by Gene Skellig
In any case, his nuclear winter model demonstrates what happens when a global thermonuclear war of sufficient magnitude lofts a large enough volume of dust particles into the stratosphere to raise the albedo of the planet by 45%. Solar insolation would be further reduced by the perpetual cloud layer below, resulting in daytime surface illumination being reduced by 75% to 85% of normal,” Sun warmed to the topic, encouraged by the query.
“I have a quote here somewhere from a study in which Dr. Lee makes reference to in his work. Let me see if I can find it in my laptop.” Sun began to sweat as he furiously searched his files.
“Here it is. Taken from the Turko, Toon and Sagan study of Nuclear Winter, 1983: “Significant hemispherical attenuation of the solar radiation flux and subfreezing land temperatures may be caused by fine dust raised in high-yield nuclear surface bursts and by smoke from city and forest fires ignited by airbursts of all yields,” Sun quoted form his laptop, and then continued.
“There would be an initial spike of global temperatures and a rapid rise in humidity and rainfall as the heat of the earth is trapped in a heavily particulated mesosphere, vastly expanding the supply of condensation nuclei to start raindrops. The increased snow and ice melt, as well as the increased evaporation with the initial warmer temperatures will result in a several weeks of extremely intense storms and heavy rainfall globally. Then, as the residual heat is ablated and less and less insolation gets through the stratospheric dust to replace it, there is an accelerating drop of global temperatures. Continental areas will drop by twenty to thirty degrees C.” Sun paused, noticing that the generals were still with him and that General Bing was looking strangely satisfied.
“In his original study, Dr. Lee calculated that widespread crop failures, poisoned water supplies, immediate and long-term effects of the blasts, complete loss of food production, certain breakdown in social order and likelihood of years if not decades of inhospitable climate would result in the mass starvation of the human population and most animal species. Some life in the seas and temperate coastlines would continue, however a nuclear war of sufficient magnitude, on the order of five gigatons, would lead to the extinction of the human race,” Sun explained.
“So why does Dr. Lee’s model show a later recovery in the baseline population?” General Bing asked, not missing a beat.
“Dr. Lee updated the baseline to reflect the much smaller arsenal of weapons, after the arms reduction of the START I and START II treaties. His baseline was calculated for one thousand megatons. We can tweak this model to reflect any number of megatons you like,” Sun explained.
During the silence that followed, Sun’s brief feeling of relief due to General Bing not getting angry at the conclusions he presented was suddenly replaced by a new kind of fear.
Sun saw in General Bing’s calm and somehow contented face that that was precisely what General Bing was thinking. As he typed commands into the laptop, to adjust the Lee calculations to reflect 500 megatons, and hit “enter” to update the model, Sun felt a large rock in the pit of his stomach.
“Here is the outcome based on a medium-sized nuclear war, such as one thousand of the 500 kiloton weapons in the modernized American and Russian arsenals, resulting in 0.5 gigatons Net Explosive Quantity,” Sun explained. The graph had a sudden die-off starting at “T-0” of the theoretical event then remained flat for five years or so, and then recovered quickly to resume the exponential population growth that has been normal since the end of the industrial revolution. It soon reached into the Orange and Red bands, then into the Black band followed by a vertical drop off to zero, at about “T + 40” years.
“Am I reading this correctly? A medium sized war with 1000 warheads would cause a large die-off but in the end population growth would result in the predicted extinction being put off by only, what, forty years?” General Bing observed.
“That’s right, General. Not enough of the population is killed-off to forestall the deleterious effects of human consumption on the ecosystem. The environment is unable to cope with the impact of the renewed population growth. If I adjust the data again,” Sun adjusted the data to two gigatons. “Here a war of about 4,000 warheads, or two gigatons NEQ, results in a 90% to 95% die-off of the human population. The surviving population growth is held low due to the harsh climatic conditions in the nuclear winter, which would last far longer than in the earlier example. Even after the climate normalizes, the aggregate human consumption continues at a much lower rate because mankind has been thrown back by several centuries. The new climate is also marginal for food production, so the population also faces higher mortality rates and has to devote more effort to food production, less on economic growth. The Neutral emoticon here indicates that life is challenging but viable, and that our impact on the biosphere is greatly reduced.
As you can see from the way the line barely moves upward at all, the resulting level of human population, on the order of 350 to 600 million, is sustainable for centuries. Biodiversity goes up faster, but levels off in the Green band,” Sun concluded.
“So what you are advising, or more accurately, what Mr. Lee’s model advises, is that mankind should be culled by over 90% so that the resulting population would then be sustainable?”
Stammering and terrified to be put on the spot, Sun Tingting could only reply: “Honorable General, I am a fly on the back of a cow. I can not make such immense decisions. All I can do is present you with the mathematical model, and turn my efforts to the next assignment I am given.”
“Relax, young man, I am only thinking out loud.” General Bing sounded happy, as though he had been given good news.
