“10, 9, 8, 7 …” the firing sequence officer said.
“Fluctuation in gamma 10 … 2.34 over nominal level.”
Parnes’s finger instinctively flipped up the safety cover of the abort switch, as his brain calculated the effect of increased gamma on the energy budget he so painstakingly fought to preserve. Then he remembered his duty. Only a few more seconds left, and it would all be over.
“4, 3, 2 …”
The hell with it. He withdrew his finger from the red-guarded abort switch as the count passed one. No turning back now. It must be done.
Suddenly, all the monitors in the room flashed brilliantly. A large screen in the center of the room displayed a graphic representation of what was happening. Based on estimates and experimental research the yield was expected to be 200 megajoules of energy per nanosecond, or about the output of a small star. Instead, and post analysis would tell him why, the actual yield was closer to 500. The team cheered. It was a brilliant success.
On the big screen, the image of the kill zone and collateral area reached out to a circumference of forty miles. Parnes knew it was the new hyper-shaping in the first stage that multiplied the yield so significantly. This was his team’s sole focus for a year. Operation FINAL SWORD ended in victory.
“Well done, Parnes,” the four-star general next to him said as he closed his mission briefing book. “Congratulations to you and your team, a truly major achievement.”
“Thanks, Bob. Too bad it’s all for nothing.”
“That detonation didn’t just wipe out Moscow, it took out the premier’s dacha, thirty-seven miles away,” the Bomb Damage Assessment Officer said.
Parnes nodded. “A great way to end this program.”
“Well, maybe if the Cold War comes back, we’ll actually build the data you just generated into an online weapons system,” the general said optimistically.
“Til then it will remain a simulation exercise report in some digital archive of the DARPA library.” Parnes realized he probably just wrote the epitaph of his program.
“What’s next for you and your team, Parnes?” the general asked in a manner that usually accompanied opening his belt a notch after another fine meal.
“There isn’t any ‘next.’ We spent ten billion on this simulation alone. No way that kind of money will ever be available again without a national emergency.”
To the general that was a gray area, best left to the politicians. Absentmindedly he went to shake Parnes’s right hand, only to realize his error mid-gesture. He turned the attitude of his hand from a shake to a pat on Parnes’s shoulder, just above his severed limb.
Parnes had become the most highly paid civilian advisor to the military, despite his physical handicap. At his level, they paid the big bucks for his brain. Legend falsely accredited the loss of his right wing to a cataclysmic discharge of electrostatic plates during a cyclotron experiment gone awry. The story went that the discharge of millions of volts exploded the cells of his arm, leaving amputation the only option. In truth, he lost the limb in a Jeep accident as a young radioman drafted into the Army. However, legends die hard and professors do not get many romantic notions hung on their identities. And although he toyed with the most feared weapons of all mankind, being five-foot eight and on the thin side of fat, he hardly cut an imposing figure. So eventually he stopped denying the legend. Having long ago mastered typing and mouse clicking with just one hand, his absent limb did not impede his work on his chosen specialty, computer technology — specifically, virtual engagement protocol and anti-computational warfare. A complicated name for what simply was anything that processed strategic or tactical military data and computer simulations.
Professor Richard Parnes achieved the ultimate position in the game of military leapfrog where success and power were awarded with positions toward the outer ring of the Pentagon. He had an office, with a window, in the E-ring. Almost as impressive was his parking spot on the River Entrance side.
At first blush, nuclear weapons research seemed a relic of America’s paranoid, mutually assured destructive past. Parnes’s work was, however, still a matter of national security. Furthermore, his elite stature was justified, because even though the Cold War ended nearly two decades before, one tiny troublesome fact remained. It seemed someone forgot to tell the Russian Strategic Rocket Force, its commanders, and their nineteen missile divisions to go home, it was all over. Instead, the Soviet’s mega death-tipped SS-20s and the like were still targeted at Main Street, U.S.A., just like in the bad old days.
Our politicians had moved this undiminished nuclear threat to the back burners of America’s collective consciousness, primarily by negotiating away atmospheric and below-ground testing. It was good public relations but it did nothing to reduce the stockpile of overkill both nations stored away like dangerous nuts for a nuclear winter.
This politically expedient non-solution to humanity’s nightmare made computer simulations the only way for our nuclear warriors to ply their trade and be ready to protect America with massive retaliatory force. Parnes’s team was born out of this need when he approached the Pentagon with the notion of “E-plosion,” detailed high-definition computer simulations of nuclear explosions. All it took was one secret, illegal underground test, officially logged as an earthquake, to prove unequivocally the accuracy of the data Parnes generated. With that baseline sample as a model, Parnes and his people were free to explore and try “what ifs” to their hearts’ content, blowing up nothing more than the occasional computer chip. The data Parnes’s E-plosions yielded gave America years of advancement in a nuclear arms race that was frozen in the eighties.
Accordingly, Parnes’s slice of the 300-billion-dollar defense pie was the second biggest, after you removed operations. He was technically part of the old Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The members of his team were handpicked technicians, the cream of the crop, enlisted from schools and America’s largest corporations. They were young and old, white, Asian, Indian, and black, male and female. Their personas ran the gamut from out-and-out nerds to fly fishermen. Only two things were considered when recruiting them: that they were the absolute best in their fields and that they pass the security clearance. Keeping America number one in any race was expensive. In nuclear weapons research, the cost was obscene. Team members made, on average, ten times more money than their commercial counterparts did. But true to the field, they rarely, if ever, got home early enough or took ample time off to enjoy most of it. The team had become Parnes’s de facto family.
Being doggedly focused on every challenge while simultaneously planning for the next made Parnes the most boring man any woman ever had the pleasure of saying good-bye to. Even brain groupies, those women who hang around geniuses as if they were rock stars, tired quickly upon finding out they were not the center of his world. A world of microns and electrons, math and physics, and a cat named Archimedes.
He and his entire team were classified, working from black op budgets, so named because the Pentagon blacked out the name and the amounts on the line budget they submitted to Congress. Congress, for its part, exercised its power of the purse by keeping those black ops on a short leash, cutting or appropriating the monies blindly as a percentage. At the end of the day, however, the route the money took was unimportant. Regardless of how it was appropriated, through black ops or out in the open, all of the money spent on defense found its way eventually into the congressmen’s districts. After a short stay in some captain of industry’s bank account, a portion of the appropriation found its way into a PAC. These political action committees “laundered” the money one more time, and then contributed it into the congressmen’s election campaigns. The whole thing worked without grinding to a halt because it was self-lubricating. In short, a percentage of the money Congress appropriated for war, appropriately enough, found its way into a congressman’s war chest. This was proven by even those antiwar congresses who, despite being elected and given the majority to end a war, just couldn’t seem to muster the votes to cut off even one penny of what the Department of Defense wanted, because in the end they would be cutting off their own funding as well.