The Seventh Angel - Страница 42

The room was utterly silent.

Roger Chu emitted a sound that might have been a sob.

“Mr. President, we can’t do that,” the Secretary of Defense said again. “I’m not just talking about our national policy against negotiating with terrorists, sir. I’m talking about strategic defense. Our attack subs would be bad enough, but we can’t reveal the locations of our missile submarines. The second we put those missile boats on the surface, our national security goes up in smoke. Our deterrence will be gone. Our second strike capability will be gone. We have to keep our missile submarines hidden. Otherwise, we can’t protect this country.”

The president looked at his Director of Communications. The normally rock-solid man was on the verge of breaking down.

“Does anyone see any alternatives?” the president said. “Any ideas at all, I don’t care how crazy.”

Gregory Brenthoven exhaled sharply. “We … My God, I can’t believe I’m saying this … We launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Kamchatka. We wipe out Zhukov before he can issue launch orders to his submarine.”

“That’s not going to work,” the Chief of Naval Operations said. “The Kamchatka peninsula is about 140,000 square miles. That’s nearly the size of California, and we don’t have any idea where — in all of that territory — Zhukov might be hiding. How do we know we can even hit him? And what happens if we don’t hit him?”

“I agree,” the president said. “If we launch nuclear strikes against Kamchatka and we don’t kill Zhukov, he’s going to incinerate every city and town west of the Rocky Mountains.”

“Then we hit it all,” Brenthoven said. “We turn the entire peninsula into a fucking parking lot.”

The Secretary of State shook her head. “No, Greg. They’re right. We don’t know what instructions Zhukov has given to the captain of his missile submarine. Maybe the guy’s got orders to nuke everything if he loses communication with Zhukov. We can’t take that chance. If we can’t take the submarine out of the equation, we can’t shoot at Zhukov.”

“Well, shit!” the president said. “Shit, shit, shit, and double-shit. What do we do now?”

“I hate to say this,” the CNO said. “But we’re going to have to put our subs on the surface.”

“We cannot knuckle under to a fucking madman,” Secretary of Defense Kilpatrick said. “We can’t do it. We just can’t.”

“We don’t have a choice,” the president said. “I’m not going to sacrifice six million American lives to protect our national prestige. If we have to kiss this guy’s ass, then we get on our knees and pucker up. Right up until the moment that we stick a knife in his heart.”

He turned his eyes to the Chief of Naval Operations. “Put the submarines on the surface Bob. All of them. Do it now.”

He shifted his gaze to his secretary of state. “Liz, we need to open immediate diplomatic dialogues with Japan and Russia. Make sure they intend to comply with Zhukov’s deadline. Hopefully, they’re smart enough to realize that this nutcase is not bluffing. If they balk, tell them we’re working on a plan to neutralize the threat, and that we’ll share it with them as soon as we nail down the details. In the meantime, they need to get their submarines on the surface so that Zhukov doesn’t start launching nuclear missiles.”

The president lowered himself into his chair. “We’re back to square one,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out how to destroy the K-506 without submarines.”

He slammed his fist on the table. “And then we’re going to go and kill the maniac who started this nightmare.”

CHAPTER 30

ICBM: A COLD WAR SAILOR’S MUSINGS ON THE ULTIMATE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

At the close of the Second World War, German rocket engineers under the direction of Wernher von Braun were engaged in developing the A9/A10: a powerful two-stage missile capable of reaching across the Atlantic Ocean to attack New York and other American cities. The A9/A10 development effort was part of a larger program called Project Amerika, which was dedicated to the creation of specialized bombers, rockets, and other weapons, to be used in Germany’s eventual conquest of the United States.

If it had ever been completed, the A9/A10 would have been the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile in history. Instead, it became the theoretical model from which later ICBMs would be built.

The program came to a halt in 1945 with the surrender of the German military, but Wernher von Braun and a number of his fellow scientists were quietly whisked away to America, where they became the core of the rocket and missile research programs for the U.S. military.

Having foreseen the collapse of the Nazi regime, von Braun’s team had managed to conceal and protect many of their blueprints and research papers. In some cases, the recovered technical documents were nearly as useful as the scientists themselves.

This was certainly true for the Soviet Union. Because Soviet agents in post-war Germany did not immediately recognize the potential value of Hitler’s rocket scientists, the Soviets acted too slowly to capitalize on this brief opportunity. Consequently, when Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev began constructing his nation’s missile program, he had captured German blueprints to work from, but almost no German technical expertise to help him decipher them. To paraphrase a prominent military historian: The United States had already snatched up all the good German engineers.

But — Germans or no-Germans — the race was on. Although they had been allies in the fight against the Nazis, the United States and the Soviet Union had very different plans for reconstructing the world in the aftermath of the war. The relationship between the two nations had been strained even when they’d been in formal alliance. With the dissolution of the alliance, mutual suspicion deepened into outright hostility. Even as World War II was ending, the Cold War was beginning.

As a result of military and industrial buildup, economic capacity, and postwar positioning, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as the so-called superpowers. The rivalry between them was intense from the outset, but it was also one-sided. America had the atomic bomb. Soviet Russia did not.

Then, in August of 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its own atomic bomb at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. The US intelligence community would later learn that the Russian weapon had been an almost direct copy of the American ‘Fat Man’ bomb dropped on Nagasaki. In point of fact, the Russian atomic bomb was more a product of espionage than research. But the source of the information paled beside a single inescapable fact … The Soviet Union now had nuclear weapons.

The balance of power no longer leaned in America’s favor. It had become a true balance, with the growing might of the US on one side, offset by the growing might of the USSR on the other.

In 1952, America briefly regained a significant technological edge with the first successful test of a nuclear fusion weapon: the infamous hydrogen bomb. This development brought another quantum leap in destructive potential. Previous fission-type nuclear weapons had yielded explosive forces in the kiloton range, equal to the destructive power of several thousand tons of TNT. Fusion-type or hydrogen weapons offered explosive yields in the megaton range, equal to the destructive power of several million tons of TNT. The deadliest weapon in history had just become, quite literally, a thousand times more destructive.

This new capability gave the United States a tremendous strategic advantage, but the shelf-life of that advantage was very short. In 1953, the Soviet Union tested its own fusion weapon, the Sloika (“Layer Cake”). Once again, the US and USSR had rough military parity, and the nuclear balance of power had been reestablished.

The superpowers differed on virtually everything, from political ideologies, to economic models, to human rights, to the very future of mankind. The Soviets believed that the Communist ideal was destined to spread to every nation on earth. Fearing that very thing, the US began building military and political alliances in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The intent was to ‘contain’ the threat of communism, and to guard against Soviet military aggression.

This philosophy led to the signing of the Treaty of Brussels in 1948, and a year later, to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.

The Soviet Union interpreted these alliances as a direct strategic threat, and responded in 1955 by forming the Warsaw Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (better known to history as the ‘Warsaw Pact’). Essentially a military alliance of socialist states in Eastern and Central Europe, the Warsaw Pact was intended to counterbalance the threat posed by NATO.

Sides had been chosen. The battle lines had been drawn for an entirely new kind of war.

Until the 1940s, even the most lethal of weapons had been limited in their capacity for destruction. As horrific as the machineries of warfare had become, their deadliness had never been absolute. Even the bloodiest battles tended to leave survivors on both sides — among the victors and among the vanquished. No matter how high the death toll rose, it was never high enough to completely eradicate the population of the defeated nation.

The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed that. With the advent of nuclear warfare, it became possible (at least theoretically) for one country to utterly annihilate the inhabitants of another country.