Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER 12
Future War

Pessimists, gloomy about the future, point out that the only continuous progress in human history seems to be in methods of warfare. Optimists point out that humans are still here, most of us living far better than our ancestors ever dreamed. Pessimists reply, ah, but wait until the next war.

Einstein, asked about the weapons of the Third World War, said that he did not know what they would be; but that the Fourth would be fought with sticks and stones.

Einstein died in 1955. Were he alive today, I think he would be both gratified and horrified. Gratified, because the all-consuming fear of the 1950s was of large-scale nuclear war. Not only have we escaped that, but after the end of the Second World War we have avoided the use of nuclear weapons in combat. But Einstein would surely be dismayed at the continuing conflicts, all around the world, and the increased vulnerability of cities and civilians to terrorist acts.

Dismayed, too, at the potential of today's science for the creation of new weapons. Weapons drive, and are driven by, technological advances. If the scale of war remains small, weapons are likely to become more tricky, more deadly—and more personal.

Anyone who reads my stories may suspect that war and military affairs are not among my main interests. That is true. However, military science fiction is a big component of the field, and many people read little else. Regard this chapter, then, not as a compendium of military knowledge, or a source book on the writing of military science fiction. Think of it as a discussion of a few story ideas with military potential that seem to have been overlooked.

 

12.1 The Invisible Man. The best weapon of all is one which the adversary never realizes has been used.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could put on your tarnhelm and, like the old Norse heroes, become invisible to your enemies? You could sneak through lines of defense, sit in on private strategy meetings, steal battle plans, and even kill selected people. I have no doubt that our leaders in the Pentagon and CIA Headquarters, gnashing their teeth over their inability to get to Saddam Hussein, would have given a fair number of those teeth for a good cloak of invisibility.

Can it be done?

H.G. Wells took a shot at the problem in his novel The Invisible Man (Wells, 1897). His solution, a drug to make every part of the human body of the same refractive index as air, possesses a number of difficulties that I feel sure Wells knew about. Let us put aside the improbability of the drug itself, and examine other effects.

First, if no part of your body absorbs light, that includes the eyes. Light will simply pass through them. But if your eyes do not absorb light, you will be blind. Seeing involves the absorption of photons by your retinas.

Then there is the food that you eat. What happens to it while it is being digested? It would be visible in your alimentary canal, slowly fading away like the Cheshire Cat as it went from esophagus to stomach and to intestines.

I think Wells could have done better with a little thought; and we can do a lot better, because we have technology unknown in his day.

Consider how Nature tackles the problem of invisibility. The answer is not drugs, but deception. Animals do their best to be invisible to their prey or their predators. But they don't do it by fiddling around with their own internal optical properties. They are invisible if they look exactly like their background. The chameleon has the right idea, but it's hardware-limited. It can only make modest color and pattern adjustments. Humans disguise their presence with camouflage, but that, too, is a static and simple-minded solution.

What we need is a whole-body suit. The rear part of the suit is covered with tiny imaging sensors, admitting light through apertures no bigger than pinholes. Their outputs feed charge-coupled devices, which pass an electronic version of the scene behind you, in full detail, to the suit's central processing unit (cpu). The front of the suit contains millions of tiny crystal displays. The cpu sends to each of these displays an appropriate signal, assigning a particular color and intensity. Seen from in front, the suit now mimics its own background (the scene behind it) perfectly.

So far this is straightforward, comfortably within today's technology. The difficulty comes because the suit has to reproduce, when viewed from any angle, the background as seen from that angle. Someone behind you, for example, has to see an exact match to the scene in front of you. To get the right effect from all angles, you have to use holographic methods and generate multi-angle reflectances. The computing power to do all this is considerable—far more than anything in today's personal computers. However, we have seen where that technology is going. Twenty or thirty more years, and the computing capacity we need will probably fit into your wristwatch.

The problem of vision, never addressed by Wells, is also easy enough. The signal received from in front of the suit is pipelined to goggles contained within the suit's helmet. We would anticipate that a suit like this would work only with uniform, low-level illumination and relatively uniform backgrounds.

Could we build one, today? I don't know, but if we could and we tried to sell it, I bet that its use would be banned in no time.

12.2 Death rays. The death ray was introduced to science fiction in its early days. H.G. Wells was responsible for this one, too. The beam of intense light, flashing forth to set fire to everything in its path, is something we all remember from The War of the Worlds (Wells, 1898). Wells called it a heat ray, and he described it in the language of weapons: "this invisible, inevitable sword of heat."

