Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

rockets. It would need to be better than anything we have now or can foresee. To be

100% effective (with atom bombs, anything less is hardly good enough!) it should be

something which acts with much greater speed than guns or anti-aircraft rockets.

There is a bare possibility that science could cook up some sort of a devastatingly

powerful beam of energy, acting with the speed of light, which would be a real

anti-aircraft weapon, even against rockets. But the scientists don’t promise it.

We would need the best anti-aircraft devices possible, in the meantime. A

robot hook-up of target-seeking rockets, radar, and computing machines might give

considerable protection, if extensive enough, but there is a lot of research and

test and production ahead before any such plan is workable. Furthermore, it could

not be air tight and it would be very expensive- and very annoying, for it would end

civilian aviation. If we hooked the thing up to ignore civilian planes, we would

leave ourselves wide open to a Trojan Horse tactic in which the enemy would use

ordinary planes to deliver his atomic bombs.

Such a defense, although much more expensive and much more trouble than all

our pre-War military establishment, would be needed. If we are not willing to foot

the bill, we can at least save money by not buying flame throwers, tanks, or

battleships.

We can prepare to attack. We can be so bristlingly savage that other nations

may fear to attack us. If we are not to have a super-state and a world police, then

the United States needs the fastest and the most longrange rockets, the most

powerful atomic blasts, and every other dirty trick conceived in comic strip or

fantastic fiction. We must have space ships and we must have them first. We must

land on the Moon and take possession of it in order to forbid its use to other

nations as a base against us and in order to have it as a base against any enemy of

ours. We must set up, duplicate, and reduplicate rocket installations intended to

destroy almost automatically any spot on earth; we must let the world know that we

have them and that we are prepared to use them at the drop of a diplomat’s silk hat.

We must be prepared to tell uncooperative nations that there are men sitting in

front of switches, day and night, and that an attack on Washington would cause those

switches to be thrown.

And we must guard the secrets of the locations and natures of our weapons in

a fashion quite impossible for a normal democracy in peace time. More of that later.

Decentralization we would have to have. Not the picayune $250,000,000,000

job which has been proposed- (“Wait a minute! Why should we disperse our cities if

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we are going to have that Buck Rogers super-dooper death ray screen?”)

We haven’t got such a screen. Nor is it certain that we will ever have such

a screen, no matter how much

money we spend. Such a screen is simply the one remote possibility which modern

physics admits. It may turn out to be impossible to develop it; we simply don’t

know.

We must disperse thoroughly, so thoroughly that no single concentration of

population in the United States is an inviting target. Mr. Sumner Spaulding’s timid

proposal of a quarter of a trillion dollars was based on the pleasant assumption

that Los Angeles was an example of a properly dispersed city for the Atomic Age.

This is an incredible piece of optimism which is apparently based on the belief that

Hiroshima is the pattern for all future atomic attacks. Hiroshima was destroyed with

one bomb. Will the enemy grace the city of the Angels with only one bomb? Why not a

dozen?

The Hiroshima bomb was the gentlest, least destructive atomic bomb ever

likely to be loosed. Will the enemy favor us with a love tap such as that?

Within twenty miles of the city hall of Los Angeles lives half the

population of the enormous state of California. An atomic bomb dropped on that City

Hall would not only blast the swarming center of the city, it would set fire to the