This is the Way the World Ends

by James Morrow

  “Still, no verification system is perfect,” said Justice Gioberti.

  “That’s where the space forts came in,” said Seabird. “Orbiting platforms armed with charged-particle beams that could kill enemy missiles during the boost phase. Einstein VI encouraged the nuclear powers to pursue this technology, along with unarmed interceptor-rockets and ground-based laser defenses.”

  “America would have taken the lead here, as I recall,” said Aquinas.

  “When the Soviet space forts proved unreliable, we saw no alternative but to ship them a few of our prototypes.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Justice Gioberti. “You gave this technology to the Soviets?”

  “As you might imagine, your Honors, it’s frightfully de-stabilizing for only one nuclear power to be building effective ballistic missile defenses.”

  “Do space forts render civilian populations invulnerable?” Aquinas asked.

  “In an all-out attack, many cities would still have been lost. The forts were essentially a hedge against cheating.”

  “So space-based defenses make little sense in the absence of disarmament?”

  “Without Einstein VI, it’s a fair guess—I’m certain of it really, when I look at history—a fair guess that the space forts would have carried the traditional arms race into whole new realms of psychosis.” Seabird indicated the frozen missiles piled up before the bench. “The nuclear powers would have sought to overwhelm each other’s forts with huge offensive deployments.”

  “Were there any other hedges against cheating?”

  “The treaty allowed its signers to build fallout shelters to a fare-thee-well, and even to adopt those weird crisis relocation schemes—you know, where they take everybody out into the country? It also permitted extensive modernization of conventional forces in Europe. After all, this was the real world we were talking about.”

  George wondered exactly how Bonenfant was going to rip apart Einstein VI. Why would Bonenfant want to rip apart Einstein VI? asked his spermatids. To help our case, he replied.

  “It must have been a great day when this agreement went into effect,” said Aquinas.

  “Two intermediate-range missiles kicked off the regime,” said Seabird. “The UN brought them here to Antarctica. I watched the whole thing on television. My family and me, my grandchildren. I’ll never forget. Who could forget? High noon, Greenwich Mean Time. Ross Island, Antarctica. The ceremony began with a team of scientists removing the fissionable material from the warheads and turning it over to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which later diluted it with uranium-238 and burned it up in a Brazilian nuclear power plant.”

  “So the missiles were now disarmed…”

  “An American MacArthur III and a Soviet SS-90. The Army Corps of Engineers carried them to the top of the Mount Erebus volcano and suspended them on chains. And then all these teenagers, about a dozen high-school students from different countries, they started cranking the windlass and lowering the missiles into the crater. First the one with the American flag on its side—the kids melted it. Then the one with the hammer and sickle—”

  As when a shower rushes on an unsuspecting picnic, Victor Seabird began suddenly to cry. His sobs echoed off the slick white walls of the Ice Palace. Aquinas comforted the negotiator with an unembarrassed hand on his shoulder.

  “These are painful memories,” said the prosecutor.

  “A few minutes later the celebrations started.” Seabird removed tears from his cheeks with little flicks of his index finger. “It was like…I don’t know. Like when your team wins the World Series on a ninth-inning homer or something.” The witness’s voice became a rasp as he described how people celebrated Einstein VI—how they honked their car horns, blew factory whistles, drank toasts, closed schools, took the afternoon off, observed moments of silence, threw parties, went to church, smiled at strangers…“Stevie went marching around the house. He was three. He had this little American flag. ‘Granddaddy got rid of the bombs!’ he kept shouting. ‘Granddaddy got—’” Despair jammed the negotiator’s throat.

  The silence was long and thick. George’s bullet wound throbbed. All he could imagine was Holly marching through Victor Seabird’s house, waving the Stars and Stripes. He saw her doing a silly dance with Stevie.

  We’re sunk, aren’t we? his spermatids asked. Not if a vulture expert shows up, he replied.

  Slowly, grandly, Aquinas said, “No further questions.”

