The Next Logical Step - Ben Bova

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The next logical step by Ben Bova. Ordinarily, the military
at least wants to have the others know the final
details of their war plans. But logically there would be times.
I don't really see where this problem has anything to
do with me, the CIA man said, and frankly, there

(00:22):
are a lot of more important things I could be doing. Ford,
the physicist glanced at General le Roy. The general had
that quizzical expression on his face, the look that meant
he was about to do something decisive. Would you like
to see the problem firsthand, the general asked innocently. The
CIA man took a quick look at his wristwatch. Okay,

(00:45):
if it doesn't take too long. It's late enough already.
It won't take very long, will it, Ford, the general said,
getting out of his chair. Not very long. Ford agreed,
only a lifetime. The CIA man grunted as they went
to the doorway and left the General's office. Going down
the dark, deserted hallway, their footsteps echoed hollowly. I can't

(01:08):
overemphasize the seriousness of the problem, General Leroy said to
the CIA man. Eight ranking members of the general's staff
have either resigned their commissions or gone straight to the
violent ward after just one session with the computer. The
CIA man scowled, is this area secure? General le Roy's
face turned red. This entire building is as secure as

(01:30):
any edifice in the free world, mister, and it's empty.
We're the only living people inside here at this hour.
I'm not taking any chances. Just want to be sure.
Perhaps if I explained the computer a little more, Ford said,
changing the subject, you'll know what to expect. Good idea,
said the man from CIA. We told you that this

(01:52):
is the most modern, most complex and delicate computer in
the world. Nothing like it has ever been attempted before anywhere.
I know that they don't have anything like it, The
CIA man agreed. And you also know, I suppose that
it was built to simulate actual war situations. We fight
wars in this computer, wars with missiles and bombs and gas,

(02:15):
real wars complete down to the tiniest detail. The computer
tells us what will actually happen to every missile, every city,
every man who dies, how many planes are lost, how
many trucks will fail to start on a cold morning,
whether a battle is won or lost. General Leroy interrupted.
The computer runs these analyzes for both sides, so we

(02:36):
can see what's happening to them too, The CIA man
gestured impatiently. Wargame simulations aren't new, You've been doing them
for years. Yes, but this machine is different, Ford pointed out.
It not only gives a much more detailed wargame, it's
the next logical step in the development of machine simulated wargames.

(02:56):
He hesitated dramatically. Well, we've added a variation of the
electro incephalograph. The CIA man stopped walking. The electro What
electro incephalograph? You know, a recording device that reads the
electrical patterns of your brain, like the electro cardiograph. Oh,

(03:17):
but you see, we've given the EEG a reverse twist.
Instead of using a machine that makes a recording of
the brain's electrical wave output, we've developed a device that
will take the computer's readout tapes and turn them into
electrical patterns that are put into your brain. I don't
get it. General Leroy took over. You sit at the
machine's control console. A helmet is placed over your head.

(03:40):
You set the machine in operation. You see the results. Yes,
four went on. Instead of reading rows of figures from
the computer's print out, you actually see the war being fought.
Complete visual and auditory hallucinations. You can watch the progress
of the battles, and as you change strategy and tactics,
you can see the results before your eyes. The idea

(04:04):
originally was to make it easier for the general staff
to visualize strategic situations. General le Roy said, but everyone
who's used the machine has either resigned his commission or
gone insane. Ford added. The CIA man cocked an eye
at Leroy. You've used the computer, correct, and you have
neither resigned nor cracked up. General Leroy nodded. I called

(04:28):
you in. Before the CIA man could comment, Ford said,
the computer's right inside this doorway. Let's get this over
with while the building is still empty. They stepped in.
The physicist and the General showed the CIA man through
the room filled rows of massive consoles. It's all transistorized

(04:49):
and subminiaturized. Of course, Ford explained, that's the only way
we could build so much detail into the machine and
still have it small enough to fit inside a single building.
A single building. Oh yes, this is only the control section.
Most of this building is taken up by the circuits,
the memory banks, and the rest of it. Hmm. They

(05:09):
showed him finally to a small desk studded with control
buttons and dials. The single spotlight above the desk lit
it brilliantly, in harsh contrast to the semi darkness of
the rest of the room. Since you've never run the
computer before, Ford said, General Leroy will do the controlling.
You just sit and watch what happens. The General sat
in one of the well padded chairs and donned a

(05:31):
grotesque headgear that was connected to the desk by a
half dozen wires. The CIA man took his chair slowly.
When they put one of the bulky helmets on him.
He looked up at them, squinting a little in the
bright light. This this isn't going too well. Do me
any damage, is it? My goodness? No, Ford said, you

(05:52):
mean mentally, no, of course not. You're not on the
general staff, so it shouldn't. It won't affect you the
way it did the others. Their reaction had nothing to
do with the computer, per se. Several civilians have used
the computer with no ill effects. General Leroy said, Ford
has used it many times. The CIA man nodded, and

(06:14):
they closed the transparent visor over his face. He sat
there and watched General le Roy press a series of buttons,
then turn a dial. Can you hear me? The General's
voice came muffled through the helmet, Yes, he said, all right,
here we go. You're familiar with situation one to one.
That's what we're going to be seeing. Situation one two

(06:36):
one was a standard war game. The CIA man was
well acquainted with it. He watched the General flip a switch,
then sit back and fold his arms over his chest.
A row of lights on the desk console began blinking
on and off, one, two, three, down to the end
of the row, then back to the beginning again, on
and off, on and off, And then somehow he could

