“The third choice sounds like a big gamble,” he said. “What evidence can you offer me to justify my taking it?”
Silence reigned for a while. The circle of faces stared grimly at the table. At last, Clifford quietly supplied the answer. “You have nothing whatsoever to lose by it.”
“How so, Dr. Clifford?” Sherman asked.
“The weapon can either work or not work,” Clifford replied. “If it works, it can either be used or not used. If it’s used, it can either succeed or fail.” He swept his eyes round the table. “The logical consequences of those statements are that there is nothing to lose. If it doesn’t work or isn’t used, the result is no different from that of choice two. If it’s used but fails, the result is no worse than the worst-case of choice one. Either way, the West loses in the long term. . . . The only alternative to that is if the weapon is used and succeeds, and the only way of making that a possibility is to select choice three.”
* * *
Clifford and his colleagues stayed that night in Washington while the President and his staff conferred. The next day they returned to the White House to meet Sherman, Reyes, Foreshaw, and Chambers in the Cabinet Room again.
“The decision is Go,” Sherman informed them. “You have first priority for whatever equipment, materials, personnel, funds, or other resources you need. Code name for the project is Jericho. It will commence at once. As I mentioned yesterday, we may be forced to make unpalatable decisions in the course of the next year or so; therefore our Western allies will have to be informed of the reasons.”
Even before the ISF scientists had left the White House, some of the presidential advisers had already dubbed the new weapon the J-bomb.
On the plane back to Boston that night, Clifford’s mood was one of grim satisfaction. Aub, for once, seemed subdued and withdrawn.
“What’s the matter?” Clifford asked him. “It’s what you’ve always said you wanted, isn’t it—unlimited government funds and resources. Why doesn’t it taste so good now?”
Chapter 20
Once it had received official approval and been accorded highest priority, Jericho swung into motion with frightening speed. Home of the project was to be a place called Brunnermont, a complex of concrete and steel levels that went down for over a mile into solid rock beneath the Appalachians and which had originally been designed and built as a self-sufficient, bombproof survival center for VIPs and as a communications and command headquarters.
Here the thermonuclear power plant that had been designed to keep Brunnermont functioning for decades if need be was modified and pressed into service to feed the fearsome beam of concentrated matter into the new reactor. A level above the generators and the reactor, in a specially redesigned and sealed off top-security zone, the Mark III fire-control and direction system slowly began to take shape. Above that was installed a full-scale strategic command nerve center linked into the network of global surveillance, defense, strike and counterstrike systems, integrated command centers and war rooms of all the Western allied nations.
During the early months, Taiwan was invaded and occupied without opposition from the West, apart from routine protests and denunciations. After a series of large-scale battles on the borders of India, appeals for Western support and intervention failed to produce any decisive response. Encouraged by this demonstration of apathy or indifference, political subversion and agitation in that country rose to new heights and found many receptive ears among a people who saw only impotence and betrayal beneath the ideology preached by their own government and its friends. Six months after the commencement of Jericho, the whole of India was engulfed in civil war. Hard-pressed at the front and harassed from the rear, the border armies fell back to the Indus Basin in the west and to Calcutta in the east. Predictably the war had now become a “struggle for the liberation of the oppressed peoples of India,” as the slogans of 1992 were once again shouted around the world. Air attacks on Indian cities became everyday news items; Calcutta burned under encircling laser siege-artillery; Bombay, Madras, and a score of other ports were blockaded by mine and submarine; famine and disease claimed hundreds of thousands. The West did nothing.
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