“I became a climatologist to help save the world. To stop the nightmarish environmental catastrophe we were sinking ourselves into. And now… this. It’s necessary, but horrible. As a scientist yourself, I’m sure you understand.”

“Not really,” I said. “I spent my whole scientific career looking away from Earth, not toward it. I’m embarrassingly weak on climate science.”

“Mm,” he said. “Western Antarctica is a roiling mass of ice and snow. This whole region is a giant glacier, slowly marching to the sea. There are hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of ice here.”

“And we’re going to melt it?”

“The sea will melt it for us, but yes. Thing is, Antarctica used to be a jungle. For millions of years it was as lush as Africa. But continental drift and natural climate change froze it over. All those plants died and decomposed. The gases from that decomposition—most notably methane—got trapped in the ice.”

“And methane’s a pretty powerful greenhouse gas,” I said.

He nodded. “Far more powerful than carbon dioxide.”

He checked his tablet again. “Two minutes!” he called out.

“All ships: Condition Red,” Stratt radioed. “Repeat: Condition Red.”

He turned back to me. “So here I am. Environmental activist. Climatologist. Antiwar crusader.” He looked out to sea. “And I’m ordering a nuclear strike on Antarctica. Two hundred and forty-one nuclear weapons, courtesy of the United States, buried fifty meters deep along a fissure at three-kilometer intervals. All going off at the same time.”

I nodded slowly.

“They tell me the radiation will be minimal,” he said.

“Yeah. If it’s any consolation, they’re fusion bombs.” I pulled my jacket tighter. “There’s a small fission reaction with uranium and stuff that sets off the much larger fusion reaction. And the big explosion is just hydrogen and helium. No radiation from that.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“And this was the only option?” I asked. “Why can’t we have factories mass-produce sulfur hexafluoride, or some other greenhouse gas?”

He shook his head. “We’d need thousands of times the production that we could possibly do. Remember, it took us a century of burning coal and oil on a global scale to even notice it was affecting the climate at all.”

He checked his tablet. “The shelf will cleave at the line of explosions and slowly work its way into the sea and melt. Sea levels will rise about a centimeter over the next month, the ocean temperature will drop a degree—which is a disaster of its own but never mind that for now. Enormous quantities of methane will be released into the atmosphere. And now, methane is our friend. Methane is our best friend. And not just because it’ll keep us warm for a while.”

“Oh?”