Battle Station by Ben Bova

billion and $27 billion.
    Space-based defenses may one day be able to destroy ballistic missiles within minutes after they are launched. But what about nuclear bombs carried by airplanes or low-flying cruise missiles? What about nuclear devices smuggled into a city by terrorists
aboard a ship or even in a smallish van?
    There are three points to be made:
    First, if space-based defenses do nothing more than prevent missile attack, they will have made an enormous contribution to peace and survival. They will have moved humankind away from the fearful specter of a thirty-minute push-button war that ends with the entire northern hemisphere devastated and the onset of Nuclear Winter.
    Second, if missiles can be destroyed within minutes, much the same technology can be used to stop the slower airplanes and drones that might carry nuclear bombs. The defensive weaponry can be based on the ground, at sea, or aboard aircraft just as well as in satellites. While atmospheric effects may trouble laser and particle beam systems, the “kinetic kill” weapons will work just fine here on Earth. And the electronic detection, pointing, and tracking “brains” that run the ABM satellites will find supersonic aircraft easy targets. There are even a few bold scientists like Wood who hint that lasers will be able to destroy targets despite the absorption and beamdisrupting problems of the atmosphere.
    Third, this kind of defensive weaponry will probably be of little use against suicidal terrorists armed with nuclear bombs. But that is a different order of problem. Terrorists may one day destroy a city, or several cities. But they will not be able to produce the kind of instantaneous holocaust that is threatened by the thousands of warheads resting atop their ballistic missiles today. Stopping terrorism calls for political action.
    Space-based defenses can stop World War III. That should be a powerful incentive for moving ahead with the research needed to prove out the fundamental concepts.

    We may be witnessing a new era in international politics, the first real change since the reign of nuclear terror began at Hiroshima. As Winston Churchill once said, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Nuclear Autumn
    The alternative to strategic defenses in space is no defense against nuclear attack, the policy called mutual assured destruction. MAD is essentially a mutual suicide pact between the superpowers: attack is deterred because neither side dares risk the other’s devastating counterattack.
    But there might be another way for a ruthless and calculating enemy to launch a nuclear attack and confidently expect no counterstrike at all.
    The arguments over Nuclear Winter—the idea that a sufficient number of nuclear explosions in the atmosphere will plunge the whole world into an era of freezing darkness that will extinguish all life on Earth—is being hotly debated among scientists today.
    Strangely, very little of this debate is being reported in the media. Even the science press is largely ignoring it. To the media, Nuclear Winter is a Truth. It was revealed through press conferences, a slickly illustrated book, and videotapes. No matter that the basic scientific underpinnings of the idea are under attack by many atmospheric physicists and other scientists. It is now embedded in cement in the mind-sets of the world’s media—and many science fiction writers, too.
    Critics of Nuclear Winter claim that its proponents used Joe McCarthy tactics to publicize what, to them, is a political idea rather than a scientific theory. They claim that Carl Sagan, Paul Ehrlich, et al made their
publicity splash and “sold” the idea to the media, and only afterward quietly admitted that there are some doubts about the models and calculations they used.
    On their side, Sagan, Ehrlich, and their colleagues insist that Nuclear Winter has been