Sheldon shook his head. “People get crazy when they’re really scared. They hurt each other. They hurt themselves.”
“The government should have known this would happen,” Ann said. “They shouldn’t have sent out the warnings. They knew people would lose their minds. This is their fault.”
Sheldon exhaled loudly. “Come on, Ann. You’re going to think the worst of them no matter what they do. You know you are. That’s how your brain is wired.”
He unzipped his travel bag and began fishing through the contents with his hand. “If the government had kept this quiet, you’d be screaming for blood right now. You’d be sitting next to me, talking about the conspiracy of silence and the people’s right to know. You’d be telling me that the people should have been warned.”
Sheldon pulled out his cell phone and flipped it open. “No offense, Ann, but you get a lot of mileage out of not liking people. You know that, don’t you?”
Before Ann could answer, he punched a string of numbers and hoisted the phone to his ear.
Ann started to slip in a comeback, but she stopped herself. What was the point? The best she could hope for would be to piss off Sheldon, the one person who seemed to be able to put up with her.
She let her eyes wander around the terminal. People were still gathered around the televisions, staring up at the curved glass screens for a glimpse of the chaos on the other side of the ocean.
Her eyes lit on a huge electronic monitor showing arrivals and departures in Japanese and English. She let her gaze slide down the list of departing flights, pretending for a second that one of them might list an outbound flight to Planet Z-X-55. She was ready to get off this planet.
With a flicker of shifting letters and numbers, the information on the monitor was updated. Times and gate numbers reshuffled themselves as various airlines adjusted their schedules.
Every flight to the United States was now listed as ‘Canceled.’
CHAPTER 27
The national security advisor cleared his throat. “Ah … Mr. President?”
The president didn’t answer. The Single Integrated Operational Plan lay untouched on the briefing table in front of him. The thick binder was still open to Section Orange: “RETALIATORY NUCLEAR STRIKE OPTIONS.”
Of all the documents Frank Chandler had been shown, trained on, or briefed about, this was the one he’d least expected to ever need. He understood its purpose. He knew that it had been created specifically for the kind of situation they were in now, but he’d never really believed that this moment would arrive.
And yet … somehow … it had come.
Gregory Brenthoven cleared his throat again. “Mr. President, we have to respond.”
The president raised a hand for silence. He couldn’t seem to think properly.
His eyes drifted down to the SIOP. The open section of the document was divided into numbered subheadings:
6.2-A Counterforce Responses
6.2-B Countervalue Responses
6.2-C Punitive Responses
Counterforce referred to the targeting of missile silos and military sites, to destroy the enemy’s ability to make war. Countervalue meant attacks against cities and the killing of the general civilian populace, to break the enemy’s national will. And punitive responses were designed as punishment: in essence, “spanking” an enemy nation with nuclear weapons.
The terms were so sterile, so scrubbed of emotional cues, that they invited the reader to ignore their grisly implications. There was no hint that selecting any of the proffered choices might condemn millions of human beings to death.
The president absently grasped the tab marked 6.2-C, and flipped the binder open to the section on “Punitive Responses.” Again he encountered three subdivisions:
6.2-C.1 Punitive Responses (Disproportionate)
6.2-C.2 Punitive Responses (Proportionate)
6.2-C.3 Punitive Responses (Minimal)
He selected the third tab, and thumbed the pages to “Punitive Responses (Minimal).” He read the opening paragraphs.
The decision matrices described in this subsection contain non-conventional response options calculated to demonstrate strategic restraint while signaling the willingness to employ nuclear weapons. They are designed to minimize human casualties within the target zone, and limit damage to the physical infrastructure of the target nation.
Where possible, any strike option selected under this subsection should be preceded by and followed by diplomatic overtures to the government of the target nation. The content of such overtures should include language that discourages further aggression against the United States and/or U.S. allies, by implying or overtly declaring a willingness to escalate to a more robust nuclear response. For suggested language and further information, see the U.S. Department of State Recommendations outlined in Annex-D.
Again, the words were almost mind-numbingly banal. If this had been a routine government document, the president might have chalked up the monotonous writing to the self-importance of the bureaucratic mindset. But such cumbersome sentence construction and oblique word-choice probably had not occurred by accident.
In the nineteen-eighties, a political satirist had referred to the SIOP as ‘The Cookbook for Ending the World.’ That little slice of dark humor hadn’t gone over well in the corridors of military power, but — with all social and political niceties stripped away — that’s exactly what the SIOP was. It was the instruction manual for ultimate genocide. Every paragraph in the fat metal binder was monstrous, in both intent and in consequence. Every neatly-numbered option lead to incalculable human atrocity.
The military officers and government officials responsible for wordsmithing the plan had understood that. And they had known that some president might one day have to sit where Francis Benjamin Chandler was sitting right now, and issue orders that would kill massive numbers of people.
So they had buried the ugly truths behind tediously flat phrases, perhaps in the hopes of granting their president a sufficient amount of emotional distance to make decisions that no human being is equipped to make.
If that had really been their intent, it had worked, at least in part. President Chandler found that the semiotically-neutral language of nuclear warfare made it possible for him to consider courses of action that would have been unthinkable if they had been couched in more accurate terms. If he’d been required to utter words like slaughter, massacre, or incinerate, he could not have forced them out of his mouth.
The drafters of the Single Integrated Operational Plan had foreseen that particular hurdle, and they’d built a corrective mechanism directly into the document. Each nuclear strike option had been assigned a so-called brevity code, consisting of a single word paired with a numeral. By referring to an attack plan or a target list by its brevity code, the president and the National Command Authority could discuss options and give orders, while avoiding the kinds of words that trigger mental shutdown and emotional overload.
The brevity code for attacking suspected nuclear weapons facilities in Iran was Typhoon Three. The code for hitting every power plant and electrical distribution facility in North Korea was Castle Eight. The code for total destruction of every city in China was Zebra Two. And the brevity code for unrestricted thermonuclear war — the end of the world — was Angel Seven.