Havelichek's narrow face had turned a ghostly pale — the only color on his countenance was now provided by his dark red beard. He felt as if he'd just come off a merry-go-round traveling at 78 RPM. In one day he'd gone from fighting with Buford to supersonic flight in an F-14 to the White House — and now the spotlight was on him. He wanted to scream," Leave me alone!'' and hide under the table; but he knew that wasn't feasible, so he took a sip of water and cleared his throat. "Ahem, Mr. President, I, uh, hope you realize this is as big a shock for me as it is for you — I was only informed a few minutes ago myself. But I'll try to recap the situation concerning the PRISM Battle Management System and describe what is aboard the shutde."
"Please do." The President's voice had become stone cold.
Another sip of water. "Yes, sir. As you're aware, one of the primary problems of operating an SDI system is handling the enormous amount of information during a ballistic missile attack — tracking missiles, prioritizing targets, dealing with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of ICBMs, decoys, chaff, electronic countermeasures, and the like. Conventional computer technology simply was not up to the task — even supercomputers. Conventional silicon-chip technology faced a fundamental limitation — a 'speed limit,' if you will — that had to be overcome. That is to say, electrons pass through conventional semiconductors at a relatively slow speed. Slow in the scientific sense, that is. Switching time for a supercomputer semiconductor is about fifty picoseconds — or a trillion switches a second.
"At Livermore," he continued, "we looked for ways around this fundamental 'speed limit.' We did so by building upon the research started at Bell Labs and developing a functional optical switch that utilizes pulse laser light waves. This is quantumly faster than electrons traveling through a solid like silicon, or even gallium arsenide. The switching time of this optical device is about twenty-five femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second… Now, in addition to that, we incorporated this optical switch into a parallel-processing computer architecture which, in effect, multiplies the number of computations that can be done simultaneously."
The Secretary of the Treasury broke in. He was a white-haired financier who had been appointed to his post just six weeks prior and was a Star Wars neophyte. "Forgive me, Doctor, but exactly what are you trying to say? In simple English?"
"Well, sir," explained Havelichek, "what it means is that we can achieve computing speeds with the optical PRISM computer that are about twenty-four hundred times faster than the Cray-Y/MP supercomputer.''
The Secretary blinked. "Did you say two thousand four hundred times faster?''
"Yes, sir, but that's not all there is to the PRISM system."
The Secretary, who had left one of Wall Street's premier investment banking firms to join the Cabinet, was mentally trying to gauge how much money he could make underwriting the initial public stock offering on the PRISM computer company after he left office. He'd have to corner this Havelichek fellow after the meeting. "There's more?" he asked.
"Yes, Mr. Secretary," replied Havelichek. "The PRISM system uses an artificial-intelligence 'expert system' to acquire the targets, prioritize them, and operate the Graser. The complexity of this AI expert system is state-of-the-art, because the PRISM computer itself was used in its formulation. It is so advanced, in fact, that if necessary the PRISM system can reprogram certain elements of its own software while an attack is in progress to achieve the most effective response to the incoming threat."
The Secretary was taken aback. He stroked his walruslike mustache and muttered, "Extraordinary."
The President cut in. "Dr. Havelichek, we know all this. The key question is, what's on board the Intrepid?"
Another sip. "Well, sir, I was working closely with Dr. Rod-riquez, since he was going to install and power up the PRISM system on the platform. The element that is on board the Intrepid is the, uh, central processing unit of the system."
The President's jaw dropped. "You… you mean the guts and brains of the system, don't you?"
"Well, yes, sir. That's about the size of it. I, ahem, guess I should add that the artificial-intelligence software — the 'expert system' stuff I was talking about — was loaded into the core memory of the CPU before it was delivered to SPACECOM at Vandenberg."
The President fell back in his chair and closed his eyes. "You mean our leading-edge computer technology… the hardware, the software. Everything is on that shuttle?"
Havelichek gulped. "Yes, Mr. President."
"Jesus God Almighty," wheezed the chief executive.
There was a prolonged silence.
"Mr. President," lamented Whittenberg, "I'm afraid there's more. Dr. Sharp, would you explain?"
Garrett Sharp held two Ph.D.s from Cal Tech, one in physics and one in nuclear chemistry. To the group of heavyweights in the Cabinet Room he looked like something of a nebbish with his thick glasses and scraggly brown hair and beard; but he understood the atom, and the unfathomable energy locked inside, perhaps as well as any living scientist. He spoke in a soft monotone without inflection, so that a statement from him such as, "Your hair is on fire" would carry the same urgency as "Pass the salt." Although rarely intimidated or excited, he was now deeply disturbed, because he knew what the loss of the Graser could mean. "Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, in order for everyone to understand what is involved here, I think it best if I review a few of the technical issues first."
No one objected.
"Very well. The Graser, as most of you know, is a weapon of staggering power. It draws on much of the laser technology that has been around for decades, but in many ways it is quan-tumly different. To explain, in conventional lasers the atoms of a given substance — like a ruby crystal — are stimulated, causing the electrons to oscillate between an energized and dormant state. The energy of this oscillation is released in focused infrared light waves. During the initial development of SDI, it was proposed that conventional lasers could be used to shoot down hostile ICBMs. Although this made for an intriguing theory, there were some inherent flaws in that line of thinking. First of all, to generate a laser beam powerful enough to 'kill' a missile, the beam would have to be of a relatively short wavelength— that is to say, the shorter the wavelength, the stronger the beam. But unfortunately, as the wavelength shortens, the power required to generate the beam goes up dramatically; and it simply wasn't feasible to lift tons upon tons of power generation equipment into space. Now to get around that problem, some people in the scientific community voiced the opinion that the laser could be based on the ground near a large power source, and the beam could be bounced off orbiting mirrors to hit their targets. This idea also proved to be unfeasible, because the optical and reflective surface tolerances on those mirrors would have to be so incredibly precise that, as a practical matter, it simply became an impossibility." Sharp paused and collected his thoughts before going on. "In addition to these limitations was the fact that lasers, even of short wavelengths, have relatively narrow beams. Hitting a missile traveling at eighteen thousand miles an hour with a narrow beam was an incredibly difficult task — even with the rapid-fire capabilities of a laser combined with the PRISM Battle Management System. It's sort of like shooting a .22-caliber rifle at a clay pigeon over three thousand miles away.
"Finally, X-ray lasers were examined, but eventually dismissed as potential ABM weapons because they required the detonation of nuclear weapons as their power source. This was deemed too 'messy' an alternative. So, in a nutshell, all of these factors made the laser unattractive as an antiballistic missile weapon.