Incited by Cold War paranoia successive Administrations had fought to close the mythical ‘bomber gap’, the equally imaginary ‘missile gap’ only to be suddenly confronted with the humiliating public spectacle of the Soviet Union stealing a march in the space race with the launch of Sputnik. From the very beginning the only answer had been the SAGE system. The British and the Germans had pioneered radar-based early warning and air defense systems in the Second World War; but from the outset the Pentagon, enthusiastically supported by the Truman, Eisenhower and the Kennedy Administrations had dreamed of creating something much grander. American science and overwhelming technical and industrial muscle had therefore been applied to the problem with little or no regard for the cost.
The acronym SAGE — the letters standing for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment — had eventually come to describe a system comprising a score of revolutionary giant, so-called mainframe computers, and the hard-wired networking equipment and communications infrastructure required to co-ordinate the data inputs from all connected radar and intelligence resources available to the US armed forces; thereby enabling NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, to combat any conceivable airborne threat to North America.
It had only cost the American tax payer a piffling $2 billion to build the atomic bomb; by the time of the October War IBM alone had been handed $10 billion — and change — for its part in creating and implementing SAGE.
“Not religious. That’s too bad.” Galen Cheney did not need to effect regret or resignation. He was genuinely sad for the balding, defeated man before him. Faithless, Godless people like Carl Drinkwater had led the American people blindly towards Armageddon and even now, long after the thermonuclear fires had burned out they had no shame. They watched Washington burning and they still did not understand that now was a time of revelation. He heard the Burroughs man’s wife moving about in the kitchen.
But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.
Chapter 8
The California State Capitol building had the feel of a besieged fort by the time Governor Edmund Gerald ‘Pat’ Brown’s convoy sped into Sacramento in the early hours of the morning. The thirty-second Governor of the most populous state in the Union had been about to sit down at dinner with his fellow ‘West Coast’ Governors, Democrat Albert Rosellini of Washington and Republican Mark Odom Hatfield of Oregon, in Portland when the first news from Washington had come in. Yesterday the three men had taken the first step towards formalising the unwritten ‘mutual assistance’ pact they had first discussed in the spring, their state police and military men having finally drawn up framework agreements covering future common ‘standard operating procedures’.
It was only days since the monstrous insurgency — which had transformed the sleepy north-western port community of Bellingham from a peaceful logging, fishing and vacation town into a murderous concentration camp in the hands of the dregs of humanity — had been ruthlessly crushed by the combined forces of the three West Coast states.
In response to the snuffing out of the Bellingham insurrection the Federal Government in Washington DC had sent the United States Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to slap Brown, Rosellini and Hatfield’s hands; otherwise, the Kennedy Administration had carried on doing what it had been doing everywhere east of the bomb-damaged Great Lakes cities since the October War; precisely nothing! It was this which had pushed the three governors — and the majority of their closest friends and advisors — over the brink; and forced them to think the unthinkable.
It had seemed to them that the men in power in the District of Columbia had washed their hands of California, Oregon and Washington State’s problems. Notwithstanding, the Administration still expected the West Coast governors to go on collecting federal taxes, and to go on accepting their ‘fair quota’ of refugees and displaced persons at the whim of the newly formed Federal Emergency Management Administration. Truth be told, it was the increasingly onerous demands of FEMA that had given real impetus to the West Coast Governors’ decision to position their three states as a ‘co-dependent entity’ within the Union, rather than attempt to maintain the status quo as ‘states of the Union’, putting the Federal Government on notice that California, Oregon and Washington State planned to attach conditionality to their ongoing membership of the union. Notwithstanding other political considerations, adopting such a posture provided each individual Governor a shield with which to ward off the increasingly vociferous ‘go it alone’, state’s rights movements which threatened to sweep all three of them out of their respective State Capitols the next time they were up for election
At the time of the October war FEMA’s role — that of co-ordinating both the immediate and the long-term strategic Federal response of ‘major national disasters’, had been split between several governmental organs. Chief among these had been the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, formed in the late 1950s by the merger of the Federal Civil Defense Administration created in Harry S. Truman’s time, and the Office of Defense Mobilization. FEMA had been created by haphazardly subsuming this organisation and random chunks of over a dozen other Federal departments under a single administrative umbrella split between the Pentagon and the Department of the Interior. Overnight unconnected parts of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the General Services Administration, the Bureau of Roads, and two-thirds of the US Army’s Corps of Engineers had suddenly become answerable to a new and from the outset, secretive cabal headed by Kennedy Administration insiders and place men.
Probably unfairly, most people west of the Mississippi regarded FEMA as a thinly-disguised tool of the Chicago-centric clique who had put John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the White House, specifically designed to siphon off the entire Federal US disaster relief budget into the Great Lakes States.
The Kennedy Administration had kept the roads open and maintained the air bridge to Chicago all year long, and despite the ‘peace dividend’ that was slashing the military everywhere else, found the troops needed to hold anarchy at bay from South Chicago. At the same time it had washed its hands of half-wrecked Seattle and the abominations of Bellingham and other isolated communities in the Cascades and the Sierra Madre; washed its hands in every way, that was, other than in continuing to bus tens of thousands of ‘displaced persons’ to the West, and systematically beefing up the Inland Revenue Service’s staffing and legal muscle to extort every last tax cent and dollar from the hard-pressed economies of the West Coast states.
What with one thing and another Washington DC had seemed a long, long way away from the states west of the Rockies until a few hours ago. What was going on in Washington DC tonight looked horribly like a coup d’état, and nobody in Sacramento believed — not for a moment — that any good was going to come out of that.
If the government fell the Union would probably splinter and no one in City Hall even wanted to contemplate what happened after that…