MAD

Nuclear Arms Reduction Summit

The Soviets and the Americans did actually hold a nuclear arms disarmament summit in Reykjavík across the weekend of 11th and 12th October 1986. The reasons for why they chose Iceland are as given in the book – for reasons of diplomacy they were keen to choose a location equidistant between DC and Moscow but didn’t want London because they – especially Gorbachev – felt that it would detract from the serious business of hammering out a meaningful treaty. During my research for MAD, I came across both an interesting and super-valuable first-hand account of the weekend. Reagan at Reykjavík: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War was written by Kenneth Adelman, Reagan’s arms control director at the time. One fact gleaned from his story was that the two nuclear code bearers did exist and were always stood in the corridor holding their deadly keys.

Unfortunately, the Summit didn’t quite lead to the sweeping success that I depict at the end of MAD. But it nearly did. At one stage, Gorbachev was close to agreeing to all the Americans demands for nuclear arms reductions, both in the USSR, across Asia and Europe. However, at the eleventh hour, he took everything off the table, alarmed at the Americans insistence that they keep their Strategic Defence Initiative, otherwise known as the Star Wars programme. SDI was an initiative designed to create a network of missile defence systems that could protect the USA from nuclear attack. The concept included lasers and particle-beam weapons, hence the Hollywood title. Ironically, the SDI programme was purely theoretical at the time of the Summit. But despite its perceived failure to deliver headlines, Reykjavík is now considered to be the beginning of meaningful discussions between the two superpowers that in time led to:

• a steady stream of unprecedented arms-control agreements.
• a remarkable decline in the number and danger of US Soviet nuclear arsenals.
• an unexpected flowering of the anti-nuclear movement in Europe.
• ultimately, the end of the Cold War.

Hofdi House

Perhaps more incredible was my discovery that the negotiations were held in Hofdi House which is exactly as described in MAD. Containing just twelve rooms, six upstairs and six downstairs, the location was chosen for the reasons given in MAD. It was small, easily defensible and on the outskirts of Reykjavík, overlooking Faxaflói Bay. More importantly for me, it provided the ideal environment for Jakob and Fredrik to perform their improbable rescue of the General Secretary.

Chernobyl

Overshadowing the Summit was the spectre of Chernobyl which had occurred earlier in the year, towards the end of April – Saturday 26th, in the early hours of the morning. Of the radiation released during the Chernobyl accident, workers and the public were exposed to three main types of radionuclides: iodine-131, caesium-134 and caesium-137. It is not beyond possibility that Vasiliev would have been exposed to 137 but it is unlikely he would have died. What surprised me was how few people did die in the immediate aftermath of the explosion – just twenty-three in the first three months. Or at least that’s what the Soviet claimed and have continued to do so ever since. I suspect that was Soviet disinformation. If you care to watch Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, a documentary by James Jones, he claims that 200,000 people are estimated to have died as a direct result of the disaster. This makes sense given that the meltdown released four hundred times more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the Hiroshima bomb.

Berylliosis

During World War II, Scientists working on the Manhattan Project were exposed to beryllium dust as they worked to develop the bomb. This did lead to beryllium disease or berylliosis, an incurable lung ailment. The numbers of workers who contracted the illness are uncertain because, for many decades, right up until late 1999, the US Government denied there was an issue, minimising the hazards of radiation and chemicals, criticising epidemiological research that raised questions related to them and spent tens of millions of dollars in defending itself against lawsuits charging that the bomb plants had made workers sick. Jakob was caught up in this denial and effectively left to fend for himself which was one of the contributing factors leading to his deep mistrust of the US Government.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The other key driver of his mistrust were the attacks on Japan. It is true that many scientists, including Einstein, were deeply alarmed at the efforts to build the bomb but recognised that it was the lesser of two evils. That is, until the aftermath of the 6th and 9th August 1945, when many hundreds of scientists expressed deep regret for their participation in the Manhattan Project. But from then on, the genie, as it were, was well and truly and out of the bottle. By the early fifties, both America and the US had raced to develop bombs hundreds of times more powerful than those that had secured Japan’s surrender.

Aconite

Aconite is extremely toxic, containing as little as two milligrams of pure aconitine or one gram of the plant itself may cause death by paralyzing respiratory or heart functions. It doesn’t even need to be ingested, with toxicity occurring through the skin; even touching the flowers can numb fingertips. But perhaps its most important consideration for being the poison of choice in MAD is its undetectability. The hard liners had to make it look like death occurred by natural causes, so it fitted into their narrative of a younger reformer being as susceptible to health issues as the previous two General Secretaries.

Bubble

The bubble was a thing! In the early days of the Cold War, the Americans realised that the Soviets were bugging facilities in both Europe and Russia, including one discovered in the Great Seal in the US Embassy in Moscow! To stop this from happening, the CIA developed acoustic conference rooms – essentially, a room within a room. Nicknamed ‘bubbles’, the first was built in Moscow, measured just twelve feet by fifteen feet and had five inches of space between separate walls. The idea was that even if the embassy was compromised, the listening device wouldn’t be able to hear what was going on in the bubble.

The Soviets got round this by having their double agents bring bugs into the room. I’ll let you decide who that was in MAD!

Ships

The Russians did bring their own ships to the Summit. Distrustful of both the Americans and Icelanders, both of which were founding members of NATO, and also mindful of the limited accommodation in Reykjavík, they decided that this was the best way to protect/house both Gorbachev and other personnel. Two were used:

1. The Georg Ots, a 500-foot Polish-built vessel for Gorbachev and his wife plus their huge retinue numbering over 300 people, most of which were KGB officers.
2. The Baltika, a 46-year-old liner that housed the Soviets who weren’t at the Saga, a hotel in central Reykjavík.

Environmental Report

The report that Jakob references at the end of MAD is real. It came from a joint UNEP/WMO/ICSU Conference held the previous year on the “Assessment of the Role of Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gases in Climate Variations and Associated Impacts”. However, it wasn’t until June 1988 that James E, Hansen, an American adjunct professor directing the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, in his testimony to the US Congress, made one of the first assessments that human-caused warming had already measurably affected the climate globally. It’s hard to believe we’ve known about these effects for nearly four decades but are still, in my humble opinion, moving way too slowly to counter the impact of carbon dioxide.

Dates and Times

Ninety-nine percent of the action is set across just three days in 1986, a time span of just thirty eight hours within which I wanted to create a sense of how Jakob’s memory issues resulting from his teleportation played with both space but also time. Hence, my, on occasions, regretful, decision to frame each chapter on a minute-by-minute time frame. Whilst it didn’t cause me as many problems as LEAP and Green Ray, books one and two in The Race Is On series, I had to build a spread sheet to track what the time would be in the context of other chapters and ensure I had my timings right. However, I think it was worth the work; readers have remarked that it builds a real urgency into the story, particularly in the last two thirds as the action jumps between Hofdi House, the Department of Geothermal Studies, the safe house and the Saga Hotel.

LEAP

Of course, teleportation isn’t real (as far as we know!). However, I had a lot of fun with my version of it, particularly imagining how it might work. My research led me down many paths and inevitably into the realms of quantum physics which, as a non-scientist, I don’t profess to understand. I’m not sure many people do – it’s an impenetrable field of study but was a fertile ground for a thriller writer, throwing up a melange of philosophical and ethical conundrums which I’ve tried to explore in MAD and, subsequently, in The Race is On series. If you’re anxious to learn more about how LEAP actually works, I explain it in a lot more detail in LEAP, my first book of The Race is On series. You can download it here if you’re interested in finding out.