The physical consequence of four point two seconds of an eight-million-volt electric arc was forty-two terajoules of white-hot heat exhaust.
At seventy thousand feet, the upper air was white-hot to four hundred thousand degrees of star-heat.
A huge heat bubble, fifteen miles wide and glowing white-hot, began expanding wildly into the mesosphere.
If that white-hot plume was allowed to settle or expand unchecked, heat-rising heat downdrafts would plunge into the lower air.
It would boil the mountain snowpacks in three minutes, unleash flash floods down the river valleys, and scorch millions of acres of ripening wheat across the northern plains.
Inside Command Bunker One, the blasting heat was already detectable through the thick quartz viewing blocks.
Toby Karr watched the thermopile galvanometer needle swing toward the red danger sector.
‘Infrared heat wave flux at forty miles distance is measuring twelve hundred watts per square meter, Lord Giles,’ Toby reported.
