GWOT Addition In Infinities
Sep. 11th, 2018 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGWOT - Addition In Infinities
It has been six months since the nuclear destruction of San Francisco and her suburbs.
The propaganda channels are full of it. The horror, the pathos, the suffering. There is little mention of the nuclear ignited fires. This propaganda is not for local consumption, but spoon fed for a national audience.
At noon we hold a brief memorial over the PA. Six minutes of silence. On each floor, the fire warden (yet another volunteer position) walks slowly tolling a hand-held bell. Ding. Ding. Ding.
Then we get back to work. The coding done at this site is part of the War.
In the early afternoon, Wyatt and I meet in the Room. We have blocked out an hour to run some numbers.
It is very difficult. We don't have good maps for China any more. Google Maps is down, you see, and so are all the rest. It didn't take long for maps to go from ubiquitous to state secret.
But we have Wikipedia and offline copies of Google Earth. We have propaganda reporting, bragging of our strikes on China. We have bits and pieces of foreign media, mostly BBC North America from transmitters in Canada. Obviously none of this is Internet accessible. We built the Wall all right ... a firewall.
On the wall we have an old National Geographic map of China under glass. We mark it up - on the glass of course - with strikes and estimated casualty counts. There used to be a tool to do this called Nukemap. It is long gone, of course.
Wyatt rests his leg on a footstool as he searches Wiki. I am standing, making marks. We trade back and forth the old solar powered digital calculator.
Officially half a million people were killed on Firecracker Day. Half a million Americans, that is. We lightly gloss over the other losses - burns and blast, radiation, cancer, starvation, "disruption of civil order," sidewalking, internment and concentration. Call it another half million. At least. In the Bay Area.
Information from other parts of America is harder to get. But we can't count those losses if we did it to ourselves.
The number I have roughed up with Wyatt is certainly wrong. Perhaps in the correct order of magnitude.
Directly killed in China by American nuclear arms: fifty million.
Killed by famine, economic dislocation, direct effects of American weapons systems - including nerve gas and tactical nukes, "disruption of civil order" and lack of medical care: likely another fifty million. Probably more.
In my left hand, I am holding one million lives.
In my right hand, I am holding one hundred million lives.
You tell me. Which is heavier?
Yet I am assured that, to quote our infamous Legal One, "gook lives are worthless."
I wonder if some Chinese battle management specialist, half crazed with grief and exhaustion and fear, is muttering to himself, "round eye lives are worthless", working up the same numbers in his bunker.
If so he is only as half-wrong as Legal One.
All lives are equally worthless.
What we don't know - and it is treason to guess out loud - is simply Why? Why did the Chinese nuke San Francisco?
I have through BBC the fact that China initially denied responsibility for the strikes. A week later it was moot - in her rage and grief, China launched on any West Coast city her surviving missiles could reach, with no effect. So officially it doesn't even matter any more.
What's worth a hundred million lives?
Well, could be a lot of things, if you think they're worthless to begin with.
What's worth a million lives?
Hmm. Tougher question.
But I have to remember an essential fact of American foreign policy. All decisions are made well east of the Mississippi and in most cases within spitting distance of the Atlantic.
Everyone believes I murdered a man for asking these questions. Our own Oliver Stone, disappeared from behind his desk one night. That mercy still might come back to haunt us.
But Oliver was utterly convinced that _we_ had done it. That America had started the War. That we had nuked _ourselves_. He had accumulated a mass of evidence, papers that now rested in a file folder box labeled "2017 Drug Test Results" in this room.
If Homeland ever searched this room, it wouldn't matter - there was enough in here to sidewalk me a thousand times over. But I'd kept those papers, treasonous as they were.
I now took them out of the box and handed them to Wyatt.
He read through them quietly. I tortured myself a little more with our offline copy of Wikipedia. Reading about a world that was as dead as Charlemagne.
Wyatt looked up.
"He was right, wasn't he?"
"Pretty sure, yeah."
"Shit."
Wyatt handed the papers back, and I filed them away. It wasn't a smoking gun, just a pile of guesses and some analysis.
"Do we want proof?" Wyatt asked.
What would we do with proof?
In a nation of secrets, that had to be the greatest secret of all.
There were of course, all sorts of theories. All were treasonous. The prevailing one was that China had intended an alpha strike but for whatever reason, most of her subs had either not launched or been sunk prior to or on Firecracker Day. Wiki confirmed that this was bullshit - we _owned_ the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and the odds of China getting in a Pearl Harbor type strike were nearly zero.
Oliver's theory was that the launch had been from an American nuclear ballistic missile submarine. He had been a nuclear submariner. I merely had a handful of books about such things.
So why only two strikes on one city? Obviously didn't want to damage anything ... important.
San Francisco is not a military city. It is not essential to command and control. It is a destination not a route. If the goal was to fuck up the Bay Area and hinder logistics, nuke the Oakland docks.
Proof would do what?
Enrage people, certainly. Undo the murder of one hundred million people, no. Correction, one hundred one million.
It wouldn't stop the War. But it would cause what Homeland called "lack of unity" when it was essential, God help us, that we win the War.
Then we could clean house. And House.
"No," I decided. "We don't want proof."
Staying alive would have to do.
