Motion caught his eye. He looked up, and Brad Foster leered at him.
Jessie blinked, and Brad’s leer softened into a smile, though his expression did not change; only Jessie’s interpretation of the smile had altered. Brad had received his certification just a few months ago, yet already he was famous. He had lost only one duel in school, when he himself had supplied his opposing partner with the critical insight that made Brad’s whole argument collapse in smoke and dust. He had already established a reputation as a valuable duelist for making corporate reorganization decisions, though insufficient time had passed to assess the accuracy of his dueling analyses. Brad was the latest in the line of star duelists that included Kip Hendrix, Will Barloh, and Nathan Pilstrom.
Brad saluted him. “May accuracy triumph over victory.” He spoke the duelist’s creed in a monotone so perfectly without emotion that it expressed, in its perfect intensity, the depth of his commitment to his words.
Jessie’s throat seemed suddenly dry; he nodded his agreement.
The work station beeped softly; Jessie jumped at the sound. It marked the beginning of the duel.
The demands of the duel moved to the forefront of his thoughts. Jessie outlined all the obvious disadvantages to a first strike. First of all, it could end all human life, particularly if the Soviets were able to launch their missiles before ours landed.
Regardless of whether the Soviets were able to shoot back or not, the resulting global effects could severely damage our nation, even with a relatively tame “surgical” preemption. What could possibly justify such a risk?
Jessie glanced at Brad again. Brad was brilliant, no doubt about it. Jessie could see it in the way Brad immersed himself in his screen, his total concentration, a pale scholar with a thatch of kinky black hair that only emphasized his ghostly complexion. Jessie felt like he was wrestling a wraith. He might find himself grabbing the words of his opponent again and again, yet he came away each time empty-handed.
Brad tossed a standard scenario up on the main screen: what if we knew beforehand that the Soviet Union was about to make a first strike against us? Would it not then make sense to try to prevent such an attack with an attack of our own?
Jessie rattled off a list of problems with this supposition. He summed up his objections by observing that, no matter how many subtle indicators flared up, we couldn’t know a Soviet attack would occur until the attack was underway. By then it would be too late for us to make a strike that got their missiles before firing.
And shooting without that absolute certainty still entailed all the basic risks. Even if our attack succeeded, America would face the radiation and climatic consequences. Again, the risks in acting prematurely overwhelmed the risks in not acting at all. Jessie noted that this logic had surely been followed by both the American President and the Soviet General Secretary during the Flameout, and both leaders had come to Jessie’s conclusion. Jessie winced as the other duelist flipped this statement to red with a polite explanation: it made no difference what decisions others had made on the matter, or how many people had shared a consensus on the matter; the question was whether or not they were right.
Despite this gaffe, Jessie’s viewpoint remained unassailable. His opposing partner continued to delineate scenes and hypotheses, but all were easily countered. Once he caught Jessie off guard: what if the Soviet Union started assassinating our leaders?
Jessie felt unexpected anger, not at Brad, but at the world at large. Nell Carson was still in the hospital; she had not yet recovered consciousness. How could that kind of thing happen? What if the Russians really had tried to kill her? Colored with anger, an attack on the Soviet Union did seem justified.
But he could not write on the main screen in the color of anger; when translated to the screen, the color of anger seemed tinted with the color of foolishness. He responded, noting that a counter-assassination might be a reasonable response. But even under this provocation, they could not justify risking the whole world: no one man or woman could be worth avenging at the cost of a planet.
Brad seemed stalled, as Jessie had expected. Jessie watched Brad frown at his terminal, disturbed by his inability to budge the verdict now growing on the main screen.
The warm joy of victory washed over Jessie. He rejected it, remembering, even now, that the real victory was not in winning, but in finding the right answer. He concentrated on the hard clack of the keys, the rubbery grip of the trackball.
Brad smiled. He held his hand to his earphone and studied a corner of his screen, as though he were receiving a stunning idea from one of the members of the audience. That someone could be right there, one of the clutch of viewers in the dueling chamber, a continent away.
What novel suggestion could Brad be receiving?
Brad sat quietly for several seconds, his eyes focused on infinity. Suddenly his fingers moved, the only part of his body not bound by his concentration. Words formed on the screen. Jessie gasped as he read them.
Suppose the preemptive strike did not use nuclear weapons? Suppose that, in addition to having reasonable certainty that the Soviets would one day make a preemptive first strike of their own, America also had a nonnuclear system with which to try a preemption of that Soviet preemption?
A nonnuclear preemptive strike—what a concept! It triggered Jessie to reflect on the questions of nuclear standoff more deeply, more clearly than ever before. His mind raced with ideas that had swirled in his subconscious ever since learning the topic of his certification duel. One particular thought stream rose above the rest, to take flight. For the first time, he consciously considered the problem of nuclear war from the point of view of game theory. As his thoughts became clear, he started typing, but he did not type new points or counterpoints into the window defending his position. His understanding was on a larger scale. He requested space in the neutral moderators part of the screen. The gray bar down the middle of the screen split, and the area of third alternatives, of new ideas, opened wide.
