Lightship

by Stephan Besik

  “Neither planetary warming nor population growth proved to be the immediate cause of the demise of the local civilization. Our research indicates that approximately nine hundred eighty Homeworld years, or about a thousand local orbits ago, a nuclear conflagration occurred which encompassed nearly all of one hemisphere and a significant portion of the other. To date, the Research Group has identified some thousands of areas of irradiation likely to have been caused by the detonation of low-yield nuclear weapons.”

  The Chief of Research paused for a few moments, as if she were feeling ill. There were some sounds of question and sympathy from the audience. The Commander of the Ship knew for certain now why the Chief had looked so solemn when she started.

  “By low yield we mean that none of the weapons was large enough to be a continent- or planet destroyer. Other expeditions have found evidence for weapons of such capabilities on a few planets. Such evidence usually appears in the form of dead planets in the home star’s Green Zone. Atmospheres are gone, oceans have been torn away, and ecosystems are nonexistent.

  “It is a known fact that nuclear weapons of almost arbitrary destructive power can be created if a civilization is foolish enough to do so. In a few instances that we know of, there is evidence that a weapon capable of cracking the mantle of a planet was used, with obvious results. Where there should have been viable Green Zone planets thriving with life, there are now airless, empty rocks.

  “In the case of Planet Three, the majority of the weapons detonated in this planet’s war were only capable of completely destroying a city of one million individuals. This assertion is based on what we have been able to estimate as the average power of weapons used and reasonable spatial distributions of metropolitan populations.

  “By complete destruction, we mean that a single weapon was of sufficient power to ensure that, in a community of one million individuals, very few if any would survive the detonation, let alone the aftermath.

  “At the upper end of the likely scale of destruction, we believe that weapons capable of destroying communities of as many as ten million individuals were deployed against some of the larger cities. It is the consensus of the Research Group that roughly seventy percent of the population of the heavily damaged hemisphere of the planet died during attacks. While we believe that these casualties occurred within days or weeks of the first nuclear detonations, our ability to estimate timing is limited. At this distance in time, the limit of accuracy on our estimates is approximately three standard years.

  “Our estimate of casualties is based on empirical evidence concerning the number of weapons deployed, the distribution of detonations, the estimated power of the average weapon, the probable number of fatalities per weapon, and the likely number of nonfatal injuries per weapon, along with our estimates of population distributions.

  “We believe that in a general nuclear conflict of the sort that occurred on this planet, few if any medical facilities of any capacity would survive, and nonfatal casualties with even relatively minor injuries were likely to die within days or weeks of their injury. Lack of food and water after the disruption of distribution networks would have seriously reduced the likelihood that injured survivors would recover. In fact, only the hardiest of survivors would be able to create survivable circumstances for themselves.”

  The Chief took another deep breath.

  At this point there was a rather impolite rise in conversation and general noise, which caused the Chief to stop her presentation. She appeared unsurprised, as well as very grim. The Commander suspected that many of the younger members of the audience were unaware that such destructive weapons existed and had been used. Perhaps to be expected among the young. He noted, however, that few of the adults were surprised. Clearly most of the crew had already internalized the terrible realities of disasters that civilizations could inflict upon themselves. The Chief waited for the noise to die down before she continued.

  The noise receded and the Chief went on.

  “Ruins of isolated communities and at the edges of major population centers provide us with some means to extrapolate population densities in larger communities. In addition we know enough of the biology of the dominant species to estimate their size and resource requirements. Based on this information and the size of areas affected by weapons detonations, we believe that population centers down to rather small communities were targeted with nuclear weapons of such power that entire cities were quite literally obliterated, leaving few if any survivors. From what we can determine, most survivors were from very small, isolated communities with so little population and so little strategic relevance that they were ignored during the conflict. The largest communities to survive were probably inhabited by no more than ten thousand individuals. Most surviving communities would have been much smaller.”

  “In theory the number of weapons deployed could have killed as many as 10 billion individuals. As a practical matter, however, the number of communities of a million individuals or greater was in the low thousands at most. Even considering the few very large cities we have identified it is unlikely that as many as ten billion individuals were destroyed during the nuclear conflagration. We estimate that the pre-war population of the planet was approximately seven billion, with six billion residing on the most heavily damaged hemisphere. Of the seven billion inhabitants of the entire planet, we estimate that somewhat in excess of four billion died within weeks of the nuclear attacks.

  “Our research indicates that roughly ninety percent of the weapons deployed were detonated over one hemisphere. The reason for this seems clear- the vast majority of population and economic infrastructure were concentrated on that one hemisphere.

