Free End Zone by Don DeLillo Page B

firestorm is carbon monoxide.”
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    “I’ve had a checkered career at best.”
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    “I think what’ll happen in the not-too-distant future is that we’ll have humane wars. Each side agrees to use clean bombs. And each side agrees to limit the amount of megatons he uses. In other words we’ll get together with them beforehand and there’ll be an agreement that if the issue can’t be settled, whatever the issue might be, then let’s make certain we keep our war as relatively humane as possible. So we agree to use clean stuff. And we actually specify the number of megatons; let’s just say hypothetically one thousand megs for each side. So then what we’ve got is a two-thousand-megaton war. We might go further and say we’ll leave your cities alone if you leave ours alone. We make it strictly counterforce. So right off the bat you avoid the fallout hazard and millions of bonus kills, or deaths from fallout. And at the same time you eliminate city-trading and punishing strikes against the general population. Of course the humanistic mind crumbles at the whole idea. It’s the most hideous thing in the world to these people that such ideas even have to be mentioned. But the thing won’t go away. Thething is here and you have to face it. The prospect of a humane war may be hideous and all the other names you can think of, but it’s still a prospect. And as an alternative to all the other things that could happen in the event of war, it’s relatively acceptable. My fellow coliberals are always the first to jump all over me when I talk about something like humane warfare. But the thing has to be considered. People close their minds. They think nuclear war has to be insensate, both sides pushing all the buttons and the whole thing is over in two hours. In reality it’s likely to be very deliberate, very cautious, a kind of thing that’s almost fought in slow motion. And the limited humane variant is the most acceptable. Negotiations could easily take that turn. A war may have to be fought; it may be unavoidable in terms of national pride or to avoid blackmail or for a number of other reasons. And negotiations, whatever remains of negotiations, whatever talking is still going on, this could easily lead both countries to the humane war idea as the least damaging kind of thing in the face of all the variants. So they hit our military and industrial targets with any number of bombs and missiles totaling one thousand megatons and we do the same to them. There’d be all sorts of controls. You’d practically have a referee and a timekeeper. Then it would be over and you’d make your damage assessment. The sensing devices go to work. The magnetic memory drums are tapped. The computers figure out damage and number of casualties. Recovery time is estimated. We wouldn’t be the same strong industrial society after one thousand megs but our cities would still be standing and the mortality rate would be in the fairly low percentiles, about eight to twelve percent. With no fallout in the atmosphere, or a relatively minimumamount, we’d have no problems with environmental stress, with things like temperature changes, erosion, droughts, insect devastation, and we’d avoid the radiation diseases by and large, the infections, the genetic damage. So we’d get going again relatively soon. It wouldn’t be nearly as bad as most people might expect. On the other hand this entire concept is full of flaws.”
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    “Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war.”
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    “The nuclear nations have a stockpile of fissionable material I would estimate in the neighborhood of sixty thousand megatons in terms of explosive power. That’s a personal estimate, based on whatever tech-data I’ve been able to accumulate in the journals and bulletins, accurate within a factor of maybe three or four. But just for the heck of it, figure that out in terms of pounds of TNT. That’s pounds now, not tons. I bet you can’t do it without paper and