While they watched, empty aircraft were taking off and more were coming in to land.

‘This is amazing,’ said Carla, her eyes glistening. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘There has never been anything like it,’ Lloyd replied.

She said: ‘But can the British and Americans keep it up?’

‘I think we have to.’

‘But for how long?’

‘As long as it takes,’ said Lloyd firmly.

And they did.

25

1949

Almost halfway through the twentieth century, on 29 August 1949, Volodya Peshkov was on the Ustyurt Plateau, east of the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan. It was a stony desert in the deep south of the USSR, where nomads herded goats in much the same way as they had in Bible times. Volodya was in a military truck that bounced uncomfortably along a rough track. Dawn was breaking over a landscape of rock, sand, and low thorny bushes. A bony camel, alone beside the road, stared malevolently at the truck as it passed.

In the dim distance, Volodya saw the bomb tower, lit by a battery of spotlights.

Zoya and the other scientists had built their first nuclear bomb according to the design Volodya had got from Willi Frunze in Santa Fe. It was a plutonium device with an implosion trigger. There were other designs, but this one had worked twice before, once in New Mexico and once at Nagasaki.

So it should work today.

The test was codenamed RDS-1, but they called it First Lightning.

Volodya’s truck pulled up at the foot of the tower. Looking up, he saw a clutch of scientists on the platform, doing something with a snake’s nest of cables that led to detonators on the skin of the bomb. A figure in blue overalls stepped back, and there was a toss of blonde hair: Zoya. Volodya felt a flush of pride. My wife, he thought; top physicist and mother of two.

She conferred with two men, the three heads close together, arguing. Volodya hoped nothing was wrong.

This was the bomb that would save Stalin.

Everything else had gone wrong for the Soviet Union. Western Europe had turned decisively democratic, scared off Communism by bully-boy Kremlin tactics and bought off by Marshall Plan bribes. The USSR had not even been able to take control of Berlin: when the airlift had gone on relentlessly day after day for almost a year, the Soviet Union had given up and reopened the roads and railways. In Eastern Europe, Stalin had retained control only by brute force. Truman had been re-elected President, and considered himself leader of the world. The Americans had stockpiled nuclear weapons, and had stationed B-29 bombers in Britain, ready to turn the Soviet Union into a radioactive wasteland.

But everything would change today.

If the bomb exploded as it should, the USSR and the USA would be equals again. When the Soviet Union could threaten America with nuclear devastation, American domination of the world would be over.

Volodya no longer knew whether that would be good or bad.