  “The number of nuclear weapons detonated appears to have been more than enough to destroy virtually every major population center on that half of the planet. Even though a relatively small proportion of weapons were detonated on the remaining half of the planet, the concentration of populations and the apparent technological base of the less populated half were such that the population of the lesser half of the planet was destroyed, or essentially condemned to death as well.” She stopped for a moment. “It should be remembered that even on the sparsely populated hemisphere there were hundreds of millions of inhabitants.

  “The prevailing theory among Research Group staff about the origins of the nuclear conflict is that a number of political organizations on two large continents attacked one another. At present we have no evidence concerning the specific motivation behind the conflict, although overpopulation is certainly a long-term factor. It is possible that we will never learn the details of the immediate cause of this nuclear conflagration. We also lack sufficient information to determine whether there were two, five, or fifty nuclear combatants.

  “We can only assume that the leadership of these political units were convinced that they would survive the conflict and achieve some useful purpose by engaging in nuclear warfare. Clearly this was not the case. It appears that little of the civilization survived the initial conflict, let alone the aftermath. Our evidence suggests that the species was virtually extinct within a hundred years of the first detonations. Indeed, there are some opinions among my staff that no individuals survived more than a few decades. For those few long-term survivors, we believe there were no options available to begin rebuilding at a technological level much above that of stone tool users.

  “Our findings confirm some theories concerning the nature of nuclear conflict. In particular, a number of theories assert that even low levels of nuclear conflict can be highly damaging to a technologically advanced species. Most of these theories assert that a civilization becomes more likely to destroy itself as it becomes more technologically sophisticated. A useful metaphor is to consider a fall from a great height. The farther one falls, the worse the damage.

  “Moreover, the more technological the culture, the less likely it will survive.

  “The difficulty is that knowledge has a context. As technology increases the context c
hanges and old methods and practices are forgotten. If it is necessary to rebuild, the old lessons have to be relearned, and quickly, because there is little left of the advanced culture to support the survivors.

  “In an advanced society the vast amount of knowledge accumulated becomes increasingly difficult to manage and preserve. The chances that a culture can rebuild are low because too many critical niches in the knowledge structure no longer have caretakers. To put it another way, your survival may depend on the operation of a sophisticated motorized vehicle to obtain food or medical services. The complexity of the vehicle may be such that you cannot repair all of its major components, and there is no one you can turn to for help. Eventually you will die because you can no longer keep your essential machine working.

  “The technological foundation that enables a civilization to create nuclear weapons is complex and large scale, and tends to be centralized near population centers. This makes the technological base of the planet highly vulnerable to attack and destruction. By eliminating population centers, significant damage is done to technological resources as well. For example, fabrication centers for such things as electronic devices are expensive at the level of development of this civilization, so there were relatively few of them. They would be nearly impossible to replace because of the loss of expert personnel and material infrastructure required to provide parts. Even at this relatively primitive level of technological development there is a frailty to a civilization that requires that stringent measures be taken to protect the information, skills and infrastructure bases that support it. Without such measures, the technology of the civilization is likely to collapse.

  “On this planet it appears that the technological foundation that produced the weapons, fuels, electronic guidance, and delivery systems that made the conflict possible vanished almost overnight. Along with the disappearance of weapons technology, other technologies more critical to survival were destroyed as well.

  “For example, the technology in use to mine deep subsurface organic fuels was destroyed. Even in situations where there was only damage, there were few experts left to make repairs. Perhaps more important, the technical infrastructure that provided parts had collapsed. As most of the readily available near-surface organic fuel deposits had been depleted in the centuries prior to the nuclear conflict, very few sources of inexpensive energy remained accessible to the survivors of the attacks. The damage to the supporting technological infrastructure was so substantial that even those few surviving deposits were inaccessible to survivors.

  “Along with the loss of technology, the few survivors were reduced to the use of plant materials such as wood for energy, which of course are highly inefficient sources. This meant that the ability to generate electricity was no longer adequate to support even small communities. Computational devices, transport, telecommunications and basics such as heat and lighting vanished. Even the technology required to produce basic agricultural equipment was destroyed. Once the level of technology declined that far, famine became inevitable. There is considerable evidence on this planet that most of the three billion survivors of the nuclear conflict perished from disease and starvation in the years immediately following the war.

  “The loss of technology also had a significant effect on medical services. The medical hazards came in three forms. First, of course, there were disabled survivors of the war whose lives were considerably shortened by their injuries and the destruction of local medical services. It is hard to estimate how many such individuals there were, but the prevailing opinion among my staff is that there were relatively few individuals in this category. As I mentioned earlier, it is our opinion that most of the injured perished shortly after the initial attacks. Medical facilities and staff were simply unavailable in most places. In short, the society had quickly regressed to a point where even moderate injuries shortened lives at best, or were fatal within just a few years of the war.

