Since the war we’ve been like a great lobotomized beast, flopping and struggling in the trackless void, unable to control or comprehend even the smallest shred of its own destiny.
After 1983 the government and many private companies began shielding against the highest level of EMP pulse they could, without spending intolerable sums. That was fifty to a hundred thousand megavolts, depending on the type of system being shielded.
So the Russians simply used larger bombs and tripled the power of the EMP pulse generated. A few extra warheads made billions and billions of dollars’ worth of shielding useless.
Because of the ease with which the pulse strength can be increased, EMP shielding is essentially impossible without a vast amount of investment and effort.
Before Warday, we were living in a dream world.
Christ, sometimes I think I’ll get up and just walk into the river. Thinking about what mayhem our little bitty nuclear war caused makes me crazy. For example, there’s this extraordinary place down the Coast. I know people who’ve been there. Undreamed-of technologies! A European preserve of ultimate luxury.
Shuttles to luxurious space stations we are told nothing about A new world, and we are being left out of it. I know people who say they’ve seen that port. Somewhere between here and Baja, I don’t know where. They want to send us back to the Stone Age so they can have the stars to themselves.
Oh no, that’s paranoia. Rumors. I doubt that the Europeans even have any space shuttles. They suffered too, economically.
I hear about this European plan to create zones in the United States. A British Zone, a German Zone, and so forth. I know that the federal government in L.A. is opposed to that sort of thing. But there’s never anything about forming a second Continental Congress and appointing a new electoral college. Or elections. They say we’re too electronically disorganized. The last time this nation had a population of a hundred and seventy-five million was 1955, and we managed to vote quite well then without computers. We had no four-lane interstate highway system then, but we traveled freely, and we had a thriving steel industry, a thriving auto industry, a powerful military, a strong and effective government, and a reasonably content population. Remember the Eisenhower years? You guys must have been kids then. There was no sense of dislocation. Not like now.
Of course, there’s the fact that we’ve had a war. But now these little European states are trying to tie down the giant with a million threads! After World War II, Germany and Japan were far more devastated than we are now, but we poured on the aid and they revived.
Oh, what the hell. You can’t blame them for being fed up with superpowers. All they probably want is to see the U.S. broken up into a number of small, independent nations. Can’t blame them, damn it.
You know, the problem with being a person like me, at the center of a big university economics department, is that I get too much low-grade information. Although I must say one thing, the British have been very free and open with their statistics. Also, we are beginning to see real bureaucratic reorganization in the U.S. government.
Now that I think of it, perhaps I’ve painted too black a picture.
I’m overwrought because I need facts in my profession, and I never get facts anymore. Conjecture. Rumor. Estimate. That’s my problem.
I think there is a panic state in this country so deep that people don’t even acknowledge it. Subconsciously we’re panicked, all of us, and some of us are worse than that. Some of us seem fine on the surface, but inside ourselves we are insane. Take that quack medical group, the Radiant Exercise people, the ones who expose themselves to radiation to acclimatize themselves. They’re mad.
Mad as hatters. And the Positive Extinctionists. And above all the Destructuralist Movement. That one’s really dangerous, because it’s so darned seductive. Give up. Live hand to mouth. Become a goddamn caveman. That’s what the Destructuralists are saying.
Despite all that has happened, I don’t think humanity would do a service to the planet by voluntarily rejoining the apes, which is what Destructuralism is really all about.
Another thing that’s mad is the movement in Europe to make us pay reparations. For what? Both combatant powers lost the war. By staying out, Europe won it. Now it turns out that the whole European peace movement, the Greens and such, were secretly supported by the very governments they were opposing, to give the Soviet Union the impression that Europe was too divided to be dangerous. Meanwhile, the Secret Treaties—you’ve heard about those? Don’t look at me with such blank faces! What are you, a couple of idiots? I’m not a political science professor. The English and the Germans and the French and probably the Italians and the Japanese all had secret treaties to the effect that in the event of a sudden and unexpected nuclear war between the two superpowers, they would seize American nuclear components on their soil. So the Russians had us isolated and didn’t even know it.
It’s pitiful. If they had but known, they wouldn’t have felt nearly so cornered by Spiderweb.
Let me tell you something. There’s a school of thought that the Europeans tempted the Soviets into getting trigger-happy by revealing those treaties to them and making the Western Alliance seem disastrously split. Their real purpose was to trick the superpowers into crushing one another. And they succeeded brilliantly.
We’re in a state of advanced confusion. And the Soviets! My God, from what I’ve heard, they’ve dissolved. We got a report from the London School of Economics to the effect that the Soviet’s Eastern European empire is gone. Poland, Rumania, Hungary renounced COMECON. Czechoslovakia broke off diplomatic relations with the Russians. Now the Czechs are under United German protection, whatever that means. Russia lost Moscow just the way we lost Washington. And there were those purple bombs in the Ukraine. Nobody knows what they were, but they killed every stalk of wheat, and now nothing will grow there. The LSE report estimates that the USSR has lost close to half of its population. It’s divided into republics, military areas, communist states, even a White Russian enclave. A madhouse of starving, diseased inmates that nobody can help. Then there’s China. India. Bangladesh. Do you know about them? About the fate of the world, my friends?
There has been a great reduction in the numbers of humanity on this planet.
When the fallout blew south and east out of the Dakotas, we lost most of the stored grain in the Midwest. And we had to abandon crops on about twenty-eight percent of our grain-planted acres. Smoke blotted out the sun for so long the temperature dropped in the Midwest. Add to that the cash crisis, the collapse of the banking system, the disruption of transport, and you have a net farm output down fifty-five percent by 1989. And in 1990 we dropped to thirty-eight percent of 1987 levels. Farm machinery broke down and spare parts were hard to get. People couldn’t get their land tested for radiation, and they abandoned it rather than breathe the dust of their own soil. You had hundreds of thousands of good acres abandoned, and then the great dust storms. That’s not over yet. That’s going to be a problem. If we don’t get in there and at least reseed the land with grass, we’re going to see the bare topsoil in the Midwest blowing all the way to the Atlantic and the Gulf. Of course, that would be the end of this country as a farming entity. We’d then have another famine.
The Agriculture Department is pushing hard to do this reseeding from the air. The trouble is, we can’t get enough grass seed!