  And then it came. The applause. It shook the gallery and laid siege to the glass booth. Overwhite pushed his gloved hands against his ears. When the tumult finally subsided, Justice Jefferson invited Bonenfant to cross-examine.

  “There are all kinds of problems with that abolition proposal,” said Overwhite, lowering his hands.

  “If Bonenfant is any good, he’ll eat it for breakfast,” said Wengernook.

  “Remember when they tried to get rid of booze in the twenties?” said Brat. “A disaster.”

  George admitted to his spermatids that he was very confused.

  “Mr. Seabird,” said Bonenfant, closing for combat, “I fail to see any ultimate merit in your Einstein VI treaty. Like all such utopian schemes, it depended on trusting a country that had lied about its missile installations in Cuba, had shot down a defenseless Korean airliner…the list is endless.”

  “Well, the pre-abolition world entailed quite a bit of trust, too, don’t you think?” said Seabird. “Every day, those defendants over there trusted the Soviets not to try a preemptive strike. They trusted them to construct failsafe launch-control devices…Utopian? Well, I wouldn’t call it that, not when you consider all the renegotiating we did. We had a Standing Consultative Commission on Einstein VI Violations, and I don’t think a week went by without a squawk from one side or the other.”

  “So you admit that the whole thing would have eventually broken down?”

  “We believed that the worst possible situation was the one that had existed—fifty thousand bombs held in check by terror and luck. Vice President Mother Mary Catherine had convinced us that nuclear arsenals were the great evil of the twentieth century, just as slavery had been the great evil of the nineteenth century. The weapons had to be banished.”

  “Sheer fantasy. People would always know how to create nuclear arms.”

  “People would always know how to create slaves, too.”

  “Russia was a huge country. What if the Soviets had squirreled away a few hundred bombs before Einstein VI was signed? Suppose they secretly developed a delivery system capable of penetrating your space forts? They could have demolished America with a bolt from the blue.”

  “Yes, but they would have assumed appalling risks.”

  “I don’t see any risks.”

  “Under Einstein VI, deterrence remained in effect.”

  Bonenfant made a great show of stifling a grin. “Deterrence? Without weapons?”

  Deterrence? thought George. Without weapons?

  “Yes. That’s what we called it, in fact. Weaponless deterrence.”

  “Now we’ve really gone through the looking glass.”

  “It’s like this. One day we said, ‘Isn’t there a significant difference between a nation that has never been a nuclear power and a nation that was once a nuclear power and is now disarmed?’ And we answered, ‘Yes, there is. The second nation still has a deterrent. The deterrent is the capacity to rearm.’”

  Deep ruts appeared in Justice Jefferson’s brow. “That sounds like a pretty flimsy deterrent to us, Mr. Seabird.”

  “Not really a deterrent at all,” said Justice Yoshinobu.

  The witness raised his hands in a braking gesture. “Under Einstein VI every side maintained hardened, well-defended factories for the purpose of building new arsenals should an adversary be caught cheating. If I remember right, a typical lead time was four weeks to the production of eighty warheads plus cruise missiles to deliver them.”

  In the tone of a teenager dealing with a naive little b
rother, Bonenfant said, “So the Soviets wipe out your cities and then sit around drinking vodka for four weeks, waiting for you to rearm and fight back?”

  “With weaponless deterrence, the Soviets do not attack in the first place. Given the space forts, the civil defense programs, the possibility of reciprocal cheating, the limited size of Russia’s clandestine arsenal, and America’s latent potential to retaliate, there are too many uncertainties.”

  “Sounds like the same old stalemate,” said Justice Wojciechowski.

  “This was a new kind of stalemate. It had the advantage of not occurring on the edge of an infinite abyss.”

  “Your regime was really just a method of buying time, wasn’t it?” asked Justice Jefferson.

  “Time,” echoed Seabird softly. “Good old time,” he muttered.

  “Rather like the policies of my clients,” said Bonenfant smoothly. “No further questions.”

  Justice Jefferson removed her whalebone glasses and stared into blurry space. Her eyes darted rapidly, powered by agitated thoughts.

  “Is that abolition stuff really true?” asked George.

