The President went on. “The owners of these toys tend to keep them on their desks so they can enjoy them. In a few minutes the immediate vicinity of each special one will disappear. Government centers, military bases, key industrial plants and so on. Slash the head from a highly centralized nation and it dies. Your nation will then be partitioned at the Urals; NATO will occupy the west, China the east.”
He felt himself slipping into the mad delusion, the spell woven by the President’s words. “How does this miraculous weapon work?”
“Your globe is prettier than mine. Mine doesn’t sparkle. But even in the hard vacuum inside the globes there are some air molecules that bump into the snowflakes. The snowflakes in your globe are iron of a unique and valuable sort. Crystalline antimatter iron. Only about an ounce, but E=MC2 is a very long lever. A signal from here relayed through a satellite triggers the detonation.”
He vaguely remembered one of the many briefs of scientific research proposals that continually crossed his desk. Something about producing antimatter with high-energy particle-accelerator rings and magnetic-containment techniques borrowed from fusion technology. But according to the brief, success was at least a decade away. Could the Americans possibly be that far ahead of his country?
His office door opened and Colonel Gurkoff rushed in. He started to reach for the globe, but the Premier waved him back sharply. In an old and tired voice he said, “If there were time to remove or defuse it, we wouldn’t have been warned.” How many more are in Kremlin offices? Four that I know about. “Aren’t I right, President Nivling?”
The President nodded.
He studied the snowflakes. They looked very cold, as cold as death. The blighting frost reached out to fill his mind and soul. “Leave me, Colonel.”
“But–”
“Leave me, Colonel!”
Colonel Gurkoff backed out, his face a blank mask.
“Even if this incredible tale were true, why tell us about it? Why not go ahead and set off your bombs?”
The President leaned forward, earnestness showing in his bland face. “Isn’t it obvious? We are standing on the brink, but we haven’t jumped yet. Some of my advisers wanted a preemptive strike. As it is, I can only delay the signal for a few more minutes. But we can still avoid war.”
“How?” He felt himself slipping inexorably toward acceptance of defeat.
“By restoring the balance of terror. You must destroy the Project Tsarina satellites right now. Then we will delay the signal for twelve hours, time enough for you to move all the toys to places where they can be detonated safely.”
The fear was plain in the President’s expression now. Not fear that what he was doing would fail. Fear that it would succeed too well and he would have to live with the responsibility. His eyes almost pleaded. The Premier had reached and held his high office by reading the truth behind faces. He saw it here.
Father, what have I done to our country? I have brought the horror down on us for the last time. Millions of our citizens will die, and foreigners will rule the survivors. “That is impossible. If I gave such an order based only on what you have told me, I would be arrested for treason and the order ignored. I must have proof to take before the Central Committee. And time.”
“Damn it, man, you know I can’t give you either!” The fear permeated his voice. “I am not trying to convince you to do anything! I am offering you the only chance I can for you to save your nation!”
He turned to the seldom-used communication console. As the President well knew, he did have the authority to order the immediate destruction of the Tsarina satellites. Of course he would then have to justify his decision to the Central Committee or be executed in disgrace. But that wouldn’t be difficult—he would have them witness the safe detonation of the toys at the end of the twelve hours. He couldn’t do it.
For all his confidence in his own judgment and his belief that the President was telling the truth, he had no real evidence. I am a rational man, a practical man. I cannot act on a mere premonition of doom. Not in this ultimate test. If I don’t destroy the Tsarina satellites and the President is telling the truth, I have murdered my country. But if I destroy them and he is lying, I have thrown away our victory. I must have verification. Absolute and undeniable.
He looked into the white current of the globe. For what? The sign he needed? Escape? Simple certainties from which to draw strength?
What he saw there was what he had to do.
A tragic necessity, martyring hundreds of Soviet citizens to the cause of national survival. But every other solution— blocking the signal, removing the toys, decentralizing military forces and so on—failed because of the time limit.
For himself he felt no fear, only relief at having an honorable surcease from guilt.
“Can you detonate one particular globe and not the others?” he asked levelly.
“Yes. But for obvious reasons, we can’t give you time to witness and evaluate a demonstration.”
“I realize that.” Not even time enough to arrange for a less-important sacrifice. “Please listen to the call I am about to make.” He would have to act quickly, before the Central Committee and the KGB could overcome their shock and interfere. He leaned over the console and activated the direct line to General Kosslov at the Baikonur Space Center. Seconds later the general’s blunt features appeared in the tiny screen. A dull, unimaginative but very loyal officer who would slit his own throat if commanded to. “Yes, Premier.”
“Copy the recording of my conversation with President Nivling—I am sending it now.” He pushed the necessary buttons.
“We have it copied, Premier.”
“Good. Now listen carefully, General. The survival of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics depends on your obedience to the orders I am going to give you.”
“I understand, Premier.”
“Stand by to activate the destruct mechanism for the Project Tsarina satellites.”
Shock ran across the general’s face like an ocean wave. “Yes, Premier. But… may I ask why?”
