TWENTY-NINE
On his second morning back, the president got a full report on the nuking. The bomb had landed in a plant parking lot; there were living witnesses to that. It had looked like an artillery shell. A guy in the lot had thrown it in the back of a pickup truck and sped away with it, horn blaring, as if realizing what it was. It had blown almost a mile away, and damage to the nuclear generating plant was not massive. There were no radiation leaks from the plant; the radioactivity released was entirely from the bomb.
A northwest breeze had carried the radioactive cloud across Chesapeake Bay and the southern Delmar Peninsula. Panic had been widespread there, where many people thought Washington had been nuked and nuclear war begun.
After the briefing, the president boarded an army helicopter and overflew the site, an action of no obvious functional but considerable political value. Afterward he met the press at the army's nuclear cleanup camp near Prince Frederick, where he delivered a two-minute address and dealt with a few questions. Then, with the first lady, he visited the refugee center near Washington, and the injured at Walter Reed Medical Center.
They were back at the White House for supper. And while he'd gotten no "work" done that day, it occurred to Arne Haugen that what he had done was as important in the functioning of a president as anything else would have been.
After supper he worked on his "new technology" speech.