‘Littlejohn,’ he said, ‘had killed one hundred and forty thousand people by the day World War Two was over. Eighty-five thousand of those were either killed instantly or died within a few hours of the bomb exploding, the rest over the following months. Many thousands more who were in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki at the time the bomb was dropped there have died prematurely young, and there has been a high rate of deformed children born not only to women pregnant then, but women pregnant many years after. It is estimated that over a quarter of a million human lives were either lost or seriously and irreparably damaged as a result of the bomb on Hiroshima.

‘How many of those that died in Hiroshima died from the actual blast?’ asked Kieran Ross, the Home Secretary.

‘It’s difficult to be precise about figures,’ replied Fifeshire, ‘but the general view on those eighty-five thousand who died more or less immediately is that about twenty per cent died from the blast itself, the rest from a massive dose of radiation.’ He sucked a generous helping of not particularly radioactive Havana smoke into his mouth, and blew it out. ‘The principal effect of radiation is the destruction of the body’s tissues: the limbs malfunction, the digestive system packs up, hair falls out, vomiting starts, the brain malfunctions and delirium sets in. None of it is very pleasant, and what is even less pleasant is that, once someone has been exposed to that kind of radiation, there is very little that anyone can do to help. As far as radiation goes, medicine is still in the dark ages.

‘The secondary effects are slower-acting, but no less hideous. These effects are caused by the debris in a cloud of radioactivity, the fall-out left in the air. Strontium 90, for example, which attacks the bone tissues, causing bone cancer, it has a half-life of twenty-eight years. Iodine 131, which escaped from Windscale in 1957, attacks the thyroids. That has a half-life of only eight days; that means that after a mere twenty-seven days it would stop killing people. There’s Radium 226, which attacks the bones and has a half-life of one thousand six hundred and twenty years. There’s Plutonium 239 which attacks the sex organs, causing birth defects, mutations and miscarriages for several generations after exposure. Plutonium 239 spontaneously ignites on contact with the air and becomes Plutonium dioxide. Plutonium dioxide has a habit of clinging to dust particles; if just one particle – just one particle – is breathed into someone’s lungs, that tiny grain of plutonium will attach itself to a cell, lie dormant for fifteen years, and then after almost exactly fifteen years, it will cause that cell to start multiplying: the multiplying of that cell is called, in layman’s language, lung cancer. And the half-life of plutonium is a mere twenty-four thousand years.’

The group in the room listened in silence. Fifeshire drew on his cigar again, and continued.