“The Attorney-General....”
“Former Attorney-General.”
“My apologies Mister President, the former Attorney-General, has a reputation for being extremely sympathetic to youth movements and politics, particularly the extreme pacifist end of those circles where drug use is most common. We believe that he decided to experiment with LSD last night. Something went terribly wrong though.
“If I may explain, if taken in a large enough dose, the drug produces delusions and visual hallucinations. The precise nature of these is determined by the patient’s mind-set as he goes into the drug episode. From what we can piece together from the patient’s, well, ravings would be the best description, he viewed you and the other people in government, you could almost say everybody who surrounded him, as devils, evil incarnate.
“What is worse, he had apparently been reading a report on the destruction of a town called Duren during The Big One. The report was written by a Major Johan Lup of the Wehrmacht who entered the town less than an hour after the nuclear event. It’s a very vivid report filled with horrifying images. Major Lup died of radiation poisoning a few weeks a Her the bombing and, well, it’s a very uncompromising description of the effects of an atomic bomb.
“It also appears that the former Attorney-General received some very bad advice. LSD is not considered an addictive drug since it does not produce compulsive drug-seeking behavior as do cocaine, amphetamine, heroin, alcohol, and nicotine. However, like many of the addictive drugs, LSD produces tolerance, so some users who take the drug repeatedly must take progressively higher doses to achieve the state of intoxication that they had previously achieved.
“It appears that whoever advised the patient was accustomed to a very high dose level. In combination, the two factors appear to have caused what the drug users call a very bad trip indeed. From what we can understand he appears to be trapped in a delusion where he believes he is in hell, surrounded by nightmarish demons and frightful devils who are inflicting the torments of the damned on him, all based on the descriptions in Major Lup’s report.”
“Dear God. How long will he be like this? Twelve hours you say?’
“Normally yes, Mister President. But that is for a normal dose. Here, the patient took a massive overdose, we believe he sweetened some coffee with LSD-doped sugar and drank a lot of it. It’s all that seems to be in his stomach, we think he put a first LSD dose in his coffee cup then just kept drinking more and more of the LSD-laced coffee.
“The best way of describing what has happened is that he has fried his brain. Or perhaps hard-boiled it would be an even better description. Anyway, the pathways in his mind are frozen into their present pattern. As far as we can determine, he will be trapped in that delusion until the day he dies.”
War Room, Underneath the White House. Washington DC.
“The actual attack will take less than two hours Mister President. By that time, the lead aircraft, the RB-58s and the F-108s will already be well on their way home. The B-52s will be finishing their attack runs and also turning for home. Basically, Sir, it’s a very simple operation, it’s just the attack plan we used on Germany enlarged and, of course, using many more much more powerful weapons. We like to think of this as The Super-Jumbo Family Size One.
“Even the weather is running for us, the fall-out from the bombing will be swept out south, out to sea.” Behind General McKenzie, the map of the Caliphate showed an eruption of red blots, representing the initiation points of the attack. Some were the small pinpoints of the 25 and 30 kiloton airbursts used by the RB-58s to take down the enemy defenses, others the huge areas of the 17 and 25 megaton bursts used to destroy area targets.
“I’d never envisaged something so devastating.”
‘‘Mister President, we find that incinerating entire countries gives meaning to our lives and enhances our manliness.”
“Tell me General, when Bambi’s mother was shot by the hunters, did you fee! sad?” Lillith paused, letting the tension build up. “Just a little bit?”
“I am sure she was nicely mounted on the wall of a good home Lillith.” She smiled and made a quick gesture of acceptance at the riposte.
“Please. Can we have a little less of the gallows humor here? I have a very serious decision to make.”
“Actually Mister President, you don’t. Not now at any rate. Even if we give the launch order now, it will take the bombers at least eight hours to fly to their fail-safe points. From there, it takes two hours for them to reach their targets. The bombers going over the Pole will take longer of course, and they’ll be landing in Russia to refuel. The Russians are getting ready to receive them and their MiGs will escort the B-52s staging through Russia at least part of the way to their targets.
“You can order the bombers to turn back at any time right up to the moment they release their weapons. You don’t actually have to make a final decision for ten hours or more.”
“General McKenzie is right Sir.” The Seer paused for a second. “That’s why we have bombers, not missiles. They give us time. Much more importantly, it gives the other side time, time to think, to make decisions of their own. It gives both of us time to try and put an end to this.
“We can send the ultimatum to the Caliphate right now, they’ll have it in less than an hour. We’ll make sure they know the bombers are taking off. They can take their decisions knowing that we mean business. Germany never had that option, the Caliphate will. If they back down now, they can live. Otherwise, they won’t.”
“Do you really expect them to accept that ultimatum?”
‘‘I honestly don’t know Mister President. It’s designed to be humiliating, it’s designed to make them grovel in the mud in front of the entire world. We have absolutely got to make sure that the whole world knows what the consequences of attacking us will be. That’s as much for everybody else’s benefit as for ours. We keep the peace and this is how we do it
“Look, Mister President, we don’t rule the world. We don’t even come close. We never have and we probably never will. We just keep the peace. That’s it, that’s all we want to do. We don’t really care what other nations do as long as they keep the peace and don’t step on our vital interests. Just to make things fair, we’ve gone to great lengths to make it quite clear what our vital interests are. We want a peaceful world. That’s pretty much it, but we do want that rather badly. And we will use force to make sure we get the peaceful world we want. We aren’t unreasonable, if nations want to fight insurgencies or have border incidents or a little self-contained killing spree where nobody else gets hurl, that’s fine with us. Just as long as the world stays more or less peaceful.
“If you like, we are the cop on the beat. The cop walks his beat and very rarely does he have to pull his baton, let alone his gun. That’s not because everybody is terrified that he’ll go berserk and destroy everything. It’s because everybody knows if they take a swing at the cop on the beat, the police will come in strength and never stop until the guilty have been punished so severely that nobody will want to pull the same trick again. This is why our national policy is called Massive Retaliation.
“Yesterday and last night, The Caliphate took a shot at the cop on the beat. Now, its up to us to show them that doing that isn’t very smart. In fact it’s terminally dumb. Then, once its over, we can go back to walking our beat and keeping the peace. Mister President, its painted on the nose of our bombers. Peace is Our Profession. Somebody has to do it, we got the job. We’re not loved for it, very few people really likes the local cop on the beat, but we have to do it anyway.”