The strategic nuclear problem was very similar to the Prisoners Dilemma, he realized. If the other prisoner chose to betray you by firing his missiles, he went through purgatory while you went through hell. If both prisoners chose betrayal, your own position was approximately the same, though at least you had the vindictive pride of thinking you got them back.
The two-prisoner game was simpler than the global nuclear problem, but it was a good place to start. In such a game, the best outcome occurred if:
1) both prisoners believed in the other s honesty, and
2) if both played honestly, by never firing their missiles.
Given this mutual honesty, the next step was obvious:
dismantle all the missiles. After all, neither prisoner would ever file his missiles anyway.
But mutual honesty only worked if both parties were superrational. If either party was merely rational, the correct answer, even for the superrational player, was betrayal. Betrayal, in this variant of the Dilemma, meant an immediate, preemptive first strike, before the opposing partner made his own preemptive first strike.
What was wrong with this analysis? Jessie looked at his conclusion in horror. Neither America nor the Soviet Union was superrational; the right answer, then, was to attack! Something had to be wrong with this analysis.
Something was wrong. The analogy to the Prisoners Dilemma was not perfect. The participants in the game had a chance to make a second, follow-up decision: if the preemptive first strike was not completely successful, the betrayed party could betray his opposing partner later, after assessing the betrayal. Only this risk of delayed betrayal kept the merely-rational players away from holocaust.
He had been typing his ideas as they came to him. Brad, reading Jessie’s digression, also waxed philosophical, typing more fresh thoughts in the opening for third alternatives. How ironic that the two superpowers should look, from the game theory viewpoint, so much like prisoners 1 They were prisoners, of course, of their own weapons. The nuclear weapon itsel
f, and the hysteria surrounding it, were the guards of the prison that held America and Russia captive. Every day these captors made men face the questions, Today, will they strike us today? Today, must we strike them today?
What was the purpose of the thousands of nuclear warheads in American and Soviet arsenals? Even an irrational person could understand that a hundred such warheads could destroy a national civilization. The only reason for having thousands was the danger that the opponent might try to use his warheads to destroy your warheads. America needed thousands because the Soviets had thousands; the Soviets needed thousands because the Americans had thousands. If each side had just a hundred apiece, the weapons would achieve the same threatening purpose, as long as the warheads were protected well enough so that the enemy couldn’t destroy them.
Jessie observed that if the Soviets were superrational—if we knew that they were superrational—then we could initiate a slow, unilateral disarmament. The superrational Soviets would follow with their own disarmament immediately, recognizing that they no longer needed the extra missiles, and that the superrational Americans would not continue the disarmament unless the Soviets themselves came along on the journey back to sanity. They could both disarm down to the point where global catastrophe was no longer possible. They would not disarm entirely, since there were other nuclear contestants in the world, controlled by other non-superrational groups. But everyone would breathe more easily.
Brad drove back to the main point, however: if the Soviets were merely rational, if we had strong reason to fear a preemptive strike from them, if we had a nonnu-clear preemptive strike option available to us, should we not use it?
Jessie looked at this new scenario with wonder. Given such a choice, he realized, his earlier decision lost its firm roots. Neither betrayal nor honesty was clearly right. The question ceased to be an engineering problem, with a clear right or wrong answer: it could only be treated as a political decision.
The colors of the main screen changed, red-lined flaws and green-lined deductions trading hues with stroboscopic speed. The new colors showed that in this nonnuclear first-strike scenario, the structure of the earlier argument collapsed. Of course, this didn’t mean that a preemptive strike was right; it merely meant that a preemptive strike wasn’t provably wrong.
Together, Jessie and Brad built tentative formulas for trading off right versus wrong subscenarios for undertaking a nonnuclear strike, depending on the estimated probability that the opponent was planning a strike, and the reliability of the attack systems. These new factors were no more quantifiable than the basic question, but they were more discrete, and less passion-provoking than the primary question—the question of when it might be justified to start a nuclear war.
They continued for a long time, lost in the ramifications of the possibilities they uncovered at high speed. At some time during the frenzy of analysis, a pale hand reached down and slapped the trackball, freezing both the cursor and Jessie’s spinning thoughts. “Congratulations,” Brad said with the same smile he had had earlier. “Welcome.” They shook hands.
The duel ended in victorious accuracy: Jessie received his certification.
May 20-21
We mark the beginning of the Information Age with the implementation of the Forstil Doctrine. Many aspects of an Information Age existed before that time. But in the implementation of the Forstil Doctrine, the Information Age asserted its ascendancy. Through this Doctrine, mankind learned not that knowledge is power, but that knowledge wisely used can be superior to power.
Of course, we do not demark the Information Age with President ForstiVs announcement of the Doctrine itself, but with the Flight that followed.
—Bill Hardie, The Rise and Fall of the Zetetic Institute
A forest infested with termites. The American war-making machine made Yurii think of such a forest.
The Soviet Union had known the true strengths and weaknesses of the American army better than the Americans themselves. KGB spies everywhere, even in the heart of the American weapon development system, saw everything, reported every major pulse. Yet in the forest of American military development, they missed the termites.