  “It’s a load of camel dung,” answered Brat.

  “He’s making it all up,” asserted Wengernook.

  “The Scriptures say nothing about it,” noted Sparrow.

  “If they’d given me the goddamn Post Office’s budget,” said Overwhite, “I might have brought off a few miracles too.”

  AQUINAS TO CALL FINAL WITNESS TOMORROW, Mount Christ-church proclaimed.

  Hearing his name, Jared Seldin, a small, thin boy with hair suggesting some futuristic strain of wheat, wandered into the courtroom. When he grasped the Bible to be sworn in, its weight nearly knocked him flat. The witness’s face was as dark and vibrant as polished oak. He gave his age as eight.

  Eight, thought George. Too old to believe in Santa Claus, old enough to ride a two-wheeler.

  Aquinas approached the stand cautiously, as if trying to get a better view of a fawn. “What century would you have been born in, Jared?”

  “Let’s see, 2134…that’s the twenty-second century.”

  “And where would you have lived?”

  “Habitat-Seven.”

  “Is that a country?”

  “A what?”

  “A country.”

  “What’s a country?” asked the boy.

  “Hard to explain…Now, how would you describe Habitat-Seven?”

  “Kind of an asteroid, I guess, all hollow inside, with a ramjet. It could go at speeds close to light, ’cause we had this big funnel in front that scooped up hydrogen atoms and sent them into this fusion engine, and then the atoms go whoosh out the back. We had plans to visit a star.”

  “What star?”

  “I forget. It had a planet.”

  “Did you like Habitat-Seven, as far as you can remember?”

  “It was a lot nicer than Antarctica.”

  “Yes, Jared, it must have been.”

  “I would have had a puppy. His name would have been Ralph. Why does everything have to be so sad, Mr. Aquinas?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me, Jared, did the people in Habitat-Seven ever get into a war?”

  “Is that like a country?”

  “It’s…you know. A war.”

  “A war?”

  “A war.”

  “I don’t understand, Mr. Aquinas.”

  Bonenfant rose, his eyes hurling freshly sharpened daggers in Aquinas’s direction. “Your Honors, I move that all of this witness’s testimony be stricken. He possesses no expertise concerning nuclear weapons.”

  “Mr. Aquinas, are you planning to take up a more relevant line of questioning?” asked Justice Jefferson.

  “Jared Seldin’s testimony serves to underscore the defendants’ lack of vision,” said Aquinas.

  “Lack of vision is not a crime, sir,” said Justice Jefferson.

  “Negligence then,” said the prosecutor. “Criminal negligence.”

  “The decision on this motion is mine, Mr. Aquinas, not yours,” said Justice Jefferson, “and I am now ruling that Jared Seldin’s testimony be removed from the record in toto.”

  Brat and Wengernook toasted each other with cocoa mugs.

  “That concludes the case for the prosecution,” said Aquinas in a small, gelded voice.

  “Case?” said Brat. “What case?”

  “I didn’t hear any case,” said Wengernook.

  The chief prosecutor returned to his table wearing an inverted smile, as if fishhooks were tugging at the corners of his mouth.

  “The part about eliminating the weapons was interesting, don’t you think?” said George.

  “Weaponless deterrence is like bodiless sex,” said Wengernook. “It gets you nowhere.”

  “A grin without a cat,” said Randstable.

  “Smoke,” said Brat.

  “Particularly when your agency is inadequately funded,” said Overwhite.

  If Holly had lived, wondered George, would she have traveled to Mars?

  CHAPTER 14

  In Which the Nuclear Warriors Have Their Day in Court

  On the seventeenth of March, as the long polar night crept across the continent, creating glaciers of coal and bergs of pitch, Martin Bonenfant opened the case for the defense.

  Throughout the courtroom lampwicks flared, fed by oil from killer whales and Weddell seals. Jagged shadows slithered around the glass booth. Bonenfant’s young face glowed orange, as if a candle burned inside his skull.

  “Call Major General Roger Tarmac.”

  Fearlessly, Brat rose.

  “You’re gonna be great,” said Wengernook.

  “Break a leg,” said Randstable, who was setting up his little magnetic chess set.

  “Good luck,” said George, whose mind was crowded with images of high-school students lowering intermediate-range missiles into a volcano.

  Prompted by Bonenfant, Brat offered a rousing account of his Indiana boyhood, from which the tribunal learned that he had on two different occasions prevented school chums from drowning in the Muscatatuck River. Then came the Air Force Academy, a juggernaut progression through the ranks, and a brilliant career as a target nominator for the Strategic Air Command in the former city of Omaha.

  “Several days ago,” said Bonenfant, “your name was mentioned during the testimony of Quentin Flood, founder of an organization called Generals Against Nuclear Arms.”

  Brat polished his Distinguished Service Medal with his scopas glove. “He took exception to one of my articles, ‘Our Achilles Leg: Triad Theory and Land-Based Defenses.’”

  “That article identified a problem with your country’s Guardian Angel missiles,” said Bonenfant.

  “America’s security has traditionally stood on three legs—the Triad. First, you had your submarine-launched ICBMs. Then you had your manned bombers. And the third force, which I called our Achilles Leg—that was the Guardian Angel land-based missiles.”

  “Why had they become an Achilles Leg?”

  “Because of the SS-60—four hundred and thirty highly accurate Soviet ICBMs designed to remove our Guardian Angels in a first strike.”

  “A frightening development.”

  “After such an attack, an American President would have only two options—he could surrender, or he could retaliate against Soviet cities.” Brat chopped the air with his hand. “But that would naturally bring reciprocal measures, and then he’s really in thick shit.”

  “And your solution was…?”

  “Missile Omega.”

  “The Omegas were effective against the new Soviet missiles?”

  “Such targets place a premium on response time. Omega is a fast mother. She also has terrific accuracy, long range, and ten high-yield warheads on her business end.”

  “Did you ever hear the argument that without a survivable basing mode”—Bonenfant fixed his mouth in a condescending curve—“Omega had little retaliatory potential and was thus a so-called ‘first-strike weapon’?”


  “We’ve never given up on the basing problem.”

  “What modes have you studied?”

  The general splayed his fingers and began ticking them off. “So far we’ve considered basing the missiles in blimps, underwater canisters, circular trenches, coal mines, and barges on the Mississippi River.”

  “You should have based them up your ass!” a young woman called from the gallery. It took Justice Jefferson a full minute of gavel pounding to quell the laughter.

  “You had an unusual nickname around SAC,” said Bonenfant.

  “I was the MARCH Hare,” replied Brat. “Modulated Attacks in Response to Counterforce Hostilities.”

  “Some people have accused the MARCH Plan of being a war-winning scenario disguised as a deterrent.”

  “The very best way to prevent a nuclear war is to show that you believe you can win one.”

  “The court may have trouble—”

  “Forces that cannot win cannot deter. Is that clear?”

  “It’s certainly clear to me. No further questions.” Bonenfant walked away from the stand with the self-satisfied air of a cat bringing a mouse to the back stoop.

  Justice Jefferson invited the chief prosecutor to cross-examine.

  “He was swell, don’t you think?” said Randstable, concentrating on the chessboard, where he was about to launch a king-side attack against himself.

  “A real pro,” said Wengernook.

  “He certainly gave them the sort of data they’re looking for,” said Overwhite.

  Forces that cannot win cannot deter. George thought about this particular truth as hard as he could.

  “General Tarmac,” said Aquinas, sidling up to the stand, “I’m bewildered by your Achilles Leg notion. Weren’t America’s land-based missiles kept in concrete silos?”

  “The new Soviet SS-60s had a hard-target kill capacity,” Brat explained patiently.

  “Hard target?”

  “An ICBM silo is a hard target.”

  “As opposed to a soft target?”

  “Right. We worked long hours on silo hardness, but there are limits—two thousand pounds per square inch or so.”

  “In other words, this whole arms race can be traced to a lot of men trying to get it hard enough?”