Fiasco (32 page)

After which introduction, the authors presented their model of cosmic war. The model began with a sphere, Quinta at the center. In the distant past, local wars had become global wars, and they in turn were followed by a race to invent improved weapons on land, sea, and in the air. The atom bomb put an end to the great conventional wars. From then on, the cold-war race had three components: instruments of destruction, instruments providing linkage between them, and instruments directed against the first two.

The creation of a cosmic war sphere suggested the presence of operational centers that responded—with technological innovation—to the advances of the adversaries, as well as to the obsolescence both of existing arsenals and of the methods of coordinating their deployment.

Each of these stages had its limit or barrier. Every time the antagonists came to a barrier, a temporary balance of forces would ensue. Then one of the sides would attempt to break the barrier. The barrier of the precosmic phase would be a situation in which each side was able to locate and destroy the enemy's devices, those serving to deal the first blow and also those for retaliating after an attack. Toward the end of this phase, ballistic missiles of global range placed deep in the planet's crust, and mobile launchers on land or launchers hidden underwater (whether on submarine units or set on the ocean floor), all became vulnerable to destruction.

In such a mutual-strike equilibrium, the weakest link was the communication system put out into space by reconnaissance and tracking satellites—spy satellites—and the link between these, headquarters, and the combat units. In order to put that satellite system beyond the reach of a surprise attack that could disrupt or blind it, the next system was created in a higher orbit. In this way the war sphere expanded. The larger it grew, the more vulnerable to disruption became its link with the control centers on the ground. The centers sought to avert this threat. As sea islands were unsinkable aircraft carriers in the era of conventional battle, so the nearest globe—the Moon—became an indestructible base for the side that was the first to take possession of it militarily. Because there was only one moon, no sooner did one side occupy it than the other, to remove this new threat, either had to concentrate on ways to stop communication between planet and moon, or else had to dislodge the enemy from the moon, by invasion.

If the forces of the invaders and defenders of the lunar fortress were roughly equal, no one could assume complete control of the body. Most likely this is what happened when the unilateral installation of the base was in progress. Those put in check had to abandon the Moon, but those giving check did not have strength enough to occupy it then.

The retreat might have had another reason, too: new developments in the disruption of distance communication. If that came about, the Moon would lose strategic value as an extraplanetary headquarters for military operations.

An abstract model of cosmic war was a multiphase space with critical transition surfaces from one phase, when fully achieved, to the next. Expanding astronomically now, the war sphere would impose on the antagonists methods of combat unprecedented in their history.

The single strategically optimal reaction to the adversary's acquisition of the ability to disrupt all connections between the operational centers and their bases and weapons on land, sea, and in the air—and in space—was to give greater combat autonomy to one's own weapons and bases.

The result was that all the centers saw the futility of having headquarters coordinate operations. The question arose: how to continue offensive-defensive strategies without being in contact with one's own forces in space?

No one blocked his own channels of reconnaissance and command. This occurred as a result of the so-called mirror effect. A did unto B as A would rather not have been done unto, disrupting his communications—and was paid in the same coin. After vying in accuracy and power in ballistic missiles, it became necessary to vie in communication shielding. The first competition had been the
amassing
of means of destruction and the
threat
of their use. The second was a "communications war." Battles waged to disrupt and preserve communication were real, though involving no destruction or bloodshed. Gradually filling the radio channels with noise, the adversaries lost track of their own deployed weapons as well as of the armaments of the enemy.

Did this mean that the paralysis of the command centers led to the transfer of the battle into space, where continual attacks and counterattacks were carried out by weapons made independent? Was the objective of these autonomous weapons the destruction of the enemy's orbiters? Not at all. The communications war continued to have priority. The enemy had to be blinded everywhere.

First there was the uncrossable threshold of the head-on collision of forces on the planet: the power of the payloads, ballistic accuracy, and the potential consequence of both—a fatal nuclear winter—meant the inevitable cessation of war.

Able to do nothing else, the enemies mutually destroyed their knowledge of their arsenals. All bands of radio waves were jammed. The entire capacity of the channels of transmission was filled with noise. In a fairly short period of time the race became a contest between the forces of jamming and the forces of intelligence-gathering and command-signaling. But this escalation, too, penetrating the noise with stronger signals and in turn jamming the signals with stronger noise, resulted in an impasse.

For a while, maser and laser communication still developed. But, paradoxically, the electronic warfare, because of the increase in emissive power, led to a stalemate here, too: lasers powerful enough to pierce the defenses yielded not intelligence but destruction. Speaking metaphorically, it was as if a blind man in a mist waved his white cane with greater and greater vigor, until the instrument serving to orient him turned, instead, into a club.

Foreseeing the approaching stalemate, each side worked to produce weapons that would possess tactical, and then strategic, autonomy. The implements of battle acquired independence from their builders, operators, and control centers.

Had the prime objective of these weapons now hurtling into space been to destroy their antagonist counterparts, the clash, unleashed at any point whatever in the sphere, would have set off a battle royal, like a prairie fire spreading to the surface of the planet itself, which would have led to a global exchange of blows of the greatest power—i.e., to extinction. Therefore, these weapons were not supposed to enter into violent confrontations. They were to put each other into check, and if they had to destroy, to do so by stealth—like infections—and not by bombs. Their machine intelligence attempted to win over the intelligence of enemy weaponry, to stun it, or—with the help of so-called reprogramming microviruses—to cause the "desertion" of the other side's orbiters, which in terrestrial history had an ancient analogue in the form of the janissaries: children whom the Turks took from attacked nations and incorporated into their own army.

