Termination Shock

Eindhoven

It had been a long time since Willem had read an official document produced on a typewriter. This one bore the date August 14, 1962. Its author was Freeman Dyson. Each page was stamped SECRET at top and bottom, but someone had gone through with a Sharpie and drawn a slash through each repetition of that word; apparently it had been declassified at some point in the last half century.

Not that it mattered in his case; he, and everyone else in this shipping container, had the clearances needed to read this document whether it was classified or not.

PROGRAM FOR A STUDY

Implications of New Weapons Systems for Strategic Policy and Disarmament

. . . followed by a quotation from William Wordsworth’s Sonnet on Mutability, which was apparently the sort of literary touch you could get away with when you were Freeman Dyson and it was 1962. At a glance—which was all Willem had time for, as the presentation was getting underway—this was a survey of eight hypothetical new weapons systems that military planners in the United States had been worried about during the Kennedy administration. Some of them (supersonic low-altitude missiles, small portable ballistic missiles) still looked quite relevant. Which presumably explained why this chap from MI6 had gone to the trouble of reproducing the document and handing out copies. He’d flown over from London this morning and would fly back in a few hours. He was addressing a group of half a dozen Dutch colleagues in a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility—near Eindhoven Airport. Inevitably, this particular SCIF was a portable unit built into a shipping container. This meant it was only eight feet wide, which made it a cramped environment for the invited guests. Most of them were military or intelligence. Willem wasn’t, but he’d been invited anyway, for reasons that had not yet been made evident to him.

“You’ve probably heard of the Tsar Bomba,” said the Brit, who was going by Simon.

“The biggest H-bomb ever detonated,” said the minister of defense.

Simon nodded. “The Russians set it off about ten months before Mr. Dyson wrote this.” He put his hand on the document. “The interesting takeaway was that despite its fifty-megaton yield, it didn’t do as much damage as expected. Why? Because the earth is hard and the atmosphere is quite yielding—and only gets more so the higher up you go. So the explosion sort of ricocheted off the ground and went the only way it could go and basically punched a hole through the atmosphere and dissipated its power into the void. For those in the know, the lesson learned was that making bigger bombs was a waste of resources. But Freeman Dyson understood that large bombs could still have military effect provided you worked out a way to detonate them in a medium that would contain the blast and absorb its energy, rather than just venting it into outer space. Such a medium is water. The scenario he describes here, starting on about page 6, is that a very large hydrogen bomb—much bigger than the Tsar Bomba, even—is deposited on the floor of the ocean offshore from the coastal region to be attacked. This is easy to do covertly using a submarine or just kicking it off a ship. When the bomb is later detonated, all its energy is deposited into the surrounding water, creating an artificial tsunami that crests over the nearby coastline and, to borrow a homely phrase from the Yanks, breaks a lot of things and hurts a lot of people. And I do mean a lot, in Dyson’s scenario. No one ever accused that man of not thinking big.”

“Are you working up to tell us that we got nuked the other day?” asked one of the Dutch intelligence analysts, half serious.

“No. As you know, a nuclear explosion would have left isotopic evidence. It also would have done a lot more damage than just wrecking one half of the Maeslantkering.”

“Then how is this old document relevant?”

“If you scan down to the bottom half of page 7 you’ll see that Dyson says that the techniques for carrying out such an attack could be developed and rehearsed using H.E.—high explosive—charges in place of nukes.” Simon adjusted his glasses and found the relevant quote: “‘This part of the enterprise would not be expensive and would not require a high level of technological sophistication. Moreover, the installation and testing program could rather easily be camouflaged and kept secret.’”

Simon flipped the document over facedown, as if to emphasize that he was now going off Dyson’s script. “So. Let’s take nukes off the table altogether and talk about that ‘part of the enterprise’ to use his wording. He’s envisioning a relatively small, cheap pilot program that consists, for example, of packing ANFO or TNT into a shipping container and shoving it off a ship at sea.”

Since this meeting was being held in a shipping container, everyone looked around and tried to imagine every cubic centimeter of the space packed full of high explosive.

“Later,” Simon continued, “you set it off and measure the result. What is the result? Well, the water above the explosion is going to bulge up. From there, waves are then going to spread outward. To give you a feel for magnitude, a standard shipping container full of TNT gives you rather more than a tenth of a kiloton of explosive yield. In round numbers, it would require a hundred of those to give you a Hiroshima-sized explosion. But even a single one, if the water isn’t too deep, will produce a bulge and a system of waves.”

“Spreading outward in all directions,” Willem said, “if I’m following you correctly.”

“You are, Dr. Castelein,” Simon confirmed.

“Then it seems to me that the waves would spread out and dissipate.”

“From a single such detonation, yes,” said the visitor. “Now, Mr. Dyson, or any other physicist who made it out of his sophomore year, would have known about constructive interference—the phenomenon where two wave crests, meeting at a given place and time, will sum to produce a much higher crest. That much is old hat in the world of mathematical physics. But what is different now, as compared to 1962, is that we have computers. Precision guidance systems. Split-second timing and communication technology. So. Our whole mentality around weapon design has changed. In Dyson’s day, a Cold War military planner might have used a nuclear weapon to take out a whole city, just to destroy a single factory. Overkill, to be sure, but the best they could manage with unguided ballistic warheads. Today we would use a cruise missile that would strike a key component of that factory—say, a power transformer or a meeting of senior management—with a precision measured not in meters but centimeters. Much cleaner, much less collateral damage, much cheaper. Likewise, a modern approach to Dyson’s 1962 scenario would be to get rid of the nukes straightaway and stick with those containers full of H.E. Drop those in precisely known locations not far from the target. Detonate them in a precisely timed sequence. The individual waves from any one detonation don’t amount to much. By the way, that’s a feature, not a bug. During a storm they aren’t even detectable. They don’t rise above the noise floor. But if you’ve set it all up right, there is one and only one location where all those waves sum together and create what seems to be a rogue wave, enormously bigger than all the others. If it just happens to cave in the Maeslantkering, why, the North Sea then rushes in and does your work for you.”