(06:59):
see he was poised incredibly somewhere in space, and he
could see it all in a funny, blurry, double sighted,
dreamlike way. He seemed to be seeing several pictures and
hearing many voices all at once. It was all mixed up,
and yet it made a weird kind of sense. For
a panicked instant, he wanted to rip the helmet off

(07:20):
his head. It's only an illusion, he told himself, forcing
calm on his unwilling nerves. Only an illusion, but it
seemed strangely real. He was watching the Gulf of Mexico.
He could see Florida off to his right, and the
arching coast of the southeastern United States. He could even

(07:40):
make out the Rio Grande River. Situation one to one started,
he remembered with the discovery of missile bearing enemy submarines
in the gulf. Even as he watched the whole area
as though perched on a satellite, He could see underwater
and close up the menacing shadowy figure of a submarine
gliding through the crystal blue sea. He saw two a

(08:03):
patrol plane as it spotted the submarine and sent in
urgent radio warning. The underwater picture dissolved in a bewildering
burst of bubbles. A missile had been launched. Within seconds,
another burst, this time a nuclear depth charge, utterly destroyed
the submarine. It was confusing. He was every place at once.

(08:24):
The details were overpowering, but the total picture was agonizingly clear.
Six submarines fired missiles from the Gulf of Mexico. Four
were immediately sunk, but too late. New Orleans, Saint Louis,
and three Air force bases were obliterated by hydrogen fusion warheads.
The CIA man was familiar with the opening stages of

(08:45):
the war. The first missile fired at the United States
was the signal for whole fleets of missiles and bombers
to launched themselves at the enemy. It was confusing to
see the world at once. At times he could not
tell if the fireball and mushroom cloud was over shaped
Cargo or Shanghai, New York or Nova Sibirsk, Baltimore or Budapest.

(09:06):
It did not make much difference, really. They all got
it in the first few hours of the war, as
did London and Moscow, Washington and Peaking, Detroit and Delhi,
and many many more. The defensive systems on all sides
seemed to operate well, except that there were never enough
anti missiles. Defensive systems were expensive compared to attack rockets.

(09:27):
It was cheaper to build a deterrent than to defend
against it. The missiles flashed up from submarines and railway cars,
from underground silos and stratospheric jets. Secret ons fired off
automatically when a certain air base command posts ceased to
beaming out a restraining radio signal. The defensive systems were
simply overloaded, and when the bombs ran out, the missiles

(09:49):
carried dust and germs and gas on and on for
six days and six firelit nights, launch boost, coast reenter death,
and now it was over. The cia man thought the
missiles were all gone, the airplanes were exhausted, the nations

(10:10):
that had built the weapons no longer existed. By all
the rules he knew of, the war should have been ended.
Yet the fighting did not end. The machine knew better.
There were still many ways to kill an enemy, time
tested ways. There were armies fighting in four continents, armies
that had marched overland, or splashed ashore from the sea,

(10:31):
or dropped out of the skies. Incredibly, the war went on.
When the tanks ran out of gas and the flame
throwers became useless, and even the prosaic artillery pieces had
no more rounds to fire, there were still simple guns
and even simpler bayonets and swords. The proud armies, the
descendants of the Alexanders and Caesars and Temungens and Wellington's

(10:54):
and Grants and Rommels, relived their evolution in reverse on Slowly, inevitably,
the armies split apart into smaller and smaller units, until
the tortured countryside that so recently had felt the impact
of nuclear war once again knew the tread of bands
of armed marauders. The tiny savage groups, stranded in alien lands,

(11:18):
far from the homes and families that they knew to
be destroyed, carried on a mockery of war, living off
the land, fought their own countrymen. If the occasion suited
and revived the ancient terror of hand wielded personal one
head at a time, killing the cia man watched the
world disintegrate. Death was an individual business, now none the

(11:39):
better for no longer being mass produced. In agonized fascination,
he saw the myriad ways in which a man might die.
Murder was only one of them. Radiation, disease, toxic gases
that lingered and drifted on the once innocent winds, and finally,
the most efficient destroyer of them all, starva. Three billion people,

(12:04):
give or take a meaningless hundred million lived on the
planet Earth when the war began. Now, with the tenuous
thread of civilization burned away, most of those who were
not killed by the fighting itself, succumbed inexorably to starvation.
Not everyone died, of course, life went on. Some were lucky.
A long darkness settled on the world. Life went on

(12:26):
for a few, a pitiful few, a bitter, hateful, suspicious,
savage few. Cities became pestiles, books became fuel. Knowledge died.
Civilization was completely gone from the planet Earth. The helmet
was lifted slowly off his head. The CIA man found

(12:48):
that he was too weak to raise his arms and help.
He was shivering and damp with perspiration. Now you see,
Ford said, quietly, why the military men cracked up when
they use the computer? General Leroy even was pale. How
can a man with any conscience at all direct a
military operation when he knows that will be the consequence.

(13:13):
The CIA man struck up a cigarette and pulled hard
on it. He exhaled, sharply, are all the war games
like that? Every plan summer worse? Ford said, we picked
an average one for you. Even some of the brushfire
games get out of hand and end up like that.
So what do you intend to do? Why did you

(13:35):
call me in? What can I do? You're with the CIA,
the general said, don't you handle espionage? Yes? But what's
that got to do with it? The general looked at him.
It seems to me that the next logical step is
to make damn certain that they get the plans to
this computer and fast end of the next logical step

(14:00):
by Ben Bova