The Soviets had never accepted the U.S. doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction; this would have meant accepting the possibility of sacrificing the homeland. Instead, they attacked the means of making war. This meant that the Soviet rockets would avoid American cities, except in cases where vital bases lay near large populations.
Prudence demanded action before the U.S. could untangle itself.
The USSR decided to carry out a further C31 attack of its own.
Precise missiles, capable of hitting protected installations with less than a hundred meters’ inaccuracy, roared forth from their silos in Siberia and the Urals, headed for Montana, the Dakotas, Colorado, Nebraska, and a dozen other states.
The U.S. orbital defenses met them. Radar and optical networks in geosynchronous orbit picked out the USSR warheads. The system guided the low-orbit rocket fleets to collide with them, exploding instants before impact into shotgun blasts of ball bearings.
Any solid, striking a warhead at speeds of ten kilometers a second, would slam shock waves through the steel-jacketed structure. These waves made the high explosives inside ignite without the carefully designed symmetry that the designers demanded. An uneven explosion was useless; it could not compress the core twenty-five kilograms of plutonium to the required critical mass.
The entire weapon erupted into a useless spray of finely machined and now futile parts, scattering itself along a thousand-kilometer path.
This destroyed 90 percent of the USSR’s first strike.
ANGEL
I hadn’t seen an old lantern like that since I was a li’l girl. Mr. Ackerman came to wake us before dawn even, sayin’ we had to make a good long distance that day. We didn’t really want to go on down near Mobile, none of us, but the word we’d got from stragglers to the east was that that way was impossible, the whole area where the bomb went off was still sure death, prob’ly from the radioactivity.
The lantern cast a burnt-orange light over us as we ate breakfast. Corned beef hash, ’cause it was all that was left in the cans there; no eggs, of course.
The lantern was all busted, fouled with grease, its chimney cracked and smeared to one side with soot. Shed a wan and sultry glare over us, Bud and Mr. Ackerman and that old Turkey and Susan, sitting close to her box, up on the truck. Took Bud a whole day to get the truck right. And Johnny the boy—he’d been quiet this whole trip, not sayin’ anything much even if you asked him. We’d agreed to take him along down toward Fairhope, where his folks had lived, the Bishops. We’d thought it was going to be a simple journey then.
Every one of us looked haggard and worn-down and not minding much the chill still in the air, even though things was warming up for weeks now. The lantern pushed back the seeping darkness and made me sure there were millions and millions of people doing this same thing, all across the nation, eating by a dim oil light and thinking about what they’d had and how to get it again and was it possible.
Then old Turkey lays back and looks like he’s going to take a snooze. Yet on the journey here, he’d been the one wanted to get on with it soon’s we had gas. It’s the same always with a lazy man like that. He hates moving so much that once he gets set on it, he will keep on and not stop—like it isn’t the moving he hates so much at all, but the starting and stopping. And once moving, he is so proud he’ll do whatever to make it look easy for him but hard on the others, so he can lord it over them later.
So I wasn’t surprised at all when we went out and got in the car, and Bud starts the truck and drives off real careful, and Turkey, he sits in the back of the Pontiac and gives directions like he knows the way. Which riles Mr. Ackerman, and the two of them have words.
JOHNNY
I’m tired of these people. Relatives, sure, but I was to visit them for a week only, not forever. It’s the Mr. Ackerman I can’t stand. Turkey said to me, “Nothing but gold drops out of his mouth, but you can tell there’s stone inside.” That’s right.
They figure a kid nine years old can’t tell, but I can.
Tell they don’t know what they’re doing.
Tell they all thought we were going to die. Only we didn’t.
Tell Angel is scared. She thinks Bud can save us.
Maybe he can, only how could you say? He never lets on about anything.
Guess he can’t. Just puts his head down and frowns like he was mad at a problem, and when he stops frowning, you know he’s beat it. I like him.
Sometimes I think Turkey just don’t care. Seems like he give up. But other times it looks like he’s understanding and laughing at it all. He argued with Mr. Ackerman and then laughed with his eyes when he lost.
They’re all O.K., I guess. Least they’re taking me home.
Except that Susan. Eyes jump around like she was seeing ghosts. She’s scary-crazy. I don’t like to look at her.
TURKEY
Trouble comes looking for you if you’re a fool.
Once we found Ackerman’s idea wasn’t going to work real well, we should have turned back. I said that, and they all nodded their heads, yes, yes, but they went ahead and listened to him anyway.
So I went along.
I lived a lot already, and this is as good a time to check out as any.
I had my old .32 revolver in my suitcase, but it wouldn’t do me a squat of good back there. So I fished it out, wrapped in a paper bag, and tucked it under the seat. Handy.
Might as well see the world. What’s left of it.
MC 355
The American orbital defenses had eliminated all but ten percent of the Soviet strike.
MC355 reconstructed this within a root-means-square deviation of a few percent. It had witnessed only a third of the actual engagement, but it had running indices of performance for the MC net, and could extrapolate from that.
The warheads that got through were aimed for the landbased silos and C31 sites, as expected.
If the total armament of the two superpowers had been that of the old days, ten thousand warheads or more on each side, a ten-percent leakage would have been catastrophic. But gradual disarmament had been proceeding for decades now, and only a few thousand highly secure ICBMs existed. There were no quick-fire submarine short-range rockets at all, since they were deemed destabilizing. They had been negotiated away in earlier decades.
The submarines loaded with ICBMs were still waiting, in reserve.
All this had been achieved because of two principles: Mutual Assured Survival and I Cut, You Choose. The first half hour of the battle illustrated how essential these were.
The U.S. had ridden out the first assault. Its C31 networks were nearly intact. This was due to building defensive weapons that confined the first stage of any conflict to space.
The smallness of the arsenals arose from a philosophy adopted in the 1900s. It was based on a simple notion from childhood. In dividing a pie, one person cut slices, but then the other got to choose which one he wanted. Self-interest naturally led to cutting the slices as nearly equal as possible.
Both the antagonists agreed to a thousand-point system whereby each would value the components of its nuclear arsenal. This was the Military Value Percentage, and stood for the usefulness of a given weapon. The USSR place a high value on its accurate land-based missiles, giving them twenty-five percent of its total points. The U.S. chose to stress its submarine missiles.
Arms reduction then revolved about only what percentage to cut, not which weapons. The first cut was five percent, or fifty points. The U.S. chose which Soviet weapons were publicly destroyed, and vice versa: I Cut, You Choose. Each side thus reduced the weapons it most feared in the opponent’s arsenal.