2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [26]
The United States thought that India could dismantle Pakistan’s ability to strike back if it hit key facilities first, with bunker-buster nukes. These were still nuclear weapons, but they were exploded deep in the ground, not in the air, and they did phenomenal damage without catastrophic radiation release. There was no way to prevent Pakistan from firing something, but with advanced defense missiles and a population large enough that it could afford a million or so casualties, India convinced the rest of the world that it was now or never.
India kept the fighting up in Kashmir to divert attention and, in late 2014, it launched a preemptive attack on the Taliban’s nuclear facilities, along with sending in a million men to try to take hold of the country. The plan mostly worked, although five Taliban rockets were launched with nuclear warheads. Two landed in unpopulated areas, but three landed near cities, with one landing twenty miles outside of Delhi. Three hundred thousand people were killed instantly, with hundreds of thousands more getting sick over the following weeks. But India had secured Pakistan and now occupied it. The Pakistani people were shocked by how quickly their country was taken over, but they didn’t love the Taliban enough to rise up, and the Pakistani army was leaderless and too disorganized to put up any further resistance. With India now in control of the Taliban’s nukes, plus its own, it would be impossible for Pakistan to fight them and win.
India’s first job was to try to put a government favorable to it in power. It found some Taliban who were friendlier to the idea than others and cultivated them, along with leaders in exile whom the people still had some affection toward. But no new government was going to get the nukes back. Those went to the victor, and for the first time in fifty years Pakistan had no weapons of mass destruction.
The nuclear explosions that took place during this conflict did one positive thing, if one could call it that. They gave the world a chance to see firsthand what nuclear devastation really looked like. A nuclear bomb, to the majority of people alive in 2015, had meant nothing. It was a weapon that signified something terrible, but virtually no one had any experience or memory of it, or even read books on Hiroshima any longer. There were still some aging baby boomers who remembered hiding under their desks in grammar school, as if that would have saved them when their schools heated up to three thousand degrees, but short of that, nuclear war was just a lingering threat.
Then people finally were able to see for themselves what a nuclear bomb really did, and more people than ever before were determined not to let it happen again. On the other hand, it also confirmed that there was no better weapon of terror ever invented.
And that’s what Los Angeles looked like. As if a big fat fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb had been dropped in the center of the city. The same devastation without the radiation. Thank God terrorists didn’t know how to start earthquakes.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
At 2:45 President Bernstein finally left the Situation Room and went upstairs to the residence to take a shower and change clothes before his meeting with the elite of the medical establishment. His original idea for the meeting, to discuss a range of issues including the problems inherent in unabated longevity, now seemed unimportant. And yet the country’s business still had to go on. There were still forty-nine states with no earthquake.
The President had one question that he wanted a real answer to. Put simply, “Are people living too long?” He had to be careful how he phrased it, just as he had had to be when he was running. It was something the other side loved to get ahold of and distort. CANDIDATE WANTS SENIORS DEAD, one headline screamed during the election. But Bernstein knew that this was an issue that had to be