“And this is only the start. The Mark Threes we used are obsolete, in a very real sense, this raid cleared the arsenal of them. We're replacing them with new generations of devices. The Mark Four that's entering the arsenal now yields almost fifty kilotons. There's a new design coming down that will give us eighty. And there is always Super.
“I don't think anybody quite understands yet how much The Big One changed the world. Perhaps when they see the film and data from the instrumented aircraft, they will. In that sense, the escort aircraft may turn out to be more significant than the bomb droppers themselves. That was a nice term you used Colonel, Laydown. We'll have to adopt that.”
“But twenty million? Was there no other...”
“There were many other ways and we looked at them all. That's what Uncle Sam pays us to do. We looked at all sorts of limited operations, one was to make a demonstration by initiating a device on a worthless offshore Island, Heligoland was a good candidate. Then tell the Germans that if they didn't throw it all in, they'd get the lot. Then there were plans involving dropping two devices, six, fifty, many more. They all had advantages, all had problems. There were two that were common to all the limited plans though.
“Studies of artillery barrages, air bombing all show the same thing. It’s the initial blow that's most effective from both the physical damage and psychological effects point of view. Bach successive blow has about half the effect of those before it. People learn to accept and adapt and the physical damage gets to be just re-arranging the rubble.
“The other thing was that a limited initial ... laydown .....enormously increased the risk to you people. The Germans didn't know what was coming and had no real defenses yet still managed to knock down about 1 percent of the bombers. That means, over a tour of duty, a crew would have about a 70 percent chance of survival.
“But, if the Germans knew what was coming and how we were going to do it, they would have thought of defenses. Even given a few hours they could have done something - note how all the aircraft we lost - almost all - were hit coming home. They could have stripped their fighters of guns, armor, everything, given them enough fuel to climb up and intercept and ram the bombers. Better to lose a fighter than a city.
“You can bet every government in the world is looking at their fighter programs right now and thinking how to get their interceptors higher. We don't think they can, not for some years, the engine power just isn't there. But they will.
“There were other things the Germans could have done. Moved large numbers of people from occupied countries onto the targets, fortunately most of the PoW camps were in Poland and bits of Germany that will be going to Poland, we left those alone. But the Germans could have moved them. Used them as, ohh, human shields if you like. You can bet somebody will think of that as well. After all, we did.” The Seer grinned. Across the base, dogs started howling.
“In the end, we did a series of options, each with its positives and negatives, and sent them up. All the way, to the very top. They made the decision to go for the option we called The Big One. Personally, I think it was the right decision.
Look at it this way. Nazi Germany and the things it stood for were a cancer in the body of the human race. It had to be cut out. With cancer, you can take half measures, you can go for just the least possible, you can take chances. And mostly doing that will kill you. The longer you leave cancer, the harder the treatment gets and the more needs to be cut out to get rid of it.
“If Hitler had been stopped in the 1930s, or if the UK hadn't caved in 1940, perhaps The Big One wouldn't have been necessary. Perhaps Nazi Germany could have been destroyed by invasion or conventional bombing. Perhaps. But we have to face what is real and reality is that we had left everything terribly late.
“You've seen the information on the death camps in Nazi Germany. They killed nine million Jews there before declaring Europe Judenfrei. At least nine million Romanies and homosexuals and communists and trades unionists and freemasons and anybody else they hated. We know they've killed at least 20 million Russians.
“Before The Big One, they were starting on the next list, the ones they didn't like. Slavs, Poles, anybody who didn't have fair hair and blue eyes? When were they going to stop? We may have killed forty, fifty million by the time it’s all over but we still have saved more than we killed. And we cut out a cancer; any nation that is thinking along those lines is going to look at the smoking, radioactive hole that was Germany and think twice. Or at least that is what we hope.
“My guess is that the decision to launch The Big One is going to be discussed and argued, and applauded and condemned for as long as people study history. Learned papers will be written arguing that the decision was wrong and criminal and others will be written saying it was the only thing we can do. All sorts of motivations will be alleged and argued and some may even be right. But here, now, based on what we know here, now and based on our national interests, here, now, the people who made the final decision did the best they could.
“In doing that they created the world we're going to have to live in. And that, gentlemen, is all we can do. Live in the world we have and make the best of it we can.”
EPILOGUE
SAC Wing, USAF Museum, Dayton, Ohio. Forty years later
Genera] Dedmon was finding it harder to walk the alley now and he needed his cane to do it. Bomber Alley never failed to impress visitors. Few visitors got the organization though, penetrators and recon birds on the left, load carriers on the right. It was arranged so the latest and most modern exhibits were nearest the entrance and visitors could walk back in time to the earliest days of SAC. Nearest the entrance as befitted the latest aircraft into SAC service were the prototypes of the B-100 orbital bomber and the GRB-105 strike-reconnaissance aerospace plane. A little bit further down were a B-70 Valkyrie and an SR-71 Blackbird on the right, with the B-74 Devastator on the left. The Devastator was still the largest aircraft in SAC service. Still, if you looked at her just right and squeezed your eyes a little bit, you could see her B-36 ancestors peeking through. A little bit further down still were the first jets. The B-58 Hustler, a B-60 Dominator and a B-52 Stratofortress. Those had been Dedmon's contribution to SAC. Curtis LeMay had founded the force, Dedmon had taken it over and brought it into the jet age; higher and faster. His successor had brought SAC forward to hypersonics, higher and faster still. And now SAC was in space.
Almost at the end were the two B-36s, an RB-36 Ain’t Mishehavin' on the left and a GB-36 Golden Girl on the right.
But ahead was what he had come to see. Bomber Alley ended in an arch. One that carried the names of all the SAC crews who had died since the service was founded. Above it, in gold letters was SAC's unofficial motto “SAC DOES NOT TURN BACK.” Dedmon walked through the arch, watched by the pictures on the plaques, and there she was. Texan Lady still standing proud and beautiful. She was in a display area all of her own, the bomber that had lead the strike on Berlin and ended World War Two. She was in perfect condition, it was the museum boast that if somebody cut off the end of the museum, they could taxi Texan Lady out and fly her.
As soon as they saw Dedmon the Honor Guard, four Russians, four Americans, cracked to attention. As usual, Dedmon stopped to read the Honor Guard plaque. He knew the words by heart but he still stopped to read them, partly out of respect to the guard and partly due to them being the most hopeful thing around in an uncertain world. The plaque was the text of the letter from President Zhukov when Bomber Alley was founded.