Free Bombs Away by Harry Turtledove

McCutcheon answered, “We can, yeah. But I hope like hell they don’t tell us to do it.”
    “Christ! Who doesn’t?” Like a lot of Americans stationed in the Far East, Bill had visited the ruins of Hiroshima. If you flew in a B-29, a plane that might drop an atomic bomb, weren’t you obligated to take a look at what you did for a living? Bill thought so. Even after five years, even with the Japs rebuilding across the vast field of rubble, what the bomb had done was enough to scare the crap out of anyone in his right mind. It had finally made Japan realize she was facing something she couldn’t fight back against.
    Of course, what the Red Chinese were doing farther north on this peninsula was plenty to scare the crap out of anyone in his right mind, too. Damn few soldiers or leathernecks had made it back to Hungnam. The new troops flowing into Korea were trying to keep the enemy from overrunning the peninsula again, not to conquer it up to the Yalu themselves. They weren’t having all that much luck. The Reds weren’t in artillery range of the air base yet, but it wasn’t impossible that they could be one day before too long.
    And atomic weapons might not knock Red China out of the war. Stalin had them, too. He could hit Europe with them, and with his own hordes of soldiers. With his knockoff of the B-29, he might reach America, too. Who had the will, the stamina, to go on after catching a few like that on the chin? There was the question, all right.
    Instead of a candy bar, Bill pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. He’d just got one going when Brigadier General Harrison strode to the lectern. Harrison carried a pointer in his right hand. He walked as stiffly as if he’d shoved another one up his rear. The way his features looked didn’t argue against that, either.
    He glanced down at his watch. Reflexively, Bill checked his own wrist. It was 1458; things were supposed to start at 1500. People were still coming in. Bill guessed anyone who showed up late for this particular dance would catch several different flavors of hell.
    At 1500 on the dot (well, twelve seconds after, by Bill’s Elgin), Matt Harrison smacked the lectern with the pointer. “Let’s get started,” he said. “You may have guessed why I’ve called you together again. I’m afraid I have to tell you your guesses are likely to be good.”
    “Aw, hell,” Hank McCutcheon whispered. Bill nodded; he couldn’t have put that better himself.
    To leave no possible room for doubt in anyone’s mind, Harrison went on, “I have received orders from General MacArthur, with the approval of President Truman, to initiate the use of atomic bombs against several cities in Manchuria and other areas of northeastern China. We are going to stop Mao from flooding Korea with Red Chinese troops. We will destroy the rail lines they use and the bases and barracks within China where, up until this time, they have been immune from attack. Are there any questions?”
    A pilot stuck his hand in the air. Harrison aimed the pointer at him as if it were a rifle. “Sir, what happens if the Russians start throwing A-bombs around, too?”
    “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right,” Brigadier General Harrison said. “The best answer I can give you is, if they want to play the game, they can play the game. And we’ll see who stands up from the table when it’s over. Does that tell you what you want to know, Miller?”
    “Yes, sir,” the flyer answered. What else could you say when your CO came out with a question like that?
    Bill wondered whether Harrison would give men the chance to decline to fly in a plane loaded with atomic weapons. The general didn’t. He assumed that they’d already done whatever talking with their consciences they needed. “I will call pilots up here one by one to give you your targets and the supporting information related to completing your missions. You may open your orders as soon as you return to your