"God Almighty! He's really done it now!" Mendelius heard his own voice echo round the attic room. Fiction or predestined fact, this, from the pen of the Pope, was the unsayable, the absolutely unprintable.

And yet, in the context of an atomic calamity, it was a matter of simple logic.

It was a scenario which, in one form or another, every national leader kept locked in his most secret files, the script for the aftermath of Armageddon.

From "The Clowns Of God"
by Morris West