Never

by Ken Follett

galabiya,

palliasses

stevedores

conviviality

insouciant.

The show was set in the early eighteenth century, before the First Opium War, which had begun the destruction of the Qing Dynasty. People thought of it as a golden age, when the learning, sophistication, and wealth of traditional Chinese civilization were unchallenged. It was similar to the way French people harked back to Versailles and the court of the Sun King, or Russians glamorized St. Petersburg before the revolution.

phlegmatic,

armaments.

Pauline thought young people should challenge established ideas. It was how the world made progress.

Socially liberal, financially conservative.

haranguing

A lie goes halfway round the world while the truth is getting its boots on.

His supporters belonged in a different stratum of American society. “Let’s

diaspora.

emollient

“Remind me what the explosion is like.” “In the first one millionth of a second, a fireball is formed two hundred yards wide. Everyone within it dies instantly.” “Perhaps they’re the lucky ones.” “The blast flattens buildings for a mile around. Almost everyone in that area dies from the impact or from falling debris. The heat sets fire to anything that will burn, including people, within a radius of two to five miles. Cars crash, trains come off the rails. The blast and the heat go upward too, so planes fall out of the sky.” “How many casualties?” “In New York, about a quarter of a million people die more or less immediately. Another half a million are injured. More die of radiation sickness in the following hours and days.” “Jesus.” “But that’s just one bomb. They would aim more than one missile at each city, in case of malfunctions. And China now has multiple warheads, so a single missile can carry up to five separate bombs, each seeking a different target. No one knows what the effect would be of ten, twenty, fifty nuclear explosions in a city, because it has never happened.” “It’s unimaginable.” “And this is only the short term. With every major city in the US and China on fire, imagine how much soot is released into the atmosphere. Enough, some scientists think, to weaken sunlight and lower temperatures on the Earth’s surface—leading to poor harvests, shortage of food, and starvation in many countries. It’s called nuclear winter.”

desultory

harangued

purloined

ructions

armament?”

ebullient.

the climax of the whole Abdul project. Abdul’s report had electrified the forces fighting ISGS in North

“DDoS.”

“Distributed denial of service,”

The weather in Ghadamis was searingly hot and the place received about an inch of rain per year.

She pushed it aside. She said: “And we have twenty-eight thousand five hundred American troops in South Korea.” “Plus some of their wives and children.” “And husbands, presumably.” “And husbands,” admitted Luis.

blitzkrieg

assignation.

Power resided not in one locus but in an immensely complex network, a group of key people and institutions with no collective will, all pulling in different directions.

Pauline said: “Let’s make sure we all know exactly what we’re talking about here. Luis, give us a rundown on the likely effects of a Chinese nuclear attack on the United States.” “Yes, ma’am.” The secretary of defense had the information at his fingertips. “China has about sixty land-based nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US. These are use-it-or-lose-it weapons, likely to be destroyed early in a nuclear war, so they would launch them all immediately. In the Pentagon’s last major war game it was assumed that half the ICBMs would be aimed at the ten largest US cities and half at strategic targets such as military bases, ports, airports, and telecommunications centers. We would see them coming and deploy anti-missile defenses, which might take out one in two, at an optimistic estimate.” “And how do you see American casualty numbers at this point?” “About twenty-five million, Madam President.”

think all marriages run out of steam sooner or later. The only question is whether the couple stay together out of laziness or split up and try again with other partners.”

Côte d’Azur

henpecked.”