For the next half century, every respectable scientist knew that such a ray was impossible. Science fiction writers of the 1930s, however, continued to use it freely. And hindsight proves that they were right to so do. The three scientific papers that permit the death ray—we now call such a thing a laser—to exist had been published in 1916 and 1917, ironically at the height of the "war to end wars." The papers were by Einstein, and they established balances among the rates at which electrons orbiting an atom can move to higher or lower energy levels.

This requires a little explanation. In Chapter 5, we noted that electrons around an atomic nucleus sit in "shells," and that an element's freedom to react chemically depends on whether it has a filled or a partially empty outer electron shell.

In addition to the locations where electrons are normally situated, there are other possible sites where an electron can reside temporarily. An electron can be boosted to occupy such a site, provided that it is supplied with energy in the form of radiation. If an electron is in such a higher-energy position, it is said to be in an excited state. An electron with no extra energy is said to be in its ground state.

Left to itself, an electron in an excited state will drop back to its ground state, emitting radiation as it does so. This is known as spontaneous emission. The return to the ground state normally happens quickly, but that is not always the case. Sometimes an electron can be at an excited energy level where other physical parameters, such as orbital angular momentum or spin, are incompatible with a straightforward return to the ground state. Such a transition is known as a forbidden transition, and the effect is to make the electron remain longer in the excited state.

Even a forbidden transition normally takes place in a fraction of a second. The phenomenon that most of us have seen, called phosphorescence, in which a material continues to glow after it has been removed from sunlight, is a more complicated process. In phosphorescence, the electron usually becomes "trapped" in a dislocation in a crystal lattice structure. Only after it leaves that trap (which may take minutes or even hours) can it finally undergo spontaneous emission to the ground state.

An electron can be induced to make a forbidden transition from a higher energy state to a ground state, by providing to it radiation of a suitable wavelength. This is known as induced or stimulated emission, because the electron as it drops back to the ground state gives out radiation of an energy appropriate to that state change.

We now have all the ingredients for our basic death ray. We pump energy into a material, raising large numbers of electrons to excited states. They will fall back by spontaneous emission to a lower energy. However, if we have picked the right material many of them do not go at once to the ground state. Instead, they drop to another excited state from which the transition to the ground state is forbidden. There they stay, increasing in numbers, until at last we supply radiation of the right wavelength to induce a fall to the ground state. They do this in large numbers, producing a huge pulse of released energy in the form of light. The emitted light is monochromatic (of a single, precise wavelength) and coherent (all of the same phase).

This is today's laser—light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. The first one was built in 1960, and they are used now for everything from data transmission to eye surgery.

This may seem somewhat disappointing for something billed as a "death ray." However, lasers are certain candidates for future wars. The first lasers were of low power, but that has changed. Great power (kilowatts and more) can be delivered into very small areas. A laser beam will burn almost instantly through any known material, and by 1968 it had already been used to initiate thermonuclear reactions. Perhaps even more relevant for the purposes of war, a laser beam can be made very narrow, with little spread over large distances. Since the power is delivered to the target at the speed of light, high-energy lasers are good in either offense or defense and have been proposed as the most effective form of protective shield against missile attack. They also, because they remain as a tight beam over great distances, have been suggested as the best way of launching spacecraft, or of sending power to them anywhere in the solar system.

The first lasers employed electrons in the outer atomic shells of the atom, and the radiation they produced was normally in the visible or near-infrared wavelength regions of the spectrum. However, there is no reason in principle why an electron in the inner electron shells should not go through the same processes of energy absorption, spontaneous emission to a forbidden state, and final stimulated emission. Because the inner electron shells are more tightly bound, the energy released on the final return to ground state is higher, and the wavelength of the radiation produced will be shorter. The result is an X-ray laser: invisible in its output, and considerably more deadly.

 

12.3 The ultimate personal weapon. War isn't what it was. In ancient times, one rational and economical way of deciding the outcome of a battle was through the use of champions.

You select the best fighter in your army. I do the same in mine. We let those two fight it out, while the rest of us stand around, watch, and cheer on our guy. The individual serves as a surrogate for the whole army. If he wins, we all win; if he loses, we admit defeat.

I don't think this was ever a common method—suppose I have ten times as many soldiers as you, but you have one huge chap twice the size of any of my people? Do you think I am going to risk losing the whole war with a one-on-one fight? Even if it worked against Goliath, I don't want anything to do with it.

