All the attention had been on a ground assault into Vietnam and the Military Committee had decreed that the enemy air force had been eliminated. They were taken by surprise by the weight and accuracy of the attack. The airbursts and cluster bomblets killed any exposed personnel and damaged everything but heavily armoured vehicles. President Wang himself ordered the attack on Vietnam halted.
`Certainly nobody in this country has taken civil defence seriously for God knows how long, for twenty-five years, at least. It was recognized by most people that civil defence was kind of a silly idea, given the kind of thing it was supposed to protect against.' The broadcast was live from the University of Michigan in Chicago. The deep baritone voice was that of Edward Stone, the sixty-one-year-old veteran editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In the past day the hands of the magazine's fabled Atomic Clock had moved from nineteen minutes to just one minute to midnight, exactly the same spot it had been during the Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union in the sixties. Midnight signified the hour of the holocaust.
`It seemed possible to protect people in cities to some degree in fallout shelters,' Stone continued, `by taking simple measures like ducking under tables or desks if you saw a flash, or ducking behind a tree or into a ditch if you were outside. But it was only when the possibility became dozens of nuclear weapons used against the US that things changed drastically. An all-out nuclear war as then planned by Moscow and Washington involved the exchange of thousands of nuclear weapons. It became pretty clear to most sensible people that civil defence against that kind of an onslaught would do no good. If you're in a city, and you're hit by a nuclear weapon, you're either going to be suffocated or burnt up or killed by the blast. Firestorms use up all the oxygen — you can't breathe. And the fallout itself doesn't go away after two weeks. You can't just magically get up out of your shelter and everything is fine and you go to the store and get some milk and resume your normal life. It just doesn't work that way.'
The anchor turned to Colonel David Blakeny of the Illinois National Guard. He had 10,000 troops under his command and spoke in clipped military sentences. `As far as nuclear attack goes, any military unit, through their normal training procedures, would have only a limited capability of reacting to that threat,' he said. `We can provide security, help with evacuation or rebuilding. We maintain a very low level of readiness. But through our day-to-day activities, and training, we could respond to that.'
`Respond, fine, Colonel,' pressed the presenter. `But how effective would that response be? Have your men been trained for a nuclear attack?'
`Negative. No drills for nuclear war preparedness have been performed by the Guard for years. There are three reasons. We did not want to scare the populace. Acting out a simulated attack would be expensive. And thirdly, during the Cold War, preparation of a nuclear strike was considered a hostile act by the enemy.'
The anchor interrupted: `You're telling me America is totally, I mean totally unprepared for this. Edward Stone, is this right?'
`We would respond in the same way as we do to any disaster. In the 1950s and 1960s the arms race ran out of control. We tried to stabilize it with the SALT 1 and ABM treaties in the seventies. The idea was to accept the concept of nuclear parity. Instead of one side always trying to get ahead of the other we would accept a situation, and they would accept a situation, where both sides had roughly equal forces. Each side could effectively destroy the other side, even if the other side struck first. In order to make Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, work, you had to make sure that neither side could protect its people or its forces. So from that perspective truly aggressive civil defence programmes would be seen as provocative. If the other side really began digging big, deep shelters and really equipping them, and acting like they were seriously beginning to protect their people, that would be seen as a provocation. It would be taken as evidence that they were planning something.'
The programme shifted to a live insert showing a street lined with palm trees in the Californian capital, Sacramento. Delia Murphy from the Department of Emergency Operations was waiting to go on air. The anchor explained how her department had responded to earthquakes, mud slides, floods, waste spills, race riots, and other disasters in recent years, but not nuclear attack.
`Until today, this hadn't weighed heavily on our minds,' said Murphy. `We did have air-raid shelters in the fifties and sixties, but they've been abandoned. None of the county shelters have been stocked. If we are hit by a nuclear missile, a lot of people will die from the first hit. There's no preparation for that kind of situation. Through the sixties the shelters were stocked with crackers, candies, and sanitation kits. But in 1984 we sold all that stuff off to the Third World countries. The last time people got worried was during the Gulf War in 1991. They would ask where the nearest shelter was. I had to joke with them. I recommended that they go to a McDonald's, because they store food in the basement.'
`What are the signs of panic where you are, Delia?' asked the anchor.
`There's been some looting. But pretty much, I think people are staying calm, listening to announcements, and looking after their families.'
`We have a response now from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA,' said the anchor. `They are very busy today preparing for something which we all hope will never happen. They are just confirming what we've all discovered in the past few minutes. Their federal initiatives and training programmes to assist American people during a nuclear holocaust were cut because of lack of funding. No one thought it would happen. Edward Stone, let me turn to you. I have a declassified intelligence document issued by Richard N. Cooper, Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. He says, and I quote: "China plans to update its ICBM force with new missiles and, unlike the Russians, to increase the number of missiles deployed. A possible future improvement is to include a mobile ICBM" d he says: "Many of China's long-range systems are probably aimed at the United States."
`Edward Stone, if we knew this was happening why didn't we do something about it?'
`Clearly we misjudged China's intentions and resolve. Until two days ago, I didn't know anybody outside of the wacko hard right who really believed that the Chinese would launch a missile attack against CONUS.'
`Excuse me, CONUS?'
`Continental United States. Sure we know China has the capability of hitting one or two west coast cities. They couldn't hit Chicago or Washington. But they could do some real damage in California. That makes us conscious about the Chinese. We would never go to war with them. What President wants to lose San Francisco or Los Angeles? So that makes us a little cautious. That's the way deterrence works. Our policy toward China seems to be pretty fragmented. But it is some sort of constructive engagement. China has a very small nuclear arsenal, of 400 to 500 missiles. Meantime, the US has more than 20,000 such weapons. But if you're asking me to point out the flaws in our intelligence policy, I would have to say that we concentrated too much on the rogue states, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Korea, and always hoped that China would remain at least militarily neutral. Not so.'