One Human Minute

distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation.

On the battlefields of yore, when knights in armor fought on horseback and foot soldiers met at close quarters, chance decided the life or death of individuals and military units. But the power of electronics, embodied in computer logic, made chance the arbiter of the fate of whole armies and nations.

Moreover — and this was quite a separate thing — blueprints for new, better weapons were developed so quickly that industry could not keep pace. Control systems, targeting systems, camouflage, maintenance and disruption of communications, the strike capability of so-called conventional weapons (a misleading term, really, and out of date) became anachronisms even before they were put into the field.

That is why, in the late eighties, production was frequently halted on new fighter planes and bombers, cruise missiles, anti-antimissiles, spy satellites, submarines, laser bombs, sonars, and radars. That is why prototypes had to be abandoned and why so much political debate seethed around successive weapons that swallowed huge budgets and vast human energies. Not only did each innovation turn out to be far more expensive than the one before, but many soon had to be written off as losses, and this pattern continued without letup. It seemed that technological-military invention per se was not the answer, but, rather, the speed of its industrial implementation. This phenomenon became, at the turn of the century, the latest paradox of the arms race. The only way to nullify its awful drain on the military appeared to be to plan weapons not eight or twelve years ahead, but a quarter of a century in advance — which was a sheer impossibility, requiring the prediction of new discoveries and inventions beyond the ken of the best minds of the day.

At the end of the twentieth century, the idea emerged of a new weapon that would be neither an atom bomb nor a laser gun but a hybrid of the two. Up to then, there were fission (uranium, plutonium) and fusion (thermonuclear, hydrogen-plutonium) bombs. The “old” bomb, in breaking nuclear bonds, unleashed every possible sort of radiation: gamma rays, X-rays, heat, and an avalanche of radioactive dust and lethal high-energy particles. The fireball, having a temperature of millions of degrees, emitted energy at all wavelengths. As someone said, “Matter vomited forth everything she could.” From a military standpoint it was wasteful, because at ground zero all objects turned into flaming plasma, a gas of atoms stripped of their electron shells. At the site of the explosion, stones, trees, houses, metals, bridges, and human bodies vaporized, and concrete and sand were hurled into the stratosphere in a rising mushroom of flames. “Conversion bombs” were a more efficient version of this weapon. They emitted what the strategists required in a given situation: either hard radiation — in which case it was called a “clean bomb,” striking only living things — or thermal radiation, which unleashed a firestorm over hundreds of square miles.

The laser bomb, however, was not actually a bomb; it was a single-charge laser gun, focusing a huge part of its force into a ray that could incinerate a city (from a high orbit), for example, or a rocket base, or some other important target (such as the enemy’s satellite defense screen). At the same time, the ray would turn the laser bomb itself into flaming fragments. But we will not go into more detail about such weapons, because instead of leading to further escalation, as was expected, they really marked its end.

It is worthwhile, however, to look at the atomic arsenals of twentieth-century Earth from a historical perspective. Even in the seventies, they held enough weapons to kill every inhabitant of the planet several times over. Given this overabundance of destructive might, the specialists favored a preventive strike, or making a second strike at the enemy’s stockpiles while protecting their own. The safety of the population was important but second in priority.

In the early fifties, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists printed a discussion in which the fathers of the bomb, physicists like Bethe and Szilard, took part. It dealt with civil defense in the event of nuclear war. A realistic solution would have meant evacuating the cities and building gigantic underground shelters. Bethe estimated the cost of the first phase of such a project to be twenty billion dollars, though the social and psychological costs were beyond reckoning. But it soon became clear that even a “return to the cave” would not guarantee the survival of the population, because the arms race continued to yield more powerful warheads and increasingly accurate missiles. The science fiction of the day painted gloomy and nightmarish scenes in which the degenerate remnants of humanity vegetated in concrete, multilevel molehills beneath the ruins of gutted cities. Self-styled futurologists (but all futurologists were self-styled) outdid one another in extrapolating, from existing atomic arsenals, future arsenals even more frightful. One of the better known of such speculations was Herman Kahn’s Thinking about the Unthinkable, an essay on hydrogen warfare. Kahn also thought up a “doomsday machine.” An enormous nuclear charge encased in a cobalt jacket could be buried by a nation in the depths of its own territory, in order to blackmail the rest of the world with the threat of “total planetary suicide.” But no one dreamed that, with political antagonisms still persisting, the era of atomic weapons would come to an end without ushering in either world peace or world annihilation.

During the early years of the twenty-first century, theoretical physics pondered a question that was thought to be crucial for the world’s continued existence: namely, whether or not the critical mass of uranides like uranium 235 and plutonium (that is, the mass at which an initiated chain reaction causes a nuclear explosion) was an absolute constant. If the critical mass could be influenced, particularly at a great distance, there might be a chance of neutralizing all warheads. As it turned out (and the physicists of the previous century had a rough idea of this), the critical mass could change. Under certain physical conditions, an explosive charge that had been critical ceased to be critical, and therefore did not explode. But the amount of energy needed to create such conditions was far greater than the power contained in all the atomic weapons combined. These attempts to neutralize atomic weapons were unsuccessful.

III

In the 1990s a new type of missile, popularly called the “F&F” (Fire & Forget), made its appearance. Guided by a programmed microcomputer, the missile sought its own target after being launched. Once activated, it was truly on its own. At the same time, “unhuman” espionage came into use, at first underwater. An underwater mine, equipped with sensors and memory, could keep track of the movements of ships sailing over it, distinguish commercial vessels from military, establish their tonnage, and transmit the information in code if necessary.

Combat readiness, in the affluent nations especially, evaporated. Young men of draft age considered such time-honored phrases as Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori to be completely ridiculous.

Meanwhile, new generations of weapons were rising in price exponentially. The airplane of the First World War was made of canvas, wood, and piano wire, with a couple of machine guns; landing gear and all, it cost about as much as a good automobile. A comparable airplane of the Second World War cost as much as thirty automobiles. By the end of the century, the price of a jet interceptor or a radar-proof bomber of the “Stealth” type was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Aircraft for the year 2000 were expected to cost a billion apiece. At this rate, it was calculated that over the next eighty years each superpower would be able to afford only twenty to twenty-five new planes. Tanks were no cheaper. And an atomic aircraft carrier, which was like an antediluvian brontosaurus under fire, cost many billions. The carrier could be sunk by a single hit from an F&F superrocket, which could split over the target into a cluster of specialized warheads, each to strike at a different nerve center of the sea leviathan.

At this same time, the production of microchips was discontinued; they were replaced by a product of the latest genetic engineering. The strain Silocobacter wieneri (named after the creator of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener) produced, in solutions containing silicates, silver, and a secret ingredient, solid-state circuits that were smaller than fly’s eggs. These elements were called “grain,” and after four years of mass production a handful of them cost no more than a handful of corn. In this way, from the intersection of two curves — the rising curve of cost for heavy weaponry and the falling curve of cost for artificial intelligence — came the “unhumanization” of the military.

Armies began to change from living to nonliving forces. Initially, the effects of the change were undramatic. It was like the automobile, whose inventors did not immediately come up with an entirely new shape but, instead, simply put an internal-combustion engine in a cart or carriage, with the harness removed. Similarly, the earliest pioneers of aviation gave their flying machines the wings of birds. Thanks to this kind of mental inertia, which in the