Weather warfare gets out of hand when a Washington admiral starts up his seabottom nuclear reactors and with a spiral current of warm water produces a circular blizzard that covers the Eastern coast from Maine to D.C. It's a fixed, unmoving (aside from tornadic winds), permanent blizzard of ever-increasing intensity that has assumed surprising characteristics and by novel's end is raging over the Texas Panhandle and just beginning to lick the Eiffel Tower. . . a megastorm ushering in the new Ice Age.