A quarter century ago, in mid-September in Toronto, I was tidying plants on the retaining wall of the front yard. My mother was sipping coffee on the porch. A neighbor came out and called over, “Thought you might want to know, a plane hit the World Trade Center in New York.”

We went inside for more news. We soon learned that another plane had hit the Center too… I said, “Mom, the United States is under attack.”

At the time, we did not know if Washington and Los Angeles — or for that matter, Ottawa and Toronto — would also be hit. Toronto’s CN Tower, then the world’s tallest freestanding structure, would be a tempting target.

But the attackers who inflicted the thousands of casualties turned out to be a lone band of self-immolating terrorists. If any states backed or helped them, they were not boasting freely at the time.

The damage the terrorists could do was limited by their lack of access to nuclear weapons. But what if such a group did get hold of them? That’s the premise of a just-published novel by Geoffrey Simmons, Oppenheimer’s Demon.

But Simmons imagines what would happen if a nuclear physicist who was badly injured as a child at Hiroshima eventually decides to get revenge by nuking Chicago.

Professor Nakamura has access to and knowledge of nuclear materials. He can hire accomplices among international crime syndicates. And, pushing ninety years old, he sees a physics conference at the University of Chicago as his last likely chance to stage his revenge.

Of course, no one other than Nakamura and a few confederates know any of this. From the opening chapter, all that any authorities know about at first is several murders during an arson incident at a western Ontario lumber mill. (Nakamura does not believe in allowing potential witnesses to survive.)

Slowly though, a much bigger picture begins to develop

Chicago DA Glenn Winders, who is also an emergency services co-ordinator, learns a bit more when another very elderly Japanese man, who can only say “You betcha,” is found in a park with a bullet wound and a USB stick — with nuclear plans on it.

Winders teams with neurosurgeon Em Lattimer, to see what they can find out from the old man anyway, using a new technology she has developed for analyzing memories from brain scans. From that and other sources, they and a supporting cast from the military, the police, and the law bench piece together the fact that there is a missile out there somewhere, aimed at Chicago, and one aimed somewhere else. If either is deployed, the outcome would make 9-11 seem negligible.

To complicate matters, Lattimer has annoyed the Dean of Medicine because she includes in her lectures discussions of the intelligent design of the universe and life forms. Given her many accomplishments in her field, one might expect the Dean to have better things to do. But he would hardly be the first or only administrator who has been promoted beyond his level of competence. So for a while, he hovers as a disorienting threat in an increasingly tense situation. The story moves quickly anyway, helped along by the fact that Winders, who is also a physician, understands the medical side as well as the legal side.

Author Simmons is, among other things, a disaster preparedness expert. He does a good job of portraying the growing panic in and around Chicago as word of the potential blast leaks out. In a recent interview, he told publisher Jonathan Witt that he was drawing on his knowledge of what happened during Hurricane Rita: “running blindly can often cause more deaths than the disaster itself.” When order breaks down and witnesses flee, shopkeepers might be shot by looters or motorists killed in a dispute over a tank of gas. And these casualties would happen even if the disaster was later averted.

Challenging us to think through the ethical dilemmas

It was a smart move on Simmons’s part to ensure that the mastermind of the plot was a victim of nuclear holocaust himself. It grounds his story in reality, forcing us to confront the suffering the Allies inflicted during World War II. From most sources, we hear only about what the Nazis did, but that is hardly a challenge.

Also, as John Zmirak observes in his review at Chronicles,

The author delves into the ominous implications of using AI to enhance or access the mind through the brain. In fact, the two lead characters (both physicians) end up debating whether the mind transcends the brain as a soul, or whether the mind is simply an epiphenomenon of sparks shooting through meat.

Once again, Simmons refuses simplistic moralizing. It’s obvious that mind-reading technology will be used by evildoers for bad outcomes. But it is also Winders and Lattimers’ only chance of finding out more from the mysterious elderly Japanese patient who was found with the USB stick — and thus they can maybe prevent the detonation.

There is an analogy to Hiroshima here too; most historians think that the casualties would have been much worse and more widespread if the bombs had not forced a quick, unconditional surrender on Japan.

And who is the demon in the title? The publisher explains in the online introduction:

Everyone knows about the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. But Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project had on hand another nuclear core. After claiming the lives of two scientists in separate accidents, it was dubbed the Demon Core and melted down. Some demons, however, are not so easily destroyed.

We’ve all met those demons at the core. Just as the last nuclear core was very much a part of the project, our own demons are the evil in ourselves that must be conquered.