Was flipping through System Crash earlier and came onto the section talking about the assorted nuclear bombs that WInternight had set off. The nukes were changed to make small atomic blasts but large EMP ones, so that the explosive blast would only be between 500-800 meters in radius and the EMP much further. The Boston Bomb went off during the Novatech IPO, and ...

I'm confused.

I mean, Boston is the site of the UCAS Stock Exchange and the HQ for NeoNet, later Novatech, RIchard Viller's hometown and ground zero for the AI three-way dance.

But a nuke went off in it.

So ... how does this work, exactly?

Did they move the stock exchange back to New York afterwards? How did the fallout effect the local area? How much of Boston got levelled and does *anyone* live there anymore? How does a high-tech company like Novatech thrive on the EMP'd ruins of a major city? Has someone quietly thrown some rebuilding efforts via the Handwavium Group to get the city back up to 2063 levels of prosperity or what?

A lot of it matters on just where the bomb went off, I suppose, but ...

Anyone have a bit of a lowdown on this one?

There shouldn't be that much of a problem - what they used was probably fairly low in the power range (Hiroshima grade probably) and set ofr an airborne explosion (EMP being somewhat line-of-sight, the higher up it pops the farthest the line of sight).

What it means is that it won't get too much fallout and the site of the explosion won't require too much cleanup.

Just look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki : both towns were rebuilt quite soon after the war. Odds are Boston got th same, maybe even faster : there's more tech around for the cleanup, and Bostons's location remains very convenient. It could even get a bit of boom (no pun intended) since real estate prices probably took a severe nosedive after the blast.

Well, it was set off inside something ... a building most likely, and far enough away from the stock exchange that it wouldn't clobber it ... they wouldn't want to EMP the birthplace of the Jormungandr Worm, after all ... but it might have been in some underground basement.

We dunno.

But now I'm curious how long it took to rebuild Hiroshima.

...

To research!

Yes they moved the stock exchange to NYC that's in the Rotten Apple PDF. And a nuclear weapon detonated in a city the size of Boston is very bad no matter the size. The death toll from initial blast is probably around 50,000-100,000 people with the lingering deaths from radiation exposure and whatnot from the blast being another 50,000-100,000 people. Then comes the rise in cancer cases in the Boston area plus a rise in birth defects in new borns. Then of course there's the physical damage to the city. Even with a AAA corps help its going to take decades to figure the complete costs of a nuclear attack on any city. Nukes are bad um'kay.

IIRC, some of the nukes did not go off as planned.

Nukes are awesome. If not for them, we'd be in enormous shitter by now.
Using nukes is bad, though.

Yeah, a bunch of those, actually. But the Boston one did (as described in the System Failure book referenced in the OP).

Heh, i knew not checking the book would bite me.

System Failure basically explains it, on page 66 and 80. Winternight used Magic™ to modify nukes to be optimal for EMP blasts. The actual explosion would be powerful only within 500-800m, but the EMP blast would stretch over 30km or more. To work properly, it had to be detonated at about 1km high...

So basically, what you get is a blast that fries all the electronics in Boston and surrounding areas. And some broken windows.