Von Neumann’s War

“Cease fire, goddamnit!” Gries ordered as one of the specialists on the west flank fired an HE round way too close to Top. Cady dropped and covered as the explosion sent an aftershock through the cold and hardening Coyote glue. A finger of the glue plopped a few inches from Top’s face.

“Goddamnit Gibson, what have I told you about blue on bluing me?” Cady yelled.

“Don’t do it, Sergeant?”

“You bet your ass, don’t do it!” he yelled at the private.

“Uh, Top,” Gries grinned offering him a hand up from the ground. “Thought we were gonna take home a live one.”

“Sorry, Major, but I just couldn’t see anyway we were gonna catch a live one. It was eatin’ right out of that net the eggheads made us. I figured if I just banged it lightly, they might could put it back together. And I sure as hell didn’t want that thing gettin’ away and bringing back a few hundred thousand of his buddies. Besides I just tapped it.”

“Concur, Top.” Gries knelt by the dented alien probe and poked at it with the barrel of his potato gun. There was a buzzing like an angry wasp inside and then another brief crackle of static electricity on its surface. It shuddered for a moment and then was still.

“I think maybe we do have a live one,” Gries said musingly.

* * *

“Mr. Secretary, after making a quick analysis of the most recent spysat photos and comparing that data with the NSA Internet data as well as the seismograph detections, we believe we can say what is going on now.” Ronny Guerrero’s image came through the T1 datalink in real-time to the President’s underground headquarters in Wyoming.

“Well Ronny don’t keep me hanging,” SecDef Stensby replied. The entire presidential staff had assembled in the War Room of the underground headquarters for this debrief. They all were hoping for good news, but none were expecting it.

“Right, sir. It looks like it was a firewall along the sixty-degree eastward latitude line. We’ve got signs of detonations in Mashhad, Iran; in Turkmenistan; Uzebekistan; Temir, Kazakhstan; Ural, Samara, Ufa, Izhevsk, Perm, Magnitogorsk, Tagil, Ukhta, Ifdel, and many other Russian cities with the first wave of detonations. There were also a few in Yemen, Oman, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. It appears that there were a total on the near order of one hundred and sixty strikes, most of them from multiple reentry vehicles,” Ronny explained.

“My God!” President Colby shook his head. “General, check me if I’m wrong but that’s a significant portion of Russia and China’s nuclear arsenal.”

“About that, sir,” General Mitchell said.

“Are we going to have nuclear winter on top of everything else?” the President asked angrily.

“Uh, sir,” the national security advisor said, then looked at the secretary of defense.

“Mr. President,” the secretary said, carefully but definitely. “Let me state for the record that most secondary analysis of the original nuclear winter scenario indicate that it’s overstated.”

The President frowned for a moment, then shook his head.

“How overstated?” he asked.

“The terms that comes to mind are deliberate ‘political tinkering’ and ‘junk science,’ ” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said bluntly. “Then a descent into urban legend. The total energy output of all of the nuclear weapons in the world at the height of the Cold War is lower than the output of the Mount Saint Helens blast. Even with fudging hard on secondary effects, nobody except the original scientists could come anywhere near a ‘mini-iceage’ scenario from a full-scale nuclear war. Upon review, even most of the physicists involved in the original study repudiated it. What we’ll get from this blast is a slight reduction in temperatures, hardly noticeable except by fine study. As a matter of fact, given the destruction of the worldwide sensory networks, I’m not sure it will be testable at all. Oh, and some spectacular sunrises. And a slight increase in background radiation, but nothing that’s going to cause two-headed babies; possibly a slight increase in cancer rates. Given that if we don’t win, the human race is going to be wiped out, a slight increase in cancer rates is the least of our worries.”

“Point,” the President said, nodding. “Did it work?”

“Not the way they intended, sir.” Ronny paused to flip through his data. “Uh, if you will flip to slide four of the package we just sent you, you’ll see that the second group of detonations that took place a few minutes after the first were located in India, China, North Korea, and the far eastern parts of Russia.”

“Why does that mean that these nukes didn’t work?” the SecDef asked.

“We did not fire on those locations. Ergo, they must have fired upon themselves. We suspect the initial detonations tipped off the Von Neumann probes that the launch sites for these nukes were a threat and then they must have attacked those locations. That is the only explanation for nuking yourself that we can figure, sir,” Ronny finished and waited for a response.