  “Next, there were older diseases that may have been under control at the original technological level of the culture, but had once again become deadly scourges as vaccines and medicines became unavailable. We believe that the older diseases repeatedly ravaged the survivors over the years after the war, slowly killing off the weak and the young. This problem led to a slow decline in a population struggling to recover.

  “There were also some highly aggressive new diseases for which there were no cures, and which appear to have been deadly to a substantial portion of the surviving population. As I said in my opening, these diseases slowed down our own activities, having survived the hundreds of years after the demise of the last native survivors. These diseases may have been artificially created as part of bioweapons programs, or they may have mutated from relatively benign diseases during or after the war. In any case, the technological tools needed to defeat the new diseases no longer existed, and disease ran wild throughout the surviving population.

  “The loss of technology, and therefore of fuel sources, was accompanied by another significant resource loss. Findings from earlier research indicate that attacks on population centers tend to destroy that most vital of resources- sources of fresh water.

  “We rarely think about the importance of water sources and distribution systems. They are so basic that they are an afterthought to our culture. It is probable that even at the level of technology of this species the availability of fresh water was taken for granted.

  “On all of the continents of this planet, in a manner typical of our own and most other planetary civilizations that we have investigated, major cities were built near water, often at junctions of rivers, lakes, and oceans. It was very likely, therefore, that attacks on major population centers were also attacks on major sources of fresh water. Wherever a community of any size existed, it was targeted with a nuclear weapon, destroying not only the community but the waterways in and around it as well.

  “The destruction of cities caused widespread and highly dangerous pollution of the adjacent waterways. The pollution came partially in the form of radioactivity from the nuclear weapons used, but also came in the form of heavy metals of all sorts being deposited in local water sources. This came about as a result of the destruction of this planet’s technological artifacts, virtually all of which contained relatively exotic poisonous metals for a wide variety of applications. As rain and wind broke down unprotected artifacts and ruins, otherwise safe materials leached into water sources and contaminated them.

  “Control over the normal waste of communities was lost as well, resulting in additional contamination of water sources.

  “The destruction of major inland waterways also resulted in substantial disruption of agriculture and commerce. Wherever there was a destroyed city, survivors had to find ways around the destruction. Waterways are keys to trade and the primitive forms of communication. With key nodes of water systems destroyed, making use of lakes and rivers became arduous at best.

  “For the survivors, the contamination of water sources meant increased illness, birth defects in children, and slow poisoning if they chose to live downstream from a target area. Those with some sense of the likely problems might have chosen to live upstream of as many ruined communities as they could, but the vast number of communities destroyed by nuclear weapons meant that survivors either had to live in sparsely populated areas to begin with or had to travel substantial distances to get to a relatively safe upstream location. In the circumstances of a heavily damaged civilization, travel was slow and hazardous, and survivors were unprepared.

  “Relocation into areas of uncontaminated water typically meant moving to mountainous areas. Such areas are characterized by a number of important liabilities, including sparse original population, rugged terrain, an already primitive communication and technological foundation, limited arable land, and unfavorable weather. The few survivors thus faced a variety of unfavorable conditions that greatly reduced the probability of survival after the holocaust.

  “Finally, to complicate the life of the sur
vivors even further, there was the problem of weather. In the few documented cases in which civilizations used very large nuclear weapons, the weapons caused massive disruptions of planetary weather systems. The detonation of such a device throws massive amounts of dust into the atmosphere, blocking out the local sun and dropping the surface temperature of the planet dramatically. In such cases the entire planet may be forced into an ice age almost overnight.

  “Depending on the size of the land mass destroyed, these “short-term” ice ages last a thousand to a few thousand years. In extreme circumstances the ice age can last as long as tens of thousands of years. War-induced climate change comes about nearly instantaneously in terms of biological evolution, so flora and fauna have very little chance to adapt. In such circumstances nearly the entire planetary ecosystem is destroyed as a near-term consequence of the detonation. What’s left are the few strains of extremely hardy plants, animals adapted to conditions of extreme cold, and microbial life forms that are capable of surviving in the worst of environments.

  “While this civilization did not instantaneously destroy a continent, for the technologically enabled inhabitants the effects of widely distributed detonations of thousands of nuclear weapons were almost as bad. The survivors were exposed to at least a century of abnormally cold weather. A short ice age, or at least very hard times on a global scale. To a peaceful, viable civilization a climatic change of this type and duration would be a major issue. To a civilization that had decimated its population, destroyed scarce natural resources, and destroyed its technological foundation, it spelled extinction. In a population already weakened by nearly incurable diseases, the cold quickly decimated survivors. Those few remaining expired quickly from lack of shelter, or slowly as crops failed year after year across the globe, and the surviving population starved.