Bradley Clifford tasted his own drink and looked back without speaking.
“The emotions that tempt us toward acting impulsively, however real they might be now, will soon be forgotten,” Sherman continued. “History would never condone the indiscriminate use of a weapon of this kind, whatever the circumstances. If the West is to survive as the defender of all the things it has always claimed to stand for, it must uphold its principles even in war. It cannot and must not permit itself to precipitate the wholesale slaughter of civilians by this means, or to embark on an orgy of mass destruction by methods against which there can be no defense.”
“But the deadlock has to be broken,” Clifford replied at last. “Without an imbalance, it must remain a deadlock permanently.”
“Yes, I agree with you. Clearly it would be absurd for us to concede any form of parity with the East now; your weapon should enable us to dictate any terms we choose. What I’m really saying is that the message is so obvious that there should be no need for us to let loose a worldwide holocaust to spell it out. I have conferred with our allies on this, and they agree. Europe, Australia, and Japan feel the same way; the Russians are all for going straight in with the bomb, but they’re outvoted.”
“I understand, of course,” Clifford said. “But what did you have in mind as an alternative—some kind of token demonstration?”
Sherman shook his head slowly, apparently having been expecting the suggestion. “Mmm . . . no. We did discuss such a possibility, but we came to the conclusion that even that would be too risky. You see, Dr. Clifford, the kind of people we are up against are, shall we say, unpredictable. Much of the Eastern world has plunged into the twenty-first century, without having any of the time to adjust in the same way the Western nations did—but even in the case of the West, the transition was far from easy. Many of their leaders still think and react in the manner of tribesmen rather than statesmen; that was why the UN collapsed and why any form of rational negotiation has been impossible for the last twenty years or more.
“But these people now possess enormous arsenals of the most sophisticated weapons systems known—apart from this latest, of course. It took our own experts a long time to realize the full implications of the bomb. The problem with a demonstration is that our adversaries might react first and think afterward; they might see it as a bluff and try to call it. If they did, we could end up taking a lot of casualties on our own side before we convinced them, and that’s the one thing I’m here to prevent if I can. I know that it looks as if the J-bomb would neutralize anything they tried to do, but we haven’t actually proved that yet. Until we’re more sure of that, we have to keep the element of surprise as an added insurance. That’s one advantage that it would be foolish to sacrifice prematurely.”
Clifford sipped his drink again and nodded slowly. None of this came very much as a surprise. He thought he knew what would follow next, but chose not to interrupt.
The President leaned forward and rested an elbow on the arm of his chair. “What I wanted to ask you about was the feasibility of using the J-bomb for a no-holds-barred surprise strike, but selectively. We want to be able to knock out the offensive capability of the other side in a single, lightning blow, especially the means of delivering any form of retaliation against our own territories. If we could first of all, without warning, eliminate their ORBS system, ICBM sites, and missile subs before they even knew what was happening, then it wouldn’t really matter how irrationally they react, since they would no longer be in a position to do anything drastic.
“After that, if they saw sense, the whole thing would be over and only purely military targets would have been attacked. If they still refused to buy it, we’d just keep hammering at their ground forces wherever they’re engaged in offensive actions against us until they did. Once again, the targets would be military; there’d be no mass killings of civilians, and we could take all the time in the world since there would be no threat to our own population or to our cities.” He sat back and waited for a reply.