“Thank you Dr. Tingting. That will be all. Colonel Hua will accompany you to your office, where you will retrieve all of your data and any reference materials. You will then collect what personal items you require from your apartment, and then you will be taken to your new billet here at Jinan District Headquarters. You are no longer a professor, and are now under my exclusive authority. That means you will talk to nobody about your work. Thank you for your competent presentation.” General Bing turned his attention to his colleagues while Sun and Colonel Hua silently removed themselves from the briefing room.
General Bing gave his carefully selected colleagues the broad strokes of his vision, the Higher Commander’s Intent. In this case, the intent would be to bring about a nuclear war of sufficient magnitude to kill off over 90% of the human population, resulting in a sustainable level of human activity over which Chinese military forces would have dominance. This plan would be developed in secret, even from the Party.
The plan would use the enemy’s Center of Gravity – their superior technological and military power - against them. For General Bing, the Chinese C of G was a toss-up between their successful infiltration of Occidental computer networks and China’s ability to mobilize human resources on a massive scale in secrecy, without their movements appearing on CNN.
The Strategic Plan was to convince the superpowers that they were each under attack from the other, so they would expend their high-readiness nuclear forces. The enemy’s Operational C of G was their ability to communicate with each other. There must be no last-minute peace initiative by red-phone. So the plan had to address the flow of information to the decision-makers during the critical timeframe.
In order to ensure that the war was devastating to all other western military powers, General Bing’s staff would make subtle and unobserved changes to the Joint Integrated Priority Target Lists of the Strategic Nuclear Forces of the United States and the Russian Federation. In effect, changes made by Chinese effects-based planners would have the enemies attacking their own friends around the world.
Supporting Plans would be drawn up to infiltrate Chinese agents throughout the world to support follow-on forces which would seize strategic sites, critical infrastructure, lines of communication, and more than a few small countries. Other Plans would ensure that a sufficient proportion of China’s citizens would also perish. However,
essential civilian and military resources would be removed from harms way in advance.
After three weeks of concerted effort, General Bing’s staff was ready to provide the General with an Information Briefing, in which they told the general what was understood to be the intent of the operation, any constraints and restraints, assumptions necessary for planning, and the strategic aim. General Bing approved the Concept of Operations and strategy for initial plan development as briefed, and OPERATION WINTER SNAKE began to take form. The staff had come up with the name “Winter Snake” because General Bing was born in the Year of the Snake, 1965, and the Snakehead wanted a nuclear winter.
To keep his operations secret for the ensuing years of preparation, training, and the manipulation of the myriad international players whom he saw as mere chess pieces, General Bing relied on a core of military personnel from his own Jinan Military District. This helped him keep WINTER SNAKE from the eyes and ears of even the nosiest of Party Members. However, when anybody turned an unwanted eye in the wrong direction, General Bing either brought the offending party on board the operation, or discouraged them in a more permanent manner.
One aspect of his plan that helped keep a lid on things was that most of the tactical operations could be developed on paper, with orders and movement tables prepared in advanced, and issued only in the hours before the Execution Phase. The rigidity and effectiveness of the Chinese state organs and military apparatus lent themselves to rapid, unquestioning mobilization. What General Bing had to do was plan the operations well in advance and have key people that he could trust ready to step forward with him when the time came. By this time, General Bing had reasoned, the world would be in such a state of panic and confusion that nobody would be looking that closely at what the Chinese military units were doing.
What’s more, General Bing thought with satisfaction, the Chairman of the Communist Party will have confirmed him as the Chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army. For now, however, General Bing did not want to be given that title. The incumbent Chief, General Wang, could be used as a tool for deception. Wang was an incompetent old fool. His meaningless operations would continue to support the enemy’s bigoted belief that China was incapable of operations on a strategic scale.
General Bing was inspired by Sun Tsu:
Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment – that which they cannot anticipate.
23
LITTLE DRAGONS
15 May: 5 Days Before NEW
The copilot was annoyed, but Ken felt relaxed. He knew from experience that the load of provisions and ammunition for the Rangers at Grise Fjord would arrive in time for their 0700 departure. The plan was to fly to Kugluktuk, normally 2.5 hours flying time from Yellowknife, and then to refuel and press on to Cambridge Bay. But Ken also knew that the weather wasn’t looking very good. With such limited range their DHC6 Twin Otter was not the ideal aircraft for this type of mission.
The mission was to transport a standard “Ranger Re-supply”: 50 cases of Individual Meal Packs and a dozen steel ammo-boxes with one thousand rounds of 0.303 caliber rounds each, for the Ranger’s preferred hunting rifle, the venerable Lee-Enfield No.4 Mark-1. The rifles were over 100 years old, but perfectly suited to the harsh operating conditions in the Canadian Arctic.
“This is the third time this week you guys have been late!” Kevin, the copilot, shouted at the Ranger Quarter-Master.
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch, Sir!” replied the cranky old Warrant Officer. “We had to wait for the ammo.”
“Well, you guys are supposed to have your load here one hour prior to launch!” Kevin said firmly. “And when you’re late like this it affects other people. The Flight Engineer still has to load the aircraft, strap down the load, and do his weight and balance! So now we’ll be at least half an hour late departing. We may not even make it to Cambridge Bay tonight!” Kevin ranted.
