“Of course your whole position goes into a cocked hat, Major, the minute you admit our early-warning system will give us enough time to launch these missiles before any incoming ICBMs have a chance to knock out the silos. The Russians haven’t devised any methods yet of sneaking an SS-9 across twenty thousand miles of airspace without its being seen.”
“They’re working on it,” Chandler said, and when Forrester looked at him he couldn’t see any sign that the man was joking.
Top Spode had been wandering along the platform poking his brown beak into niches. When he came by Forrester he said, “Like to have another look at the ROG command post on our way back.”
When they emerged from the ROG access tunnel a fat Tech Sergeant intercepted them, red-faced and out-of-breath as a volunteer fireman: there was a telephone call for Mr. Spode; would he mind taking it over here?
Major Chandler excused himself and went across the thrumming cavern to have a word with an officer at the far end of the Iconorama and Forrester said to Moskowitz, “Do you see how young these men are? We’ve given these things to children to play with.”
“I don’t know,” Moskowitz said. “Did you ever read Poe’s essay on simpletons and bluffing in ‘The Purloined Letter’? It ought to be required reading in Washington. The thesis is, when you’re trying to guess your opponent’s next move your best chance is to identify your own reasoning intellect with your opponent’s. If you value his intellect too high or too low, you’ll guess wrong. Now it takes a high scale of intelligence to identify deliberately with an opponent’s cunning, but the next best choice is to pick somebody whose intellect is the equivalent of the opponent’s. Most likely to think the same way, you see?”
“Professor, you’re way beyond my limits of subtlety.”
“All I’m saying is, the intellectual level of Russian leadership is third-rate and we may actually have a better chance if our own leadership isn’t vastly superior to theirs. Kennedy was a brainy man but he made the mistake of assuming Khrushchev was too intelligent to try planting missiles in Cuba: we almost had a war over that. But if they know our leadership is just as dumb and trigger-happy as theirs they won’t try to run dangerous bluffs on us. Maybe we need to keep it on that level, because we know what happens if we don’t.
“Put yourself five miles away from a one-megaton blast. The force would destroy most of the concrete and brick buildings inside that radius and earthquake-effect and the wind-drag pressures behind the blast would knock down most of what was left; anything left standing would probably be melted by the heat of the fireball. If you were still alive somehow, your clothes would burst into flame and you’d suffer flash burns and retinal burns—the kind that killed half the victims at Hiroshima and blinded thousands more. Your eardrums might burst, your lungs might be ruptured, you might be killed or maimed by flyipg bricks and glass. Everything around you might burst into flame and if you weren’t burned to death, you might suffer heat stroke or carbon-monoxide poisoning. Oxygen depletion and extreme heat can cause respiratory damage from inhalation of radiated heat. Then there’s the whole gamut of radiation-fallout effects on human biology—beta and gamma and X rays, always bearing in mind China and Russia use very dirty bombs. The effects aren’t pretty. Quick death, slow death, permanent injuries of every degree—ulcerated cutaneous lesions, burns, internal destruction, blood and tissue deterioration, genetic mutation, cancer, fibrosis, disintegration of bone marrow.… Senator, you know what we’re trying to fight. It’s what Lapp called the technological imperative: if a weapon can be built it will be built. These gadgets have become a central object of worship in our time and you can’t take a society’s idols away from it. Sometimes I think you and I are just lying down on the tracks.”
“No,” Forrester said. “We’re going to lick them this time. I’m not a bad in-fighter, Professor. And we’re gathering support every day.”
“But we’ve got this damned technological clock ticking away—maybe it’s too late to stop it. Each side keeps goading the other into a first-strike psychosis; there’s always the temptation to turn a so-called retaliatory weapon into a first-strike weapon. Remove the other side’s deterrent by knocking out their missiles before they can be fired. Leave them helpless to hit back. It’s the old Why-Not-Victory idea—feebleminded cretins. This Phaeton system—what’Il they do with all the lethal radioactive wastes from the spent elements? It’ll multiply the permanent storage problem out of sight. And the risk of accident? A radioactive leak, a chemical reaction, some stupid little component that got passed through quality control when the inspector was yawning? We’ve always had those risks but when you multiply them a thousandfold you go right off the crap table. Speaking purely as a mathematician I’d say the odds stink.”
“Make a stab at a figure.”
“I’d have to sit down and work it out.”
“Will you do that?”
“Sure, why not?”
Chandler and Spode returned from their separate errands at almost the same moment and Top Spode’s face was closed up tight. “Let’s get out of here—something’s come up.”
Forrester asked the question with his eyebrows but Spode only shook his head, mute.
The Professor got into the back seat and on the sun-blasted concrete in front of the admin block Forrester saw Major Chandler, who had just bade them good-bye with cool civility, stop to remove his big sunglasses and polish them. Forrester was amazed to see that behind the great mirrored shields the eyes were little buttons, too small for the rest of Chandler’s face.
Spode put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking slot. Forrester said, “All right, what’s up?”
“Later.”
They were in Spode’s car because Forrester’s two-seater wouldn’t have accommodated them. Spode drove through the gate and accelerated past the ugly parasitical traps that had sprung up to milk the airmen: SALES & SERVICE, DISCOUNT, AIR-CONDITIONED, LOW DOWN PAYMENT TO SERVICEMEN, TOP VALUE, ALL CARDS HONORED. Past a hamburger stand and a beer joint and a retread tire shop, dust hanging in the un-paved parking lots. The sun was molten brass. Forrester said, “All right, Top, what’d you spot?”
“Hard to say right off. But I tried to case it as if those pushbuttons were the crown jewels. I think it could be done.”
Moskowitz snorted. “Of course it could be done. Any group of crackpots with a little scientific training could think of a dozen ways to beat the fail-safe systems. All it takes is the instincts of a safecracker.”
“And the organization of a Gestapo,” Forrester said. “I still don’t put too much credence in it—it’s a far-fetched notion but it’s worth exposing if there’s any risk at all.”
Spode said, “It would take more than a handful of crazies. You’d need fifty or a hundred people and they’d have to be in the right places with the right training and a hell of a lot of preparation. But there’s no single security point I could see that’s so foolproof it couldn’t be breached. Take those KMS identification systems—those visitors’ cards for the three of us got prepared fast enough, and that means they could be fixed up for anybody. All it takes is one insider. Maybe you could do it without an insider for that matter—pick an airman’s pocket and make copies of his card, slip the original back into his wallet and nobody’s the wiser. Just leave blanks for your own people’s thumbprints to be filled in, and get uniforms for your people. I don’t see how any of it’s beyond the reach of some of these fascist outfits that have passwords and code names and keep bazookas in their basements. Half of them are Air Force people or retired Air Force people.”
Spode crowded the 45-mile-an-hour speed limit down Twenty-second Street. “You’d have to get your hands on copies of the codes they use and that might be tricky; they keep changing the codes. But it could still be done. Each one of those blockhouses down there has a phone and a microwave radio—I had a look. That’s the key point, communications. Every system has to have a bottleneck here and there and if you can take Over those bottlenecks you can control all the incoming and outgoing messages. Once you do that the rest’s no problem. We’ll need to tap a few sources and work up a complete chart of the communications they’d use in case of a nuclear attack.”