Individual combat, by chosen champions, will certainly not work today. For one thing, our weapons make personal strength in combat rather irrelevant. But the combat of champions makes a point that is as valid now as it ever was: in war, as in all other human activities, individuals make a difference. Some wars arise because of the ambitions of a single human.

Such a person is usually well-protected, and capture is difficult. Killing is easier. A 20-megaton hydrogen bomb in downtown Baghdad would almost certainly have taken care of Saddam Hussein. But how many hundreds of thousands of innocents would have been killed along with him?

The sledgehammer-on-the-ant solution is no solution at all. Too many would die. But suppose we could, neatly and cleanly, dispose of the major troublemaker.

It was tried with Adolf Hitler, and failed. A bomb carried into a conference exploded as planned, but he was shielded from the blast by the leg of a table. It was tried by the CIA with Fidel Castro, and produced a variety of failures that read like a catalog of ineptitude. (Poisoned cigars, no less. Shades of Snow White.)

But does it have to fail? Or can we suggest ways to guarantee the death of a single, chosen individual?

Let us go back to basic biology. In what way is El Supremo, busy causing so much trouble, different from every other person on Earth?

Forget photographs, forget fingerprints and retinal patterns. More reliable than either, and increasingly recognized as such in court cases, is the uniqueness of an individual's DNA. Unless you happen to have an identical twin, your DNA is yours and yours alone.

It should be a lot easier to obtain a sample of El Supremo's DNA than it would be getting close to the man himself. An old hat, a sock, or a dirty shirt will contain little flakes of skin, a razor may have a tiny drop of dried blood. Remember, a single cell should be enough. The entire genome is in every nucleus.

Inside El Supremo's body, just as in your or my body, there are defense cells known as T cells. Their job is to mop up viruses that have invaded the body. This happens all the time, because viruses are small and light enough to be airborne. We take in viruses with every breath, and our T cells destroy them. If you have few T cells, your body will lose its resistance to outside infection, which is exactly what happens to people with AIDS.

However, the T cells can't go around destroying everything in sight. They have to be able to distinguish foreign matter, which is not supposed to be there, from the cells of your own body. If something looks like you, in the right kind of way, your T cells will not touch it.

What kind of way is that? Well, among other things our DNA contains a sequence that codes for the production of a molecule called a major histocompatibility complex (MHC). The MHC in your body, like your DNA, is unique and specific to you. The MHC, which is safe from T cell attack because it is recognized as part of you, can carry other things to a T cell. Those other things will then also be judged as part of you, and left in peace; or as alien to you, and destroyed.

Now we are ready to go to work. Recall, from Chapter 6, that a virus is little more than a package of DNA wrapped in a coat of protein. We will take a virus that contains the DNA of a lethal disease. There are plenty of those. However, we will give to that virus a protein coat matching the MHC profile of a specific person—say, El Supremo.

We reproduce the virus in large quantities, and release it in the city where El Supremo makes his home. People breathe it in, and it enters their bodies. If it begins to reproduce in any quantity, the T cells recognize its MHC coat as alien to the body (or rather, to that body's genetic code). They destroy the virus. The numbers of the virus remain in check. People breathe some out, which are in turn breathed in by other people.

This goes on—until, weeks or months later, a sample of the virus is breathed in by El Supremo.

At this point, everything changes. The virus is recognized by the T cells as part of El Supremo, because its protein coat looks like the right MHC molecules. The virus can continue the process of cell invasion and reproduction, and the T cells will leave it alone. A few days later, the tragic death of El Supremo is reported—struck down in his prime by a fatal viral infection.

There is no suspicion of foul play. No one else becomes sick, or is in any danger. We employed a weapon that could harm no one in the world but El Supremo.

Can we do all this, today? Not quite. But when the human genome mapping project is completed, a few years from now, we should have the genetic maps and the rapid DNA sequencers to do the job. War will become a more personal tool than it has ever been in the past.

And war will take on a more generalized meaning. The use of the basic idea presented here is described in the novel Oaths and Miracles (Kress, 1996)—with organized crime controlling the biological weapon.

 

12.4 Cyborgs. A cyborg is a rather ill-defined amalgamation of human and mechanical components. Most of us today are cyborgs. I am wearing glasses, and I have one gold tooth and another that has been capped with some unknown (to me) white material. I have friends with artificial hips and knees, a couple of others wear pacemakers. Most teenagers I meet have braces on their teeth.