Kevin had gotten quite a reputation as a “berserker” at the Squadron. He tended to explode at people at the slightest provocation and never seemed to understand how to sit still and relax. But he was an excellent hands-and-feet pilot, and Ken was certain that once he settled down and learned how to deal with people he would make a fine Aircraft Commander.
Ken gave Kevin the left seat for the leg to Kugluktuk. He was pleased with how carefully Kevin correctly followed all the procedures. It was interesting how Kevin behaved more calmly when he was behind the controls of the aircraft, Ken thought.
The flight to Kugluktuk went well, and even the weather seemed to be holding. After an uneventful landing, Ken, Kevin and Rick the Flight Engineer put the aircraft to bed. The wind had picked up and was blowing in from the open ice of the Inside Passage with a wind-chill value of minus 30 C. The crew took extra care to make sure that the electrical oil-pan heaters were working. Without electric heat, the oil in the engine would be too cold to start again in the extremely low temperature.
It was five days before the crew could depart Kugluktuk. A persistent low pressure system had brought blizzard conditions to the tiny arctic hamlet. The crew, accustomed to such delays in the arctic, simply settled into a daily routine of checking the weather throughout the day and making the occasional trip to the airport to check on the aircraft. They also watched a lot of TV.
Ken had brought along his laptop computer and was hooked into the hotel’s Wi-Fi connection. With nothing better to do, he thought about the letter Casey Callaghan had sent him a few months before. He Googled “nuclear winter, climate change, extinction, war” to see what would come up. The first item that matched his search criterion read: “…plans to start a nuclear war. The resulting nuclear winter will cause global devastation, severe climate change, and mass extinction…”
It was uncanny how fast the internet search engine came up with strange documents and phrases that matched whatever was put in the search window. Ken clicked on the link. He was not aware that the instant he did so, alarm bells would sound at General Bing’s headquarters in Jinan province, China, and then later in a computer lab at an MI6 facility in east London.
“General Bing, we have another one.” Colonel Hua alerted the General that another one of the traitor Sun Tingting’s files had been discovered. Colonel Hua himself had put the bullet into the back of the climate scientist’s head when it was discovered that Sun had been trying to warn the world about OPERATION WINTER SNAKE. Sun tried to get documents past the firewalls and search-and-destroy viruses that the Chinese military were using to snuff out any communications regarding the WINTER SNAKE. So far, they had been successful in shutting down Dr. Tingting’s many attempts to spread the word.
The first step had been blowing up a lecture hall at the university, where Dr. Tingting’s students had been called in for a ‘surprise quiz’. The entire group had been killed or taken care of soon after in the region's hospitals, with only moderate collateral damage. It was covered up with an elaborate operation to disguise the blast as a gas leak. Had legitimate forensic investigators spent any time in the blast crater they would have found evidence that the explosion was caused by twenty barrels of Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine. General Bing’s men had placed the Cyclonite under the lecture hall and detonated it once Dr. Tingting’s students had begun their exam.
That, along with follow-on investigation of each student’s cell phones, home computer and social media contacts had ensured that none of Dr. Tingting’s lectures or theories about the ultimate die-off that mankind would face, nor any of his research for General Bing, would get outside of China.
However, Dr. Tingting’s colleagues outside of China were another problem. So Colonel Hua had personally taken charge of a small army of PLA’s best computer wizards to hunt down any sniff of information from Dr. Tingting, or any of his peers, that could draw attention to any aspect of the operation.
They had launched aggressive hunter-seeker viruses that would seek out any references to Dr. Sun Tingting, his students, Dr. Lee’s model or any use of specific keywords. This included the very search cues that Ken had Googled with his laptop.
The vast majority of hits were computer-assessed and algorithmically filtered out for being caught by too broad a net. However, this time they hit on a file that had not been identified in the past. It was another of Sun Tingting’s attempts to warn the world of General Bing’s plan.
By the time Ken clicked on the file, expecting to see some conspiracy theory type of nonsense, the Chinese hunter-seeker virus had searched the linked document in a microsecond and determined that it met the criteria for files that must be destroyed. It then carried out a subroutine embedded in the virus that would flag the computers and internet service providers involved, send a summary to the HQ in Jinan, and then infect the associated computers with an instantly fatal virus.
What Ken saw was a momentary opening of a document, then a sudden flash on his computer screen, followed by blackness. Moments later Ken heard swearing from down the hall where a man playing a web-based computer game reacted to his computer suddenly going black as well. The whole town of Kugluktuk, with over forty computers on-line at the time, was cut-off from the internet when Colonel Hua’s virus took down the local network.
Computers at Arizona State University, into which Sun Tingting had implanted one of his warning files, was identified by the Chinese viruses as the source of the file that Ken had uncovered with the search engine. The entire computer network of ASU was taken down. Thousands of computers were immediately rendered useless. Even if the network could be rebooted once the cause of the network failure had been identified, it would only go down again due to malevolent coding that the virus had written into the machine-language core of the university’s computer system.