“I am going to leave this line open while I finish my talk with President Nivling. If it goes dead in the next five minutes, it will mean the Kremlin is gone and the Americans have a weapon that will destroy us utterly unless Project Tsarina is ended. You will have three minutes after that in which to activate the destruct mechanism. Then you will inform General Vladisov in Leningrad of your action and transmit the conversation recording to him. Is that clear?”
It took a moment for the entire meaning to penetrate the thick peasant skull. Then: “Yes, Premier.”
Vladisov. Yes, he will make a good leader for the difficult time ahead. He is younger, born into this new era of subtlety. He will master his anger, not lash out in retaliation and doom the world. He will be able to make the necessary arrangements with President Nivling.
“We are almost out of time,” the President said in an urgent tone. “You must destroy the satellites now.”
“Detonate my globe.” So easy to say. Just words without real meaning. Everything has become a move on the chessboard, even my own death. “If you can.”
There, it was done. Too late now for the KGB to cut the line or shoot him. He had depended on the inertia of their bureaucratic minds to provide the minutes he needed. He wondered if the KGB agents were hunting for the toys, evacuating the Kremlin, or coming to make him change his orders—all equally futile.
The President nodded to someone off-camera. “I see. I have come to know you well, Premier. I have a lot of respect for you. Now you are making me a murderer. Your murderer. Damn us both! We are supposed to be good leaders, not creating idiotic and destructive situations!” He took a long breath. “But if your General Kosslov obeys orders, you will have saved your nation.”
“He will.” He almost smiled as he imagined the panicked scurrying of the old fools of the Central Committee. We will pay the price of the failure we wrought together, as it should be. The new leaders will hopefully learn an important lesso
n from it.
He picked up the globe and stared at it. Something was wrong. The orbit of the moving snowflakes was descending. The tiny white particles were slowly dropping toward the bottom of the crystal.
Night’s darkness was falling with this last snow of winter.
Father was calling to him to come inside, to sit in the warmth by the fire, beyond all cold. To melt the guilt and failure that were jagged ice crystals in his blood. To rest.
The first of the snowflakes touched the crystal—
Editor's Introduction to:
A WAY OUT MAYBE… OR A DEAD END FOR SURE
by John Brunner
John Brunner is one of Britain’s best known science fiction writers. Author of Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, Shockwave Rider, he has more than a dozen books in print. I have known him for some twenty years. I don’t agree with his politics nor he with mine; but we do have grudging mutual respect for each other’s views. I have found John to be intelligent and generally sensible, as well as unfailingly polite.
I don’t pretend to be an “impartial” editor. I have strong views about freedom and justice and the need to defend them. The opposition has plenty enough opportunity to present its views of the world, and I feel no obligation to help spread their ideas. We do, however, live on the same planet; and it is well to understand what others are saying.
When last we met, I invited John Brunner to present his views of the defense of the West. I’ll reserve my comments for an afterword.
A WAY OUT MAYBE… OR A DEAD END FOR SURE: A Disarmer’s Assessment of Western “Defense” Policy
by John Brunner
Not only are nuclear weapons the most dangerous weapons ever devised—they are also just about the most useless.
Lord Louis Mountbatten said as much in the last public speech he gave before he was murdered, and he was my country’s longest-serving and most distinguished officer. More recently Robert McNamara has defined nuclear weapons as serving no purpose except to frighten other countries out of using them. (Hmm! Don’t we normally talk of people being scared “out of their wits,” never “into them?”)
But long before either man’s pronouncement, my late friend Michael Mitchell Howard put it in a nutshell. He wasn’t a career soldier, but he rose to be a colonel on Montgomery’s staff in North Africa, gaining experience he put to use when acting as Chief Marshal of the protest marches against Britain’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in the fifties and sixties.
Michael used to explain why he felt justified in applying his army training to the service of the Peace Movement by saying, “Nuclear weapons have written the factor of infinity into the military equation.”
But—you may reply—all of us know that nuclear war would mean the end of civilization, if not of humankind entirely, especially if recent computer simulations of the consequent “nuclear winter” are correct.
All of us know? Really? Then consider U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense T.K. Jones, who is on record as stating: “Everybody’s going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around. Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It’s the dirt that does it.”
Apart from knowing a lot of people who live in apartments without access to loose dirt, I can’t help wondering how you close those doors behind you…
During the Vietnam War, an American spokesman is alleged to have declared, “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” Our species can tolerate that kind of lunacy in small doses. But when you’re talking about destruction on a global scale, it’s a very different matter. It is my contention, and it has been the contention of the peace group I’ve worked with in Britain since its inception in 1958 (CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), and indeed the contention of clear-sighted and far-thinking people all over the world for much longer than that—consider Einstein: “The atom bomb has changed everything except our way of thinking!”—that governments both Eastern and Western are behaving as though nuclear, like traditional, weapons could be used to fight and win a war, and that this kind of attitude is insanely dangerous because there could never be a victor, only victims. Yet nuclear war might easily break out tomorrow from any of a dozen flash points in Europe, Central America, Asia or the Middle East.