By science fiction standards this is pretty pathetic stuff. When we say "cyborg," we expect at the very least something like the Six Million Dollar Man, capable of feats of strength and speed beyond the human. If it is to be war—the enhanced warrior is a common feature of science fiction—then we demand the super-soldier, augmented and improved with built-in superhuman fighting equipment, like the speeded-up Gully Foyle in The Stars My Destination (Bester, 1956).

Is such a creation possible?

It may be, but it is not so clear that it is desirable. If you use a cyborg in a story you will find yourself constrained by the laws of both physics and biology. The human body, considered as raw material for war, has some severe drawbacks. If we have a choice of a human-machine combination, rather than pure human or pure machine, which human features would we keep?

TABLE 12.1 (p. 300) offers a comparison of human and machine properties and limitations. We assume that there will be significant change in the next forty or fifty years in what computers and robots can do, but little change in human capabilities.

We see that our big advantages lie in our versatility, built-in repair capability, and self-reproducing feature. Ideally, the cyborg will have the power to repair or reproduce itself. In the near future, the human part can do the repairs to the machine, but what about production of additional copies? A machine that repairs and reproduces itself from available raw materials is certainly a long-term possibility. But what then is the role of the human, as robotic reasoning powers increase?

There is also the problem of mismatch, particularly on variables like physical strength. We can, if we choose, give our cyborg a "bionic arm," able to lift tons. But if the rest of the body is still flesh and bone, use of the bionic arm will produce intolerable stresses. The same problem will arise if we speed up the human reaction time too far. Our natural reaction speed is close to the limit of what our bodies can stand. The pulled muscles of Olympic sprinters attest to this.

We may benefit by giving our cyborg enhanced sensory powers—it might be useful to communicate via bat-squeak signals, or see thermal infrared radiation—but we are unlikely to gain from superior strength unless it is accompanied by the installation of superhuman muscles and bones. One way to do this is via an exoskeleton to take the added stresses. However, if we are going outside the body with our improvements, we may as well go all the way and put ourselves inside a car or tank or spaceship. That has another great advantage. If the machine goes wrong, we can abandon it and get ourselves another one.

My final conclusion: half a century from now, a cyborg will be regarded as an inferior form of robot. As a warrior, it will lose every fight to its totally inorganic foes.

 

12.5 Cleaning up after nuclear war. Since 1945, the horrors of nuclear war have been graphically depicted in books and movies. After a while, recitation of biological and physical effects becomes numbing. It is hard for a rational mind to distinguish the effect of a 10-megaton TNT-equivalent hydrogen bomb from a 50-megaton TNT-equivalent bomb, because they are both so intolerable.

Unfortunately, that does not mean they will never be used. Suppose that, despite all our efforts, a nuclear bomb (large or small) is exploded. One of the things that makes such weapons worse than their chemical equivalents is the longevity of their aftereffects. Some radioactive by-products have very long halflives. After the bombs have exploded, perhaps even after the causes of the war are forgotten, radioactive debris will remain.

Must this be so? Must lands remain blighted for a hundred or a thousand years? Actually, all the evidence so far suggests no such thing. Life appears to be far too resourceful and adaptable to be discouraged by high ambient radioactivity. Plants and animals are thriving on the Pacific atolls where hydrogen bombs exploded forty years ago, and new growth appears in the very shadow of the Chernobyl reactor building. However, let us assume that radioactive waste is at least a nuisance. Can we see ways in which our descendants might cleanse radioactive ruins faster than Nature seems to permit?

There is a way, at least in principle, with a "nuclear laser" that we don't yet know how to build.

To understand how the device might work, consider the nature of radioactivity. The nucleus of a radioactive atom is unstable. It is, in energy terms, not in its ground state. After a shorter or longer time period, the nucleus will emit a particle which allows it to proceed to a state of lower energy. That state may actually be a different element. For example, if a nucleus emits an electron it will change to become the element next higher on the atomic table, since it now, in effect, has one more proton than before. If it emits an alpha particle (the nucleus of the helium atom) it will become the element two lower in the atomic table.

The state of the nucleus after emission of a particle may be a "ground state," which means that the nucleus is now stable; or it may be a transitional state, in which case after a shorter or longer period another radioactive decay will take place, moving the nucleus to a lower energy level and again perhaps causing it to become a different element.

