Warday

First, to say that nobody understood the effects of EMP would be superfluous now. We lost, in about three seconds, approximately a hundred and fifty million television sets; five hundred million radios; ten million computers; three hundred million electronic calculating devices; fifty-six million electronic telephones; all television, radio, and microwave relay stations; all electronic business exchanges, such as stock and commodity exchanges; millions of electronic automobile ignitions; most electronically dependent aircraft, either crashed or permanently disabled; all communications satellites, either traversing or in geostationary orbit above the United States, Canada, and the USSR; and something on the order of two hundred trillion pieces of information held in computers.

The war burned down the electronic village, is what it did. What we had not understood was that our financial system depended on that village. All of our destinies were contained in fragile electronic superbrains, and so we have been deprived of destinies. I guess that’s the real point of war, isn’t it? To create intolerable deprivations and induce deaths.

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.