Simon paused for a little while. Willem looked around the table. He could tell that some of his Dutch colleagues had known in advance what was going to be said, and others were surprised. Willem was one of the latter. It would take him a few minutes to absorb all this. But it did seem to answer the question of why he’d been invited. It must all have something to do with Bo, and his sudden departure from the Maasvlakte on the morning of the storm. Willem, in other words, hadn’t been brought here to be briefed. He had been called as a witness.

“Are you suggesting that the flooding of Rotterdam and Zeeland was the result of a military attack by a foreign power!?” asked an incredulous army general. Clearly not one of those who had been briefed in advance. Therefore, just as surprised as Willem. And yet Willem had something of an unfair advantage. The series of weird encounters he’d had with Bo during the previous few weeks had inoculated him.

Simon said, “Yes. A similar attempt was, we think, made on the Thames Estuary, but it wasn’t as effective because that is a more sheltered waterway. You can’t come at it from as many angles.” As Willem and everyone else knew, Simon was engaging in a bit of understatement here. There had been a lot of flooding in the Thames Estuary.

“Is there evidence? Other than this?” asked the general, slapping the Dyson report.

Simon carefully avoided making eye contact, in a way that suggested, to Willem’s perhaps over-sensitive mind, that confidential sources and methods were involved. He would not speak of these. But he had not come unprepared for the question. “You would expect,” he said, “to see seismographic evidence of those detonations. And we have seen it. It’s quite clear. It tells us where we might go and search, were we so inclined, for debris—shattered containers or other residue left on the bottom of the sea. No doubt we shall. We’ll coordinate any such efforts with the Royal Dutch Navy, it goes without saying. But we don’t need to, really. The spikes on the seismograph tracings are as distinct as the sound of rifle shots in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace.”

“So they—whoever they are—know that we know.”

“I should say so, yes.”

“What’s the motive, though?” asked a woman from the Dutch counterintelligence service. “I mean, it’s not as if they—whoever they are—can then follow up with an invasion of our country. It has no military value to anyone. It seems like a pure act of vandalism.”

Her counterpart from Dutch foreign intelligence was sitting across the table from her. Janno. Willem had known him for decades. And it was clear that he’d been briefed on all this in advance. “We think it is a political gambit. An effort to sway the public conversation around climate change.”

“But everyone already knows about climate change! Even the right wingers have changed their tune since”—she glanced toward Willem—“since the queen’s speech. About geoengineering.”

Since everyone was now looking—awkwardly, guiltily—at Willem, he felt it made sense to speak up. “The great question of our time is no longer whether climate change is happening but what to do about it. The right wing has recently snapped around to a hard-line pro-geoengineering stance. Since then we’re seeing hints that Shell and other oil companies are going to follow their lead. It has been made obvious to me personally during the last few weeks that China is providing covert support to those political actors in our country who advocate aggressive deployment of geoengineering schemes such as what is going on in West Texas. The disaster at the Maeslantkering can only strengthen their hand politically. I can’t imagine what it’s like right now to be Ruud Vlietstra.”

“Since you mention the prime minister,” said the defense minister, “I have some news, which none of you will have seen because we are in a SCIF and our phones don’t work. As of—” She glanced up at the twenty-four-hour clock on the wall. “Literally ten minutes ago I am the caretaker defense minister. Ruud’s out. The coalition has dissolved. He has notified the queen that a new government will need to be formed.”

“Has Ruud been briefed on all this?” asked the woman from counterintelligence, rattling her copy of the Dyson paper. “Does he know he was—we were—set up?”

“Yes,” said the now ex–defense minister. “But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t help to know.”

“So there will be a new government,” Willem said. “Forming it might take months. The parties such as the Greens who are on the record as anti-geoengineering are likely to be shut out. Because the electorate will now be calling for strong measures. That means that Martijn van Dyck and his lot will probably be in. It’s just arithmetic.”

Heads turned toward Simon, who studiously ignored them. It was up to the Dutch people to work out among themselves what it all meant for them.

“Getting back to the question of motive,” said Janno, “China—obviously this is all China—has spent a little bit of money and taken some modest risks and claimed the scalp of the Dutch government.”

“Probably the British government as well,” said Simon. “Things are headed in that direction.”

Janno nodded. “The next governments of both those countries are likely to be pro-geoengineering to a degree that would have made them politically radioactive until a few days ago. In Texas, T.R. McHooligan has achieved a similar result, transforming the conversation around geoengineering by simply doing it. What does all this mean for China? It means that they can go on fueling their economy with coal and suppress its nastier side effects with geoengineering schemes of their own, while enjoying political cover from several countries in the West that might otherwise have raised a fuss. Good value for the money, if you ask me.”