The Americans even nurtured their termites, like the ragtag group of the Sling Project. Here were termites that could fell forests even tougher than the dense wood of the American military-industrial complex. How could even the KGB track so many termites? They couldn’t, until the termites, the projects, appeared on die front pages of the American newspapers. Since the end of the so-called Flame-out, Yurii had read all about the Hunters of the Sling
Project in the New York Times. Like the rest of the world, he acquired information that should have been top secret. The Americans had even supplied high-resolution photos, the very best, in the silly paper! Americans were crazy beyond comprehension.
Yurii rocked in his chair, then stopped as a squeak from the springs disturbed him. For a moment he yearned for the good old days, when General Secretary Sipyagin had ruled—correction, the days when Citizen Sipyagin had ruled. Yurii reminded himself that he was General Secretary now.
The burden weighed more heavily than he had expected. As Sipyagin’s closest advisor, the job of General Secretary had looked little more difficult than advising, and it seemed to have fewer frustrations. But he realized now that this simplicity had been an illusion—an illusion only possible because the General Secretary had had no plans of his own to drive through the bureaucracy. Instead, he had had independent, vigorous advisors, such as Yurii himself, generating and herding plans through the system. If Yurii were content to let the other advisors continue their wayward performances, things would remain the same. But Yurii was most definitely not content to do so.
Even the office seemed smaller now, though it had a new, uncluttered look: the ivory figurines, the bookcases, and much of the furniture had left with Citizen Sipyagin. Barren planes of plaster and woodwork reminded visitors of the newness of the Soviet high command. Still, Yurii had enhanced the office in a technological sense: a large, flat computer display rose at an angle out of one side of the desk, and a teleconference screen coated one wall with its plain black surface. The blackness of the screen reminded Yurii of the unfathomably murky American thinking.
The video monitor across the room also made him think of the Americans, for he had seen images of the American Minuteman silos on the screen just the day before. Men had pulled back the silo covers on missile after missile: 120 in all, according to the bean counters who tracked such data. Only Americans could let all those missiles lie naked in the sunlight, exposed to nuclear destruction from Yuriis own missiles. They were even exposed to the ignoble attacks of birds, spattering their droppings across the nose cones. It seemed disrespectful to the hellish power bound within those silos.
Agonized, Yurii thrust the open-silo mystery aside, for other mysteries also blurred the future*of his nation. Yurii glared at the American rocket launch reports again. The Americans continued to toss those damnable HighHunters into space at a phenomenal rate. Why? Could they be planning to destroy all of Russia’s tanks and trucks, the way they destroyed her ships?
His mouth became a hard line. He could not allow that. Without her armor, Russia would become naked to the vengeful spirit of Polish, Czech, and Chinese hatred. Such a destructive move would require a nuclear retaliation. Was the new president, Forstil, so blind that he couldn’t see that? Did Yurii himself have to tell the American such an obvious truth, bluntly, so that no terrible, world-engulfing error could occur? Forstil wearied him as much as the strong-willed bureaucrats in his own country. He could see no moment of calm sailing anywhere on his horizon.
Exhausting as these possibilities seemed, they did not disturb him so much as other possible explanations of the surge of American HighHunters. Yurii had reports, very reliable reports, of profoundly disquieting modifications to the HighHunter Crowbars. The reports said these missiles were larger, and even more massive, than the ones used to destroy the Soviet Navy.
For a moment, Yurii snarled as his senior military-technology analysts had snarled, staring at these reports. Why would the Americans change a weapon that already overwhelmed everything else on the planet? General Mangasarian had recommended an immediate spaceplane launch to open up one of those demon canisters and look at the new Crowbars. Yurii had rejected the idea. Hilan Forstil was every bit as unpredictable as Carson; a spaceplane assault on a HighHunter might trigger crazi-ness, like a rain of HighHunters on Russia’s spaceplane launching platforms. He could envision the effects a hundred ship-killing Crowbars would have on a delicate gantry.
Was that the purpose of the new HighHunter—to destroy Russia’s space program by destroying her rocket launchers? To blind them by destroying their ability to launch spy satellites, so that they could no longer watch the American missile silos?
No, that made no sense either. The old Crowbars were perfectly capable of knocking out the satellite launchers.
More benign explanations for the new Crowbars abounded. Priorities had changed for the United States with the start of the war, and then again with the introduction of the Hunters, but now those priorities had returned to normal. Like a balloon that had deformed under the pressure of a rigid finger, the military had returned to its old shape now that the finger of war had been removed. The grand American military-industrial complex had captured the contracts to build the new HighHunters. The grand American bureaucrats were back in charge—the same ones who had “improved” their naval aircraft so much that they could barely lumber off the catapult. The new Crowbar could be just such an improvement—a new version designed to officialize the weapon with the stamp of point-lessness. Who could be sure—the new Crowbar might not even be able to kill a tank! It couldn’t kill tanks as effectively, anyway: since the new Crowbar was much larger, you couldn’t put enough of them into a Hunter to stop an assault.
Despite this reassuring possibility, Yurii worried that he had missed the key point someplace, though he felt close … With a rush of pleasure, he realized that he knew one person who could unravel the mystery of the American Crowbars.
David's Sling Page 33