Reyes stared at him, openly appalled.
“That’s insane.”
“Those are the facts.”
Reyes turned toward Sherman as if pleading for a note of reason to be reinjected into the conversation. “Alex, you can’t let them get away with that. They’re both mad.”
Sherman shrugged.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Well, damn it, you’re the President. Use your Presidential authority. Order them to disarm it.”
“There’d be no point, Don. I wouldn’t expose the Presidential image to the public indignity of being told to go to hell. They wouldn’t do it.”
“Then you could shoot the bastards.”
“They’d let me, too. I’m telling you—they just wouldn’t do it and nobody else knows how to. Forget it.”
Reyes looked wildly from one end of the table to the other.
“How the hell am I supposed to forget it?” he shouted. “If anything goes wrong with that psycho machine we could all be zapped right here in this room any moment. I could forget it like I could forget a cobra in my bed . . . .” He looked back at Cleary. “What’s to stop its power-supply system from going faulty? How’s it supposed to be able to tell the difference between a line just failing and somebody pulling it out?”
“Actually the risk of anything like that is so near zero that you can forget it,” Cleary said in a voice that was calm and unperturbed. “Everything in Brunnermont was designed and constructed to the strictest military standards. The technology throughout features the most advanced concepts of reliability engineering, triple redundancy, and self-checking known. Every subsystem works on triple voting and has at least one backup that switches on automatically if a fault is detected. Even if outside power is cut off for any reason, its own generating complex will keep it running for years if need be. Any combination of component failures, right up to impossibly unlikely levels, can be tolerated for way beyond the worst-case repair times.” He paused for everyone to digest these remarks, then went on.
“What it does mean is that if and when faults do develop, and common sense dictates that we have to assume they will, those faults will have to be fixed and fixed good . . . without any messing around.”
“That’s one of the other things we’ve also begun working on already,” Foreshaw told them. “We’re talking to the manufacturers and outside contractors that were involved in all aspects of the system so that we can get together a permanent team of highly trained maintenance engineers to be permanently resident on the Brunnermont site. A first-aid team has already been put in to cover in the meantime.”
“To summarize, the system is as near fail-proof as makes no difference, and it’s tamper-proof,” Cleary rounded off.
General Carlohm spoke next. “So we still haven’t solved the problem of our attack arm. But why are we assuming all the time that it has to be based on the J-bomb at all? After all, we got along okay before we had it. There’s nothing to stop us building up our conventional ORBS and missile deterrents again. It’ll cost us an arm and a leg, but . . . if that’s what we have to do, it’s what we have to do.”
“I’m afraid there is something to stop you.” Cleary was beginning to sound apologetic. “You see, the Brunnermont surveillance programs are very sophisticated. They can identify the characteristics and trajectories of an attack profile and distinguish an offensive missile from, say, a regular suborbital aircraft, space shot, or satellite orbit. You could set up another deterrent system, sure, just as the other side can, but the moment either of you tried to use it, you’d trigger off the watchdog. You saw what happened yesterday; nothing would get through if either side launched any kind of offensive missile strike against the other.”
“It’s back to the last century again then,” Carlohm growled. “We’ll have to start building B-52s again.”
“Now, you know that would be crazy,” Foreshaw responded. “For one thing, today’s forms of conventional defense would leave any kind of classical attack like that with no chance; it would be like attacking machine guns with cavalry. And for another, the sheer numerical superiority of the East means we could never think of taking them on in any kind of unlimited war along the lines of 1939-45. Doing so would be suicide.”