They went through low tunnels, heels ringing on the echoing concrete; they wore hard hats and flashed their ID badges at the checkpoints. The low roar of ventilator blowers was an oppressive rumble Chandler led them on to a circular balcony and when Forrester looked up and down all he could see was the massive polished skin of the ICBM and the confusion of machinery around it—pipes, cables, platforms, wheels, ladders, lights, joints, cylinders, gears, devices.

Chandler delivered himself of his set-piece speech: “This is one of our eighteen Minuteman Threes, a multiple-warhead three-stage missile with a tri-gyroscope guidance system like the ones that put the Apollo ships down on pinpoints on the moon. After she’s launched the first and second stages burn out. They’re decoupled by explosive connectors and they fall free. When the third stage ignites it accelerates the payload to orbital speed. She’s up at a ballistic altitude zenith of about eight hundred miles and once she’s up there above the atmosphere she sheds her ceramic heat shield to lighten weight. Then she coasts in orbit until her micro-circuit computer, which is programmed with the target information, fires the retro-rockets and brings her down toward the first target.

“You’ve got three warhead reentry vehicles—RV’s—triggered by altitude fuses. If the target’s a city they’ll detonate high above the target to maximize the area of destruction. A twenty-megaton blast at altitude will destroy brick buildings in a circle maybe fifteen miles in diameter. But if your target’s an enemy missile base your RV has to get in low to dig the enemy’s missiles right out of their hard silos. That means impact inside four hundred yards of the silo. That kind of accuracy requires meticulous programming and that’s why the ground-support systems for each one of these silos are as big and complicated as the inside of an aircraft carrier.”

Forrester listened with half his mind; when Chandler stopped for breath Forrester changed the subject: “And what if you don’t get your Phaetons, Major?”

“In other words why can’t we make do with what we’ve already got here? Senator, how much do you know about the Russian SS-9?”

“Not very much.”

“The SS-9’s a lot bigger than this bird here: big enough to carry five times as many warheads as our bird. So far they’ve deployed about four hundred SS-9S, which is enough to target our whole deployment of one thousand Minutemen, assuming they’ve got a good enough delivery system to knock out our hard silos. Naturally we hope they don’t—we hope they’ll leave enough unhit for us to retaliate and cripple them. Our clout depends on convincing the Reds we can penetrate our warheads into their turf no matter what they do. The object of the game is to keep them convinced we can inflict unacceptable damage on them. If they line up enough SS-9s to kill our whole system they don’t have to worry about that any more unless we’re lining up something against them—like the Phaeton Three.”

Moskowitz said, “It’s funny the way you Air Force people ignore the Navy.”

“Professor, there’s a limit to the size and speed of a bird you can launch from a submarine. We’ve got maybe thirty nuclear submarines deployed on station at any given time, and they may have a few hundred missiles and warheads among them but all the Reds have to do is knock out those thirty submarines to destroy the whole Polaris-Poseidon system. The Navy puts a lot of store in mobility and concealment but I wouldn’t bet my ass the Reds couldn’t attack all our subs simultaneously—they’ve got a sophisticated sub-tracking system and you can be damn sure they know where every one of our subs is right now. Let’s don’t forget they don’t need to make a direct hit to knock out a sub. Set off a nuke anywhere in the neighborhood and you make a shock wave that’ll take any submarine out of action. But even supposing they did miss two or three of our subs we’d still be talking about thirty-ton missiles with a maximum range of maybe twenty-five hundred miles. A submarine-launched bird is a lot easier for their ABM defenses to handle.

“No,” Chandler concluded, “the only real knockout punch we’ve got is this Minuteman Three and if they deploy enough SS-9s to cancel these birds out, then where’s our deterrent against a preemptive first strike?”

Moskowitz wore a bemused little smile that implied he didn’t believe a word of it. Forrester couldn’t get away from the notion he was listening to a computer. Chandler’s pronouncements were set pieces right out of the little propaganda booklets printed up for Public Information Officers. To Forrester’s mind they were all infected with a tragic blindness: the generals talked only to other generals; they parroted 1950 slogans of deterrents, weapons gaps, the Communist monolith. The machinery had grown in sophistication; the commanders had not. I have seen the futre, and it does not work. He ran his eyes up the dismal great column of the missile, gleaming dully in the antiseptic artificial light, and he heard Moskowitz begin to speak in his wry classroom voice.

“Of course your whole position goes into a cocked hat, Major, the minute you admit our early-warning system will give us enough time to launch these missiles before any incoming ICBMs have a chance to knock out the silos. The Russians haven’t devised any methods yet of sneaking an SS-9 across twenty thousand miles of airspace without its being seen.”

“They’re working on it,” Chandler said, and when Forrester looked at him he couldn’t see any sign that the man was joking.

Top Spode had been wandering along the platform poking his brown beak into niches. When he came by Forrester he said, “Like to have another look at the ROG command post on our way back.”

When they emerged from the ROG access tunnel a fat Tech Sergeant intercepted them, red-faced and out-of-breath as a volunteer fireman: there was a telephone call for Mr. Spode; would he mind taking it over here?

Major Chandler excused himself and went across the thrumming cavern to have a word with an officer at the far end of the Iconorama and Forrester said to Moskowitz, “Do you see how young these men are? We’ve given these things to children to play with.”

“I don’t know,” Moskowitz said. “Did you ever read Poe’s essay on simpletons and bluffing in ‘The Purloined Letter’? It ought to be required reading in Washington. The thesis is, when you’re trying to guess your opponent’s next move your best chance is to identify your own reasoning intellect with your opponent’s. If you value his intellect too high or too low, you’ll guess wrong. Now it takes a high scale of intelligence to identify deliberately with an opponent’s cunning, but the next best choice is to pick somebody whose intellect is the equivalent of the opponent’s. Most likely to think the same way, you see?”

“Professor, you’re way beyond my limits of subtlety.”

“All I’m saying is, the intellectual level of Russian leadership is third-rate and we may actually have a better chance if our own leadership isn’t vastly superior to theirs. Kennedy was a brainy man but he made the mistake of assuming Khrushchev was too intelligent to try planting missiles in Cuba: we almost had a war over that. But if they know our leadership is just as dumb and trigger-happy as theirs they won’t try to run dangerous bluffs on us. Maybe we need to keep it on that level, because we know what happens if we don’t.

“Put yourself five miles away from a one-megaton blast. The force would destroy most of the concrete and brick buildings inside that radius and earthquake-effect and the wind-drag pressures behind the blast would knock down most of what was left; anything left standing would probably be melted by the heat of the fireball. If you were still alive somehow, your clothes would burst into flame and you’d suffer flash burns and retinal burns—the kind that killed half the victims at Hiroshima and blinded thousands more. Your eardrums might burst, your lungs might be ruptured, you might be killed or maimed by flyipg bricks and glass. Everything around you might burst into flame and if you weren’t burned to death, you might suffer heat stroke or carbon-monoxide poisoning. Oxygen depletion and extreme heat can cause respiratory damage from inhalation of radiated heat. Then there’s the whole gamut of radiation-fallout effects on human biology—beta and gamma and X rays, always bearing in mind China and Russia use very dirty bombs. The effects aren’t pretty. Quick death, slow death, permanent injuries of every degree—ulcerated cutaneous lesions, burns, internal destruction, blood and tissue deterioration, genetic mutation, cancer, fibrosis, disintegration of bone marrow.… Senator, you know what we’re trying to fight. It’s what Lapp called the technological imperative: if a weapon can be built it will be built. These gadgets have become a central object of worship in our time and you can’t take a society’s idols away from it. Sometimes I think you and I are just lying down on the tracks.”