A trick that millions of people hadn't managed.
It has been six months since the nuclear destruction of San Francisco and her suburbs.
The propaganda channels are full of it. The horror, the pathos, the suffering. There is little mention of the nuclear ignited fires. This propaganda is not for local consumption, but spoon fed for a national audience.
At noon we hold a brief memorial over the PA. Six minutes of silence. On each floor, the fire warden (yet another volunteer position) walks slowly tolling a hand-held bell. Ding. Ding. Ding.
Then we get back to work. The coding done at this site is part of the War.
In the early afternoon, Wyatt and I meet in the Room. We have blocked out an hour to run some numbers.
It is very difficult. We don't have good maps for China any more. Google Maps is down, you see, and so are all the rest. It didn't take long for maps to go from ubiquitous to state secret.
But we have Wikipedia and offline copies of Google Earth. We have propaganda reporting, bragging of our strikes on China. We have bits and pieces of foreign media, mostly BBC North America from transmitters in Canada. Obviously none of this is Internet accessible. We built the Wall all right ... a firewall.
On the wall we have an old National Geographic map of China under glass. We mark it up - on the glass of course - with strikes and estimated casualty counts. There used to be a tool to do this called Nukemap. It is long gone, of course.
Wyatt rests his leg on a footstool as he searches Wiki. I am standing, making marks. We trade back and forth the old solar powered digital calculator.
Officially half a million people were killed on Firecracker Day. Half a million Americans, that is. We lightly gloss over the other losses - burns and blast, radiation, cancer, starvation, "disruption of civil order," sidewalking, internment and concentration. Call it another half million. At least. In the Bay Area.
Information from other parts of America is harder to get. But we can't count those losses if we did it to ourselves.
The number I have roughed up with Wyatt is certainly wrong. Perhaps in the correct order of magnitude.
Directly killed in China by American nuclear arms: fifty million.
Killed by famine, economic dislocation, direct effects of American weapons systems - including nerve gas and tactical nukes, "disruption of civil order" and lack of medical care: likely another fifty million. Probably more.
In my left hand, I am holding one million lives.
In my right hand, I am holding one hundred million lives.
You tell me. Which is heavier?
Yet I am assured that, to quote our infamous Legal One, "gook lives are worthless."
I wonder if some Chinese battle management specialist, half crazed with grief and exhaustion and fear, is muttering to himself, "round eye lives are worthless", working up the same numbers in his bunker.
If so he is only as half-wrong as Legal One.
All lives are equally worthless.
What we don't know - and it is treason to guess out loud - is simply Why? Why did the Chinese nuke San Francisco?
I have through BBC the fact that China initially denied responsibility for the strikes. A week later it was moot - in her rage and grief, China launched on any West Coast city her surviving missiles could reach, with no effect. So officially it doesn't even matter any more.
What's worth a hundred million lives?
Well, could be a lot of things, if you think they're worthless to begin with.
What's worth a million lives?
Hmm. Tougher question.
But I have to remember an essential fact of American foreign policy. All decisions are made well east of the Mississippi and in most cases within spitting distance of the Atlantic.
Everyone believes I murdered a man for asking these questions. Our own Oliver Stone, disappeared from behind his desk one night. That mercy still might come back to haunt us.
But Oliver was utterly convinced that _we_ had done it. That America had started the War. That we had nuked _ourselves_. He had accumulated a mass of evidence, papers that now rested in a file folder box labeled "2017 Drug Test Results" in this room.
If Homeland ever searched this room, it wouldn't matter - there was enough in here to sidewalk me a thousand times over. But I'd kept those papers, treasonous as they were.
I now took them out of the box and handed them to Wyatt.
He read through them quietly. I tortured myself a little more with our offline copy of Wikipedia. Reading about a world that was as dead as Charlemagne.
Wyatt looked up.
"He was right, wasn't he?"
"Pretty sure, yeah."
"Shit."
Wyatt handed the papers back, and I filed them away. It wasn't a smoking gun, just a pile of guesses and some analysis.
"Do we want proof?" Wyatt asked.
What would we do with proof?
In a nation of secrets, that had to be the greatest secret of all.
There were of course, all sorts of theories. All were treasonous. The prevailing one was that China had intended an alpha strike but for whatever reason, most of her subs had either not launched or been sunk prior to or on Firecracker Day. Wiki confirmed that this was bullshit - we _owned_ the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and the odds of China getting in a Pearl Harbor type strike were nearly zero.
Oliver's theory was that the launch had been from an American nuclear ballistic missile submarine. He had been a nuclear submariner. I merely had a handful of books about such things.
So why only two strikes on one city? Obviously didn't want to damage anything ... important.
San Francisco is not a military city. It is not essential to command and control. It is a destination not a route. If the goal was to fuck up the Bay Area and hinder logistics, nuke the Oakland docks.
Proof would do what?
Enrage people, certainly. Undo the murder of one hundred million people, no. Correction, one hundred one million.
It wouldn't stop the War. But it would cause what Homeland called "lack of unity" when it was essential, God help us, that we win the War.
Then we could clean house. And House.
"No," I decided. "We don't want proof."
Staying alive would have to do.
A trick that millions of people hadn't managed.
