‘Each of the ten men I spoke to prefaced their replies by saying that, basically, they had no real idea what would happen, and gave me educated guesses. I find that incredible. No real idea! There are few other man-made potential disasters the results of which could not be reasonably accurately predicted. The scientists said that the blowing up of a nuclear reactor would result in an uncontained disaster of a magnitude that would depend on force and type of explosion – whether it was caused by internal malfunction, or by a conventional bomb, or a nuclear device – and on the strength and direction of the wind, and the general weather conditions at the time.

‘If a crowded jumbo crashes into a town, everyone on board is likely to be killed, as is everyone within two hundred yards of the crash, but it would go no further than that. Similarly, a car careering off a road might kill the people on board, and anyone in its path, but the effects would go no further. Nor would a terrorist’s bomb in a street kill more than those people within the immediate vicinity. But with nuclear reactors, the situation would be quite different.

‘A massive range of permutations were fed into a computer at the Atomic Energy Research Commission, and this is what the machine came up with.’ Fifeshire paused for a moment, and relit his cigar. Then he picked up a computer print-out and read aloud. ‘“Worst conceivable accident: likely to be achieved only by sabotage with a nuclear explosive device. Assuming wind speed of fifteen miles per hour, there would be a cloud of radiation fifteen miles long and forty-five miles wide within one hour. In three hours it would be forty-five miles long and nine miles wide and would be lethal to anyone in this area. Further it would be almost certainly fatal for anyone to enter this area for at least four weeks, and this area would be permanently uninhabitable for at least one hundred years. In twenty-four hours the cloud would be three hundred and sixty miles long and eighty miles wide, and fifty per cent of the people in its path would die within ten years, if they were not evacuated for a very minimum period of at least one year. There would be long-term restrictions on agriculture, and dairy farming would be prohibited for ever in this area. The cloud would continue to expand and still be sufficiently dangerous to warrant, for a period of one to six months, the evacuation of the population in its path within a radius of between one thousand and two thousand miles.”’