The Prime Minister relaxed in his chair at his desk in the command bunker. The place had been built nearly thirty years ago, at the height of the cold war, and was a very good example of the worst possible scenario ideology that went behind government thinking at the time. The place had originally been a deep coal mine until the seams ran dry in the mid sixties. The MOD had immediately taken it over. The deep shafts provided a ready made fallout shelter and sufficient depth to shield from even the greatest Russian warheads, and although the cold war had finished nearly ten years previously, the MOD kept the place up and running as an emergency control centre.
Since the day before the nuclear strike, the PM had been operating from this bunker. It protected him from the outside world, from all the criticism and the protests, the complaints and the jeers. He had realised that his time in office would be remembered for what he had done over the past few days, and it was now up to him to try and prove it was the right thing to do. He had begun to think about his decision, despite all the assurances of his advisors. His dreams were punctuated by horrible visions of fires, death, despair and anger. How many people had died there, he did not now. He had received news that they had found twelve teenage survivors. He now wondered why there had been teenagers there, 'do wizards train their youngsters in dark magic'. He hoped so, because he didn't want to be remembered as a murderer, a tyrant, an irresponsible upper class toff who had no idea how it affected ordinary people.
The press weren't helping. The military was trying to keep a lid on certain things, but somehow these things were leaked to the newspapers and T.V networks. The cloud of radiation had now drifted within thirty miles of Stirling, and a major evacuation of over two hundred thousand people was taking place. Panic had set in, and looting and rioting were breaking out in every town in southern Scotland. But now, he had another appointment, the leader of the wizards, their Prime Minister, or, what did they call him, the Minster for Magic. He had met him once, two years ago, about some escaped criminal. He couldn't remember much about him. Seemed a bit pompous, he thought.
Then the door burst open, and there stood the Minister for Magic. He looked as tired as the Prime Minister, but seemed to be in some sort of distress or anger. He walked right up to the Prime Minister, ignored his extended hand and any other gesture of courtesy. He just glared at the Prime Minister, a look of extreme anger radiating from every nook and crevice.
"Please tell me it wasn't you." He said, in a surprisingly calm voice.
"It wasn't us what?" replied the Prime Minister, slightly surprised at his opposite number's reaction.
"The explosion, Hogsmeade, the school, the giant cloud, was it you?" His tone became steadily angrier.
"If you are referring to the nuclear explosion yesterday then yes, it was us who deployed the device."
"But how, I mean, your muggles, how could you." His voice shifted to an unbelievable tone.
"A nuclear bomb, despite its relatively small size, can produce an explosion of many thousands of tons."
"Then, it was you, you…murderers." His eyes narrowed, and his face went pale. "You killed them all."
"The device was used against a terrorist camp, we had…"
"It wasn't a terrorist camp, it is, it was, a school and a wizarding town. Twenty thousand people are dead, do you hear me, dead!!"
"Pardon, are you sure you're not mistaken?" Asked an increasingly worried Prime Minister.
"A third of Britain's magical community have been blasted off the face of the earth, DO YOU THINK I'M MISTAKEN!?!" He was now shouting at the Prime Minister, despite his close proximity.
"But our intelligence…"
"I COULDN'T GIVE A F##K WHAT YOUR INTELLIGENCE SAID. A WHOLE TOWN, A SCHOOL FOR HELL'S SAKE. CHILDREN, YOU STUPID MUGGLE, CHILDREN, INNOCENT WOMEN AND CHILDREN, BURNT TO DEATH, AND VAPOURISED. THE WHOLE WIZARDING COMMUNITY IS IN TOTAL DEVASTATION. WHY, MAN, WHY?"
"If you would just let me finish, according to our reports, there was a large area of magical activity, and we presumed it to be this terrorist group of wizards, and since we didn't have any information to the contrary, then we decided to act."
"AND YOU THINK THAT EXCUSES YOU?"
"Well, you have informed us of these wizards and where they were operating from. If you had told us everything from the beginning, then we would have not have used this terrible weapon." Fudge stared at the Prime Minister as though he had just called his mother a dirty slut.
"Listen to me, muggle, you have just killed our best people who could fight this. In fact, you have just probably sent many people over to their side. They are not going to be satisfied that their sons and daughters had died because of your mistake." With that, he turned and walked out. The Prime Minister went over to the drinks cabinet he kept for times like this. He poured himself a double Whiskey, and drank it down in a couple of gulps. He returned to his desk and sat down.