The whole process of radioactive decay can be viewed as a nucleus moving to states of successively lower and lower energy, until it finally rests in the (stable) ground state. Although we know on average how long it takes a nucleus to go from one state to another—this is what the halflife measures, the time for half the nuclei in a large sample to make the change of state—there is no way to predict when any particular nucleus will undergo radioactive decay.

As an example of the sequence of changes, consider plutonium. Element 94, it is not found naturally on Earth. It is presumably created, like other heavy elements, in supernova explosions, but it is radioactive and its most stable form, 94Pu244, has a halflife of less than a hundred million years. Here is the complete decay sequence, with the halflife indicated for each step, for a more short-lived form of plutonium:

94Pu241 (13.2 years) to 95Am241 (458 years) to 93Np237 (2 million years) to 91Pa233 (27 days) to 92U233 (160,000 years) to 90Th229 (7,340 years) to 88Ra225 (14.8 days) to 89Ac225 (10 days) to 87Fr221 (4.8 minutes) to 85At217 (0.032 seconds) to 83Bi213 (47 minutes) to 84Po213 (4.2 microseconds) to 82Pb209 (3.3 hours) to 83Bi209.

Look like gibberish? Sorry. Nuclear physicists and chemists deal with sequences like this every day.

Bismuth, 83Bi209, is stable. The intermediate elements referred to in this radioactive decay chain are lead (symbol Pb, element 82), polonium (Po, element 84), astatine (At, element 85), francium (Fr, element 87), radium (Ra, element 88), actinium (Ac, element 89), thorium (Th, element 90), protoactinium (Pa, element 91), uranium (U, element 92), neptunium (Np, element 93), and americium (Am, element 95).

What can we say about this rather messy chain of decay products? Well, almost all the time for the whole decay process comes with transitions that take 13.2 years, 458 years, 2 million years, 160,000 years, and 7,340 years. If we could somehow get rid of those, our dangerous plutonium 94Pu241 would turn to stable bismuth 83Bi209 in a few months.

Is there any way to draw the fangs of radioactivity, by speeding up the long transitions?

We return to the similarity between the atom and the nucleus, discussed in Chapter 5. There, we noted that the protons and neutrons of the nucleus, like the electrons of the atom, can be thought of as fitting into shells. There are excited states of the nucleus, as there are excited states of the atom, and for protons and neutrons such excited states of the nucleus are termed resonances. The whole phenomenon of radioactivity can be thought of as a nucleus, descending to its ground state by a series of transitions. "Forbidden" nuclear transitions are marked by very long decay times.

What we need—but do not yet have, with the science of today—is a mechanism for stimulated nuclear emission. We need a nuclear laser, in which the application of radiation (very short wavelength) triggers a stimulated nuclear transition and accomplishes in minutes what normally takes thousands or millions of years. This would call for careful control, because all the energy provided by the transitions could be given off in a very short time. The process would have to be timed carefully, drawing off energy at a tolerable rate.

However, there is another good side to this. We have found a potentially useful supply of free energy. In one possible future, maybe our despised dumps of radioactive wastes will be as sought after as today's oil fields.

 

 

TABLE 12.1 

Comparison of human and machine
performance and tolerances. 

 

Property
Human
Machine
Gravity field/accn.
0.25-2 gee*
0-50,000 gee
Hearing range
20-20,000 cps
0-106 cps
Vision detail
Resolves to one minute of arc
Can easily resolve to one second of arc
Vision wavelength
red to violet range
X-rays to long wave radio
Air pressure
0.3-1.5 atms.
0-100,000 atms.
Necessary support
Air, food, water
Power supply
Operating rate
Almost fixed
Variable; includes zero rate (off)
Speed of thought
1,000 cycles/sec
>1012 cycles/sec
Mass
15-500 kg**
Any value
Radiation tolerance
Poor
Easily hardened to radiation
Mean time to failure
< 100 years
Variable; no reason why it should not be >1,000 years
Strength
Poor
To limits of material science
Versatility
Excellent
Very limited
Repairs
Automatic
Needs external maintenance
Production/ Reproduction
Easy***
Needs factory

* A human can survive in free-fall, but physical deterioration,
including bone loss, usually sets in after months in a low gravity field.

** There have been humans who weigh as little as 15 kg (33 pounds)
and as much as 500 kg (1,100 pounds). I'm not sure either would be my choice for a warrior.

*** Perhaps too easy.

 

Back | Next
Contents
Framed