The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

century city faces is a holdover from the Cold War: nuclear weapons. The doomsday scenarios are familiar enough: A megaton hydrogen bomb—too big for “suitcase bombs” but much smaller than today’s twenty-five-megaton state-of-the-art weapons—detonated at the site of the Broad Street pump vaporizes the entire area from the western edge of Hyde Park to Waterloo Bridge. A weekday attack would effectively wipe out the entire British government, reducing the Houses of Parliament and 10 Downing Street to radioactive ash. Most of London’s landmarks—Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey—would simply cease to exist. A wider zone extending out to Chelsea and Kensington and to the eastern edge of the old City would suffer 98 percent loss of life. Move a few miles farther out—up to Camden Town, out to Notting Hill or the East End—and half the population dies, with most buildings damaged beyond recognition. Anyone who happens to see the blast directly is blinded for life; most survivors suffer hideous radiation sickness that makes them envy the dead. As you move out from Ground Zero, the fallout leaves a vast wake of elevated cancer occurrences and genetic defects.