How did we get into this mess? And what, if anything, can we do to get out of it?
Let me grant straightaway that now that nuclear weapons have been invented, they can never be disinvented and therefore no country can ever be totally secure again. But we could do very much better than we’re doing at present. We might as well start by identifying the processes that reinforce our predicament.
Central to the problem is a fundamental misapplication of the term “defense.” In my book, defense consists in rendering one’s country indigestible to an invader. I speak as one whose earliest childhood memories include being taken by my father, at the age of six, to a light-metalworking shop near our home when the Germans were threatening invasion at any moment. People were improvising pikes from scrap iron and rocket-launchers from domestic drainpipes, and it was taken for granted that were the Germans fool enough to set foot on British soil, they would never have a night’s sound sleep until they left. (That’s why so many people in Britain sympathized with Vietnam under American attack; we recalled the Blitz.)
Such an attitude to defense may suggest the one adopted by, for instance, the Swedes and, above all, the Swiss, who adhere to a principle of “armed neutrality.” (The Swiss government did seriously consider acquiring nuclear weapons but decided not to do so, given that their presence on Swiss territory would inevitably attract a full-scale strike in the event of world war.)
The point is that this definition of defense—in my view, the only one that preserves the traditional meaning of the word—rules out ipso facto the employment of any weapon that cannot safely be used on one’s own territory, let alone one that might entail the extinction of the species. Nuclear bombs are solely for retaliation and revenge… and by a clever propaganda trick, we have been duped into imagining that policies based on these primitive—indeed barbaric—concepts will prove as efficacious as those we could and should adopt, at far less cost, in order to construct a genuinely defensive strategy.
Given that a Hiroshima-sized warhead can wipe out a city of 100,000 people and that the NATO alliance alone now possesses several times as many warheads as there are cities of comparable size, the question arises: What conceivable purpose can they serve?
A cynical answer has to be: They must make a lot of money for people who lack the imagination to understand how radically they reduce the chance of our survival.
And that, sadly—in the West at least—is true.
* * *
There exists a sound strategic precept that was drummed into me—and doubtless into thousands of others—during my service in the Royal Air Force. It states that the most important principle of military planning consists in a correct assessment of the other side’s intentions.
Do we in NATO have a correct assessment of Soviet intentions? Do the planners in the Pentagon or Whitehall or wherever else? Does the behavior of our governments, or what they authorize for circulation to the press and public, demonstrate that they do? It is easy to cast doubt on that idea. Let us assume what is far from being proven (think of Islamic fundamentalism, for example): that the event most likely to trigger World War III is an attack by the USSR. More often than I care to count, people I have met on visits to America have told me that evidence of the Soviets’ hostile intentions can be found in Khrushchev’s celebrated exclamation, “We shall bury you!”
Unfortunately, my Russian-speaking friends inform me that what he actually said could more properly be rendered, “We shall be at your graveside!” And this, I submit, is the sort of remark anyone might make who believes that in the long run his system will outdo his rival’s. (In Jack London’s influential Marxist science-fiction novel, The Iron Heel, published ten y
ears before the revolution of 1917, the time span for establishment of a socialist world order is estimated as twelve thousand years…)
Purely as a matter of historical record, be it noted that since they took over from the czars in 1917—and the czars were autocrats like the Somozas in Nicaragua, fighting tooth and nail to retain the serf system, under which peasants were bought and sold along with the land they tilled, against even the relatively minor democratizations proposed by the Duma, a parliament about as representative in the twentieth century as Britain’s in the eighteenth—the Soviets have seen their territory invaded by not fewer than fifteen enemy nations. The Germans in the forties carted off their factory equipment wholesale to be worked in Germany by slave labor, much of which was Russian. The buffer states of today—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria—were ceded to the USSR under the Yalta Agreement as its sphere of influence in return for its contribution to defeating the Nazis. All those listed, by the way, plus many others, were either conquered by the Germans or allied with them during World War II. For instance, under Admiral Horthy, Hungary was a fascist state, and so was Romania in the days of the Iron Guard. Along with the occupation of the post-Versailles Baltic republics, for which Stalin bargained with Hitler to establish a longer seaboard, the Russo-Finnish War is often cited as evidence for Soviet aggressiveness. Let it not be forgotten, however, that as late as 1944, the Finnish Air Force flew with the swastika as its official insignia and that World War II was ostensibly fought to stop the fascists from taking over any more free and democratic nations.
Of course, very probably data like those do not form part of a regular American History course. A lot of Europeans neglect to take account of just the same facts owing to the impact of contemporary propaganda, especially that concerning Afghanistan. Nowadays it’s seldom mentioned that the British invaded that unhappy country several times— most recently in 1919—and in October 1929 turned it into a puppet state by ensuring the murder of a popular rebel leader and installing a general as dictator.
There Will Be War Volume IV Page 7
