway bridges.

Those who could rushed desperately away from the blaze spreading out from central Moscow, having to leave behind in heart-rending anguish those pinned under massive chunks of concrete and heavy beams. To escape the terrible heat and cool their blistering flesh, thousands of people threw themselves into the Moscow River. Soon it was almost filled with both the living and the dead.

The blast wave followed several seconds behind the pulse of heat. Mikhail Kramskoi, a dissident writer working near Moscow State University on a secret manuscript exposing Soviet violations of human rights, was killed by a flying piece of timber. University students studying near windows were covered from head to foot by glass fragments, making their bodies into living pincushions.

At five to seven miles from center city, children on bicycles received second-and third-degree burns on their exposed skin. Since lighter-colored cloth reflects light better than darker material, the very pattern of their dresses was in some cases burned into women's flesh.

Paint blistered off houses. The leaves of trees caught fire. The heat passed through windows and ignited beds and upholstry. Commercial buildings were only lightly damaged, but winds blew roofs off residential homes and scattered fiery embers everywhere.

At this distance, a quarter of the people were injured. Many of those not hurt happened to be in basements or were otherwise shielded from the heat and debris.

Their fortune was shortlived, however. Five minutes after the rocket fired by Major Butts hit the Kremlin, other nuclear bombs began falling. The explosions covered the tormented city, its suburbs, and outlying districts with blast, heat, and radiation. They showered on Moscow more than 1,000 times the destructive power that was used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

One million five hundred and twenty thousand people were killed by the weapon fired by Major Butts. More than four million died in the subsequent blasts. The last bombs to fall no longer killed anyone. They simply ground the rubble into ever-finer powder.

When this article appeared, Richard Taylor was a Sojourners contributing editor and longtime peace activist who worked part time with Sojourners Peace Ministry developing resources for outreach and Ronald Sider was a professor at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and President of Evangelicals for Social Action. Ronald Sider is a Sojourners contributing editor.

Taken from Nuclear Holocaust and Christian Hope by Ronald J. Sider and Richard K. Taylor. © copyright 1982 by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship of the USA and used by permission of InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL 60515.