by D. A. Hill
“How many people know about this?”
“Outside this room, about a dozen people at JPL in Pasadena,” Karen Schauble answered.
“We need to keep this locked down while we formulate a plan,” he said in his best take-charge-in-a-crisis voice. Everyone nodded in agreement. The President turned to his Secretary of Defense Harry Branston. “Harry, you are authorized to use all means necessary, including lethal force—do I make myself clear—all means necessary, to prevent anyone or anything entering or leaving the JPL facility. Cut off all communications in and out. If a cockroach so much as tries to leave you are to blast it to hell. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” he answered.
“Jack, pull together whoever and whatever you need. I want options within forty-eight hours.”
—o—
The President sat in his normal position at the head of the table and surveyed the room, pausing to look each of his key advisors in the eye. For the past two days he had tried, admittedly with little success, not to think about the asteroid, knowing he should trust in his team to bring him a solution. Now it was time for them to step up. “What do you have for me?”
The Situation Room was filled with some of the brightest minds in the United States Government, yet nobody replied. “Well? Anybody?” the President demanded. “Somebody please tell me, how we are going to stop this thing.”
Harry Branston decided it was up to him to give the reply that nobody wanted to give. “We’re not, Mr. President,” he said. Seeing the President’s shock, Branston quickly elaborated. “Despite all the holo-movies you might have seen where they destroy the asteroid before it hits the Earth and everyone lives happily ever after, it isn’t possible with the technology and time we have available. To nudge the asteroid off course we have to hit it far enough out that we would need to launch now. Problem is we don’t have anything with the range and payload required. We haven’t launched anything bigger than a suitcase beyond an Earth orbit for over twenty-five years, at least not without using complicated slingshot maneuvers around the sun and other planets. Those take years to execute.”
“Can’t we just nuke the damn thing when it gets closer to Earth?”
“Yes sir we can, but we risk turning a single very large asteroid into multiple asteroids, each still plenty big enough to wipe out a large city. Better to have only one object to track and to limit the impact to a single location.”
“Harry are you telling me we just have to sit here and wait for this thing to hit us?” the President asked rhetorically. “Jesus, how the hell did we get into this situation?”
“Mr. President, programs to detect and defend against asteroid strikes have been proposed many times but they have always lost out to funding more immediate and popular needs,” Jack Brown answered. “Social Security and Medicare for example.”
Jack Brown’s point hit home with Carlson. He had wasted much of his first term battling unsuccessfully with Congress on measures to get entitlement spending under control before the United States was completely bankrupt. They were already struggling to fund their military commitments, and to contain the growing Chinese threat. To add insult to injury, the very people who most strenuously resisted entitlements reform were the most outspoken in criticizing him for being weak on national security. “Those old geezers are going to be dead soon anyway. Of course they don’t want anything to interfere with their precious entitlements,” the President said bitterly. “Too bad their children and grandchildren are screwed. In more ways than one it now seems.”
Jack Brown and the President had been over this issue a thousand times. He agreed with him, but the politics on entitlements were radioactive. Jack ignored the President’s rant. “Apart from a few scientists who have generally been regarded as somewhat fringe, there’s just never been an important constituency pushing for asteroid detection and interception. But that is irrelevant now sir. We are where we are.”
Paul Carlson was not happy with Jack’s answer. He wanted nothing more than to find someone to blame for putting him in this unenviable position. He had not worked most of his adult life to rise to the highest office in the land only to have it all end on his watch. But he knew Jack was right. Even if entitlements had not been such a problem, there were always a thousand competing demands on government. He certainly would not have voted to fund an asteroid protection program during his years in the Senate, even if such a bill had miraculously made it out of committee and to the floor for a vote. “Let’s move forward.”
“Mr. President if I may?” the Secretary of Homeland Security Rajev Sandeep asked. The President nodded, indicating that Secretary Sandeep should continue. “Mr. President since we can’t prevent an impact we need to immediately mobilize all resources, public and private, towards surviving the impact and its after effects.”
“That makes sense. I assume you have developed such a plan?” the President asked.
“Yes Mr. President,” Rajev Sandeep answered. “But before we discuss what we’re proposing to do, I think we should explain exactly what it is we will be dealing with. I’ve invited Dr. Chen Wei from Caltech to describe the effects of the impact. Dr. Chen specializes in studying extinction level events.”
Dr. Chen stood. The President indicated for him to proceed. “Sir, it depends on precisely where the asteroid hit, which unfortunately we will not know until much closer to the impact date.” Dr. Chen spoke the English a man who had spent his childhood in China but much of his adult life in the United States, a relic of an earlier era when the country was willing and able to draw in the best minds from all over the world. Not anymore. The Chinese in particular were doing quite well at holding on to their best minds and generally using them to America’s disadvantage.
“If the impact site is at sea, immediate effect would be mega-tsunami—wave high as two miles. Actually the term wave is misleading. A better description is an enormous mass of water destroying everything in its path. Such a mass of water hitting the west coast would not stop until it reach the Sierra Nevada, from the east coast the Appalachians and from the Gulf of Mexico there would be nothing to stop it before the border with Canada.”
“What about an impact on land?” The President asked hoping for better news.
“Sir, the explosive force would be equal to all the world’s nuclear weapons combined, twenty thousand time over. The crater would be somewhere between seventy-five and one hundred twenty-five mile across. Everything within several hundred mile would be hit by a massive shock wave and fireball.”
“Armageddon. You’re describing Armageddon,” the President said. Nobody disagreed. “So should we pray for it to hit an unpopulated landmass? Or the middle of the Sahara desert perhaps?” the President asked, desperately hoping for a positive scenario.
“That would minimize the immediate casualty, Mr. President,” Dr. Chen replied. “But regardless of where the impact occurs and how bad the immediate casualty are, the extinction threat comes from the cloud of dust and debris thrown into the atmosphere; that blocks the sun’s rays and causes the atmosphere to cool.”
“How much cooling are we talking about Dr. Chen?”
“Data on previous asteroid impacts would be very helpful in answering your question but they all occur so long ago that what we have is inferred rather than observed. It is more speculation than data. Most recent significant impact site is the meteor crater in Arizona. Even this impact was fifty thousand year ago.”
“I know the one. My father took me to see it one summer when I was in middle school,” the President said. “I wanted to go to Hawaii instead, but I do remember it was quite impressive.”
Dr. Chen fixed the President in his gaze. “Mr. President, we believe the meteor responsible for that crater was only fifty-five meter in diameter.”
The President sat back in his chair as if the shock had physically moved him. “And this one is nine miles…” the President said to himself, as the implications of Dr. Chen’s statement sank in
. Only now did Paul Carlson really understand the scale of the destruction an asteroid nine miles wide would cause. Given this realization, he found it hard to believe the immediate effects of such a cataclysmic event were not going to be their biggest problem. “So how bad is the cooling going to be?”
“Without hard data from asteroid strikes, the most useful events to extrapolate from are large volcanic eruptions over the past two hundred years, in particular Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991, for which we have a very reliable data on the amount of material ejected into the atmosphere. That eruption cooled the Earth’s climate by about one degree Fahrenheit for nearly two year. To give another example, the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 caused following year to be known as Year Without A Summer or Eighteen Hundred And Froze To Death; it snowed in New York June 1816 and rivers in Pennsylvania were still frozen in August. You can imagine what that did to crops. The effects of 2045KC impact would be orders of magnitude bigger.”
“Orders of magnitude?” the President asked.
“Mr. President, this impact would eject ten or a hundred time as much material into the atmosphere. Fortunately the relationship between the amount of debris and length and severity of resulting climate anomaly is not linear. At some point solar radiation is already fully block so more debris has no effect. Plus volcanic eruptions are usually rich in sulfur which is very effective for blocking solar radiation. So one hundred time as much debris mean much less than one hundred time the climate effect.”
“Somehow under the circumstances, the phrase it could be worse doesn’t seem much of a consolation,” Carlson replied.
“Unfortunately not Mr. President,” Dr. Chen replied. “Our estimate is still that 2045KC impact would result in two year of near total darkness—like a night with full moon in the middle of the day—with temperature below freezing for most of that time.”
“People will need food and heat to survive.”
“Yes sir, but unfortunately the first two years are only a small part of the problem. Heating will be less critical after the first two year when reasonable level of daylight and more moderate temperature will return, but unfortunately not to the level where we can have normal agriculture. That will take at least ten years and possibly twenty.”
“So you’re telling me the challenge is to provide enough food to keep the population alive not for two years, but for as much as twenty years?!” The President banged his fist on the table in frustration. “Holy crap, this just gets worse and worse!” he shouted. He had used more profanity in the past twenty minutes than Jack Brown had heard him use in twenty years.
“Correct Mr. President,” Dr. Chen responded as he resumed his seat.
The President collected himself. “OK. Alright. So that’s the challenge we face. No use complaining about it. So what’s the plan? How do we keep people alive?”
The room was deathly silent. Harry Branston looked around the room and knew that no one else would step forward to disappoint the President. He had known Paul Carlson since they were at college together; he would have to be the one to deliver the dreadful news. “Mr. President it is simply not feasible. At least not to save everyone.”
“What do you mean it’s not feasible Harry?” the President asked angrily. He held the highest office of the most powerful nation in the history of the world, a nation that had achieved amazing things. Seventy-five years ago—when his grandfather was still a boy!—the United States had put a man on the moon. Now they were telling him this could not be done? He could not accept that. “There must be a way,” he demanded.
“Sir, let’s begin with the food situation,” Harry Branston replied. “The problem is this; we would need to somehow accumulate during the next two years a food surplus equivalent to twenty years’ worth of consumption. Put another way, in the next two years we would need to grow eleven times as much food as we normally do.”
The Secretary of Agriculture spoke. “Mr. President, we have examined every option to increase food production and reduce consumption over the next two years so we might stockpile as much food as possible, but we can’t even come close to having enough to feed four hundred million people for twenty years.”
“There has to be a way,” the President pleaded, as if repeating the statement would somehow make it true.
“Sir you have to appreciate just how much food we are talking about. I know it’s hard to get your head around. May I try to illustrate?” the Secretary of Agriculture asked.
“Go on.”
“Each person needs half a ton of food per year just to survive; that’s two hundred million tons a year to feed the population of the United States. I must stress, this is the minimum amount the average person can survive on long term. On these rations people will spend every minute of every hour of every day thinking about food.”
“Well at least I can run for re-election on a platform of having saved the world whilst simultaneously curing America’s obesity epidemic,” the President observed wryly. “Please continue,” he said as everyone sat silently, looking mildly embarrassed as his joke fell completely flat.
“Multiply the annual requirement by twenty years and we are talking about four billion—that’s billion with a B sir—four billion tons of food. Even if we could miraculously produce that much surplus food in the next two years, food will become the most valuable commodity on the face of the Earth, the only currency of value. Not only do we need to find a way to store this enormous amount of food so it remains edible for twenty years, but we will need to keep it secure from hundreds of millions of starving people who will do anything to eat.”
“So how much food can we accumulate?” President Carlson asked. He did not like where this was heading. Did not like it at all. But he had to face it. It was not like he could just say sorry, I didn’t really want to be President, and then go home to New York and pretend it was all a terrible dream. He had no doubt there would be plenty of people ready to step straight into his shoes, but he had no reason to believe any of them could handle the situation any better than he could.
“The first step is to stop all food exports. Keeping the twenty percent of our agricultural production we normally export over the next two years would provide enough food to support the population for six months.”
Secretary of State John Hammond interrupted. “Mr President, we need to discuss the foreign policy implications of such a decision,” he said with concern. “In fact we need to discuss how we deal with this internationally in general. There seems to be an unstated assumption in this plan that we deal with this unilaterally.”
“Absolutely,” Harry Branston answered unashamedly. “Mr. President, our responsibility, our only duty is to the American people.”
“I agree,” the President said.
“But Mr. President, aren’t our chances of survival better if we address this at a global level?” Hammond protested.
“Since most countries are net importers of food, that’s just spreading the same amount of butter ever thinner on a larger piece of toast,” Branston replied impatiently.
“Secretary Branston is right,” the President said. “Self-sufficiency is our only option—any other path is equivalent to unilateral disarmament. If that strains our international relations we have the strength to deal with that.” Having settled the issue in favor of Branston, the President indicated that the Agriculture Secretary should continue.
“We estimate we can increase production by another twenty percent by using every piece of available land and spare labor to grow food, giving us another six months. Slaughtering and eating all our livestock over the next two years and stockpiling the grain we would normally feed them could give us another six months. Finally, rationing everyone’s intake to the minimum recommended calories over the next two years would give us another six months’ worth. That’s only enough food to feed the country for a total of two years.”
Paul Carlson did not respond. How could he? He had just been told the entire population of
the United States was probably going to starve to death four and a half years from now.
It was left to Harry Branston to articulate the stark choice the President faced. “Mr. President, you are facing a terrible choice, perhaps the most terrible choice a leader of any country has ever had to make, but ultimately there is only one decision we believe you can make. Either we try to save everyone, in which case everyone dies, and I mean everyone, not nearly everyone, but every single man, woman and child in America, or we make sure we save enough people and critical resources that we can rebuild our civilization.”
“Harry, you’re suggesting we condemn hundreds of millions of Americans to death,” the President replied in anguish and anger. “That we just stand by and watch them starve.”
“Mr. President nobody needs to starve. When the time comes, we can provide a more humane option.”
A chill of horror ran down Carlson’s spine as he realized that Harry Branston had just suggested the United States Government facilitate mass suicide. God help them if it came to that.
“It’s the asteroid that has condemned them to death, not us. We didn’t do this. We have no other option. All we can do, all I am asking you to do Mr. President, is focus on saving the people we can save.”
“And how many is that? Forty million?” the President asked. If they would only have enough food to feed four hundred million people for two years it seemed logical that they could feed a tenth of that number for twenty years. Carlson was therefore surprised when no one confirmed that number. “Twenty million, ten million?” Still no reply. “Less than ten million? Less than a million?” the President asked, the rising pitch in his voice betraying his increasing level of distress as he counted off smaller and smaller numbers.
Harry Branston finally spoke. “Unfortunately, Mr. President, the food supply is not our only constraint. We will have to establish survival centers—think of them as arks if you like—that can be self-sufficient for twenty years and that we are able to secure in a world that has gone to hell. In addition to food reserves these arks will need military resources, stores of energy and power generating capacity, shelter, medical facilities, seeds and animals and so on to rebuild, all located inside a perimeter that can be defended.”