This model of the war sphere was a gross oversimplification. Every phase of its growth might be accompanied by incursions, infiltrations, terrorist acts, and maneuvers that, like feints, were designed to lead the deceived enemy into an error that would be highly costly for him or even self-destructive. Both cable communication and electronic pulse devices allowed the adversaries on the planet to preserve a centralized system of headquarters at a certain range—a range that we could not determine, because it would vary depending on technological innovation. In the dictionary of our concepts there was no expression for the war-sphere of the Quintan type, for it was neither war nor peace but a permanent conflict that bound together the enemies and drained their resources.

Could one, then, categorize the war-sphere as a cosmic variant of a war of attrition, in which the side that lost was the one weaker in raw materials, energy, or inventions? To this conventional question came an unconventional answer. The inhabitants of the planet did not possess unlimited reserves of minerals or inexhaustible sources of energy. Although this limited the duration of the conflict, it promised victory to no one. The model of the final phase was, simply, a star.

A star, as everyone knew, owed its existence to the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium, a reaction that took place in its core at pressures and temperatures in the millions. When all the hydrogen was burned in the center, the star began to contract. Its gravity compressed it, raising the temperature at the center, which then made possible nuclear reactions of carbon. At the same time, around the inner sphere of helium—the "ash" of the consumed hydrogen—the remainder of the hydrogen continued to react, and this spherical front of fire expanded more and more within the star. Finally the dynamic equilibrium was destroyed, and the star threw off its outer envelopes of gas with great violence.

Much as in an aging sun, where the sphere expanded because of successive syntheses of hydrogen into helium, helium into carbon, and so on, the interplanetary sphere of the war zone arose, surface on surface, according to the stages reached in the arms race.

At the center—i.e., on Quinta—a minimum of military communication continued to exist on each side. Away from the center, autonomous weapon systems operated, keeping themselves in mutual check. Their independence was limited, of course, by the programmers at headquarters, who kept them from setting off a chain reaction that would bring the fire of battle to the planet itself.

The programmers, however, found themselves increasingly on the horns of a dilemma. The more sophisticated were the weapons hurled into space by the adversaries, the greater the offensive-defensive sovereignty that had to be given to those weapons. Both digital and analog simulations of the war-sphere, projected at least a hundred years into the future, did not yield any single-valued solution. Nevertheless, on the basis of variants run through the computer, the authors of the model posited the existence of a restriction threshold in the programming of autonomous fighting systems: above that threshold, weapons that were only
independent
could become
insubordinate.

This image, departing from the model of a star, approached the model of natural evolution. Autonomous weapons were like the lower organisms: provided with aggressiveness, which was held in rein by the instinct for self-preservation. Insubordinate weapons would be the primates, who had acquired the ability to invent and from merely cunning or quick-witted creatures became the initiators of wholly new kinds of activity. Such weapons freed themselves from the indirect supervision of the builders.

In saying that the builders ended up on the horns of a dilemma, the authors believed that defeat threatened both those who curbed their weapons' growth in intelligence and those who spurred on that growth. Either way, as the war-sphere spread it lost dynamic stability, and though its fate was not amenable to a single-valued prediction, that fate went beyond the interests of the sides that had begun the struggle. But such a state of affairs was still far off.

The flashes observed by the
Eurydice
could have been skirmishes between highly advanced combat units on the periphery of the Zeta system. Their clashes at a distance of billions of miles from Quinta meant that authentic battles could take place on fronts that were astronomically removed from the planet. There the war could sometimes turn "hot." It might also, in the future, make unpredictable jumps into the heart of the war-sphere. No one versed in post-Clausewitzian strategy could really expect a victorious conclusion to the conflict. Yet the professional strategists found themselves in the forced position of a player who cannot leave the table because he has thrown all his capital into the game. It was precisely in this that the enemies mirrored each other. The once-important question of
who
began the arms race lost all significance. Peaceful or aggressive intentions of the warring sides could no longer be distinguished in the conflict. The game boded ill for all the participants, and the only victory possible would be Pyrrhic.

Within this framework, what were the prospects for contact? The authors did not know. So far, on the cosmic chessboard moved black and white pieces of comparable power, not entering into battle but only giving check. On the other hand, completely new and unknown pieces appeared—and were tested by battle. Tested by small encounters, like ancient skirmishes. Or possibly it was not the planet—not its nations, governments, or headquarters—that had attacked the
Hermes,
but mechanisms to which the
Hermes
was a "foreign body," a thing large, technological, and unknown. The
Hermes
would have been, then, not a wayfarer fallen upon by bandits but an infection confronted by defending lymphocytes within an organism.

The limitations on the arms race were few. Old combat orbiters could be pulled down to the planet and "recycled." As for weapons of the viroid type—microminiaturized parasites, self-cohering molecules drawing energy from the Sun, required tremendous engineering inventiveness but little raw material.

Polassar, Rotmont, and El Salam concluded by summarizing their conception of Quinta. As a mighty artifact of a continuing struggle for supremacy, this artificial organism—a war-sphere with a radius of seven billion miles—could be viewed as a system eaten by cancer. Its cosmic organs were, to a greater or lesser extent, malignant metastases of conflict. But here the analogy to a living creature broke down, because that whole, even in its beginning, had never been "healthy": it was infected at birth with the antagonism of technologies taking aim at one another. It had no "normal tissues"; its dynamic equilibrium was made possible and maintained by its mutually counteracting "tumors." In order to preserve so specific a balance, the tumors had to be able to recognize each other. Wherever new, radically different growths might appear, among the inner planets or the outer, they would be instantly disarmed, checked, or "converted" (the "janissary" enlistment of them) by technological "antibodies," whose purpose was not to cure—there being no patient or doctor—but to keep the dynamic
status quo ante fuit,
the stalemate.