The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [93]
Once well into the Sea of Japan, Silent Thunder climbed again, leveling off at twelve thousand meters. Of course, the western shores of the sea were Russian, and of course, the radars there were a lot more numerous and powerful than Japan’s. