THE RADIOACTIVITY NEVER did rise much beyond a mildly hazardous level, and that was only transient, during the second week of the war—the week called the Death of Cities. The small shards of sanity retained by the high commands on both sides dictated avoiding weapons with a built-in backfire: no cobalt bombs were dropped, no territories permanently poisoned. Generals still remembered that unoccupied territory, no matter how devastated, is still unconquered territory.
But no such considerations stood in the way of biological warfare. It was controllable: you never released against the enemy any disease you didn’t yourself know how to control. There would be some slips, of course, but the margin for error—
There were some slips. But for the most part, biological warfare worked fine. The gr