'Oh god', he thought, 'please god, we didn't make a mistake?' But he knew the answer, and he put his head in his hands and began crying, crying for all those who had died, crying for all that blood shed, crying for the destruction of innocents and children. He had done the worst crime imaginable, and had killed more people at once than anytime since the last nuclear bomb. The Minister for Magic had been right. He was a murderer, a destroyer, a criminal, every evil and despicable thing on this planet, and there was nothing he could do to put it right.
Brian Dunford, Defence Minister and chief military advisor to the Prime Minister, and General Morgan, the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces in Europe, sat down in the Ministers office in the Houses of Parliament in London. For several minutes, they exchanged an increasingly frustrating argument about the detonation of the a-bomb. The American General had not mentioned the 'Powell', he was waiting for a full report to come through, but the discovery of the remains of the British missile did not help his mood, particularly as the Minister seemingly unapproachable attitude towards the device deployment.
Eventually the discussion ended, with no obvious results, apart from ruining both of their days. When the American had left, Dunford shut and locked the door. He took out a cigarette. He didn't usually smoke, only in times of stress. Now was one of those moments. He was about to light it when a figure suddenly appeared behind him. He turned around to face the intruder.
"Oh, its you Lucius." He said, recognising the death-eater, despite the mask. Besides, it was always Lucius; he had ways of doing things that even Dunford admired in a morbid kind of fashion.
"Well, I see you are making things difficult for the Americans. Good, my lord will be pleased."
"I still don't see why you had to kill all those Americans though. I hate to see that many people die."
"You know, for someone responsible for thousands of deaths, a greater number even than our lord himself, I'm genuinely surprised." He muttered sarcastically, taking a glass of Brandy from a bottle on the desk.
"Don't say I'm responsible for the bombing of that town," Dunford snarled at the wizard.
"Well, lets face it, you are the Prime Minister's chief advisor, and he'd do whatever you'd say was best. And you told him to use that, err, what's it called?"
"A Nuclear bomb."
"Yes, the master was impressed, and so was I, I never knew muggles could be so…destructive." Dunford didn't answer. "Yes, anyway, our master wants to antagonise the Americans a bit more. We already done our share of dirty work, its time you did something that would really piss the US off."
"I'll see, it'll be difficult to figure out…"
"Remember, Dunford, what would happen if you didn't comply." Lucius raised his wand, and a picture appeared, of a brown haired middle aged woman and a young boy, around seven, and had his mother's hair. Dunford turned to Lucius.
"Don't you dare even lay a finger on them."
"We won't," Lucius, muttered deletrus, and the image disappeared. "Provided you follow our orders. I'll return in a few days, just to check up on you." He disapparated, leaving the Minister on his own, with an unlighted cigarette in his mouth and a dirty glass on the desk.
A/N The title, if you wondered, comes from a poem I had to do in English a few years back. We had to do a poem on a random subject, and I had to do a thing on nuclear bombs. I found this book about the nuclear bomb tests in Australia (These were British tests, when Australia agreed to lease the British testing sites, providing the size did not exceed something like 60 kt, although the British did actually test a 100kt device in Australia and kept the true yield a secret until 1984. For more information on nukes (if you really want to know) try http://www.fas.org/nuke/hew/). This is what actually sparked my interest in these weapons, (don't worry, I hate them beyond anything else, but their immense power, and their place in history, tells a lot about the human psyche.) My poem went:
The cloud rises higher than the tallest mountains,
They make the earth tremble in their wake,
A Device capable of destroying everything and yet,
They keep their homelands safe and protected.
A shadow of destruction,
More powerful than any disease,
Or earthquake,
Or anything that nature can throw at man, and yet.
It all comes from the smallest particles in the universe,
an atom,
And yet it can destroy entire countries,
The simplest thing in nature,
But also the most powerful force in the Universe.
They burn hundreds of times hotter than a star,
And produced a light greater than the sun itself.
Capable of producing winds hundreds of miles faster than
a hurricane,
And can turn the brightest day into night, and the
darkest night into day.
Capable of erasing thousands of people in the blink of an
eye,
Of obliterating age-old cities off the face of the Earth.
Of destroying Empires and continents,
And poisoning the land until the end of time.
And known simply,
A name that raises fear in any man,
Of any nation, of any race,
As 'The bomb'.
Well, I got
a B- "good description and well expressed feelings, but lacking in any recognisable
structure."
Oh well.