The Cardinal of the Kremlin - By Tom Clancy Page 0,70

shots-I can take out as many missiles as you can."

Ryan thought the General might come off his chair at that one, but instead he adopted his intellectual guise. "Mr. Alien, that was the first test of an experimental system, and half of its shots did hit. In fact, all of the targets were eliminated in under a second. Major Gregory here will have that targeting problem beaten by summer-won't you, son?"

"Yes, sir!" Gregory piped up. "All we have to do is rework the code some."

"Okay. If Judge Moore's people can tell us what the Russians have done to increase their laser power, we have most of the rest of the system architecture already tested and validated. In two or three years, we'll have it all-and then we can start thinking seriously about deployment."

"And if the Soviets start shooting your mirrors out of space?" Alien asked dryly. "You could have the best laser system ever made on the ground, but it won't do much more than defend New Mexico."

"They'll have to find 'em first, and that's a much harder problem than you think. We can put 'em pretty high up, between three hundred and a thousand miles. We can use stealth technology to make them hard to locate on radar-you can't do that with most satellites, but we can do it with these. The mirrors will be relatively small, and light. That means we can deploy a lot of them. Do you know how big space is, and how many thousands of pieces of junk are orbiting up there? They'd never get them all," Parks concluded with confidence.

"Jack, you've been looking at the Russians. What do you think?" the President asked Ryan.

"Mr. President, the main force we're going against here is the Soviet fixation on defending their country-and I mean actually defending it against attack. They've invested thirty years of work and quite a pile of money in this field because they think it's something worth doing. Back in the Johnson administration, Kosygin said, 'Defense is moral, offense is immoral.' That's a Russian talking, sir, not just a communist. To be honest, I find that a hard argument to disagree with. If we do enter a new phase of competition, at least it would be defensive instead of offensive. Kind of hard to kill a million civilians with a laser," Jack noted.

"But it will change the whole balance of power," Ernest Alien objected.

"The current balance of power may be fairly stable, but it's still fundamentally crazy," Ryan said.

"It works. It keeps the peace."

"Mr. Alien, the peace we have is one continuous crisis. You say we can reduce inventories by half-again, so what? You could cut Soviet inventories by two thirds and still leave them with enough warheads to turn America into a crematorium. The same thing is true of our inventory. As I said coming back from Moscow, the reduction agreement now on the table is cosmetic only. It does not provide any degree of additional safety. It is a symbol-maybe an important one, but only a symbol with very little substance."

"Oh, I don't know," General Parks observed. "If you reduce my target load by half, I wouldn't mind all that much." That earned him a nasty look from Alien.

"If we can find out what the Russians are doing different, where does that leave us?" the President asked.

"If the CIA gives us data that we can use? Major?" Parks turned his head.

"Then we'll have a weapons system that we can demonstrate in three years, and deploy over the five to ten years after that," Gregory said.

"You're sure," the President said.

"As sure as I can be, sir. Like with the Apollo Program, sir, it's not so much a question of inventing a new science as learning how to engineer technology we already have. It's just working out the nuts and bolts."

"You're a very confident young man, Major," Alien said professorially.

"Yes, sir, I am. I think we can do it. Mr. Alien, our objective isn't all that different from yours. You want to get rid of the nukes, and so do we. Maybe we can help you, sir."

Zing! Ryan thought with a hastily concealed smile. A discreet knock came at the door. The President checked his watch.

"I have to cut this one short. I have to go over some antidrug programs over lunch with the Attorney General. Thank you for your time." He took one last look at the Dushanbe photo and stood. Everyone else did the same. They filed out by the