It would seem that defining elements of a nightmare are
imminence, inescapability and paralyzing horror. You’re riveted to the spot
whilst something is creeping closer,
just out of your field of vision, or you have to give a presentation at work in
ten minutes but you’ve prepared nothing and you’re suddenly standing in your underwear.
Watching Lucy Walker’s documentary Countdown
to zero made me realise that being the premier of a major nuclear power
(for our purposes Russia or the USA) presented with definitive proof of
incoming, nuclear armed ICBM’s more acutely concentrates these qualities than
any nightmare could. An ICBM is imminent because its atmospheric re-entry speed
is 2.5 miles per second, or 150 miles per minute. It’s inescapable because no
existing force can impede it once it has left its silo. It’s horrifying
precisely because of these qualities, there is so little time for a response,
and neither option is promising; refuse to fire back and allow your citizens to
be sacrificed, or retaliate and drag the rest of the world onto the funeral
pyre.
The further you look
into the mentality inculcated by the existence of ICBMs, the more tense and
nightmarish the whole enterprise becomes. To make sure you extract full use
from your force, it makes sense to maintain your missiles on a “launch on
warning” posture, meaning launching your own missiles before waiting for what
you assume to be an enemy missile
hits your soil. Even worse, an attack would not be indicated by thousands of
missiles arcing over the horizon in a definite indication of hostile intent.
Instead, it would be started by a single missile detonated at high altitude in
order to generate an electro-magnetic pulse and destroy all unshielded
electronics in the enemy country; a detonation at 300 miles altitude would in
one fell swoop wipe out the communications of almost all of the US and Canada.
Thus, there would be seconds to detect a single missile, interpret whether it
was a civilian rocket launch or even just a radar error, and determine what your
own ICBM force should do. Even assuming communications remained intact; the
president would have between thirty seconds to twelve minutes to make a
decision. You can’t make a cup of tea in thirty seconds and I can barely pick
something off a menu in twelve minutes; imagine deciding the fate of the world
in that time! There’s no way a human being can make that decision. It is the
quintessential nightmare situation.
And if you do decide to strike back, there must be a brief
interval where everything is in the air. The missiles of the two opposing
states will (figuratively at least) pass each other in flight, tracing
essentially the same route in opposite directions, completely irreversible. Not
only that, but ICBMs even correct themselves in flight, their onboard computers
taking star sightings as they surge out of the atmosphere and reach the top of
their brief parabola to correct their course in the extremely unlikely event of
navigational error. There’s something really quite sinister about the idea of
that mechanical eye, faultlessly calculating velocities and trajectories in the
unimaginable cold of space, aiming to within a handful of metres...
Still, there’s just about time for that cup of tea though.
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