THE H-BOMB GIRL by Stephen Baxter (beach books txt) 📕

“She means,” Bernadette said, “never miss a chance to shop.”

Agatha smiled, pale. Then she glanced at a clock. “It’s time.”

Bernadette clutched the baby in her arms. “I’m packed.”

The way out the back was through a laundry room, where giant steel cylinders swallowed up heaps of towels. As they seemed to be in the charge of Sister Agatha, nobody stopped them.

The door at the rear of the building wasn’t locked. They burst out into the open air.

The evening sunlight was bright over Liverpool, reflecting from the windows of the terraced houses, and making the roof tiles shine pink. They ran off into the maze of terraced streets, laughing and talking, the four of them with the baby, until they were sure nobody could catch them.

Afterword

The Cuban Missile Crisis really happened. In October 1962, the Cold War almost got very hot indeed.

In 1962 the Soviet Union, Russia, was losing the arms race with the west. The US had 5000 nuclear weapons it could have used to destroy Soviet targets. The Russians only had 300.

The Soviet Union was a poor country, compared with America. But Premier Khrushchev saw a cheap way to even up the balance of power. He decided to plant bases for short-range missiles close to America on the island of Cuba, where there was a friendly Communist government. President Kennedy’s America had earlier mounted a failed invasion of Cuba.

During the summer of 1962 the Russians sent cargo ships to Cuba laden with missiles and warheads, and 40,000 soldiers and technicians. All this was kept secret. Khrushchev planned to reveal the missile bases to a stunned world when they were ready.

But in October 1962 American spy planes spotted the missiles and their launch pads, still under construction. President Kennedy could have ordered air strikes, or invaded Cuba. But he feared triggering a third world war.

So Kennedy ordered a “quarantine.” US Navy ships were ordered to turn back any more Russian vessels. Kennedy was trying to show firmness without provoking a fight.

Behind the scenes there were frantic negotiations with the Russians. But things could have gone horribly wrong. Communications were poor, and soldiers on the ground might have started shooting on their own initiative.

The emergency preparations for nuclear war shown in this book, with children being evacuated from the cities and everybody urged to build fall-out shelters, are based on plans the British government actually made at the time. They weren’t put into place during the Cuban Crisis; the events in this novel didn’t come to pass. But the Vulcan bomber fleets really were put on stand-by, and there were protests against nuclear war in many large towns and cities.

Saturday 27th October, “Black Saturday,” was the most dangerous time of all. An American spy plane was shot down by the Cubans, and the US Navy forced a Russian submarine to the surface. Black Saturday was perhaps the closest we ever came to an all-out nuclear war, and the systems used, such as the “Single Integrated Operations Plan” shown in the story, really were hair-trigger.

If the war had come about, it would have been every bit as terrible as depicted in this story. In 1956 Harold Macmillan, who would be prime minister in 1962, said, “We cannot hope to emerge from a global war except in ruins.”

But the Russians and Americans calmed down. Missiles on Cuba just weren’t worth risking war over.

On Sunday 28th, the Russians agreed to a secret deal. They dismantled their bases on Cuba, and in return the Americans got rid of missiles in Turkey. Kennedy and Khrushchev ordered a “hot-line” telephone link, so they could talk directly to each other if there was another emergency. President Kennedy won great praise for his calmness and firmness in the crisis. It was a great shock when, just over a year later, he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

A recent book on the Cuban Missile Crisis is High Noon in the Cold War by Max Frankel (Ballantine Books, 2.004). A movie about it, called Thirteen Days and starring Kevin Costner, was released in 2001.

Nobody has built a time machine, and nobody knows what would happen if you went back in time and tried to change history. Some scientists like Stephen Hawking think it would be impossible. Others think you wouldn’t really change history but create a whole new future, starting from the point where you made your change. So you could end up with lots of “parallel” futures, in which people’s lives work out differently. That’s the idea used in this book.

And, like Agatha in the novel, if you did go back to change the past, you might find yourself stranded in the new future you created, watching your own life working out differently than you remember. If you’re interested, try How to Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies (Penguin, 2002).

“Merseybeat” groups really did play in my old school, Saint Edward’s College in West Derby. Even the Beatles played there, in October 1961. Apparently the highlight was Paul McCartney singing “Besame Mucho.”

Any errors or omissions are my sole responsibility.

Stephen Baxter