New York Attacked!

Philip Morrison's scenario of an atomic bomb attack on Manhattan:

"There was no one of the eight million who had not his story to tell. The man who saw the blast through the netting of the monkey cage in Central Park, and bore for days on the unnatural ruddy tan of his face the white imprint of the shadow of the netting, was famous. The amateurs who collected radioactive souvenirs from the strong patch of radioactivity which sickened Greenwich Villagers fir weeks were matched by those who found scorched shadow patterns in the wallpaper and plasterboard of a thousand wrecked homes.

New York City had thus suffered under one bomb, and the story is unreal in only one way: The bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or twos. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands. Even if, by means as yet unknown, we are able to stop as many as 90 percent of these missiles, their number will still be large. If the bomb gets out of hand, if we do not learn to live together so that science will be our help and no our hurt, there is only one sure future. The cities of men on earth will perish."

From "If the Bomb Gets out of Hand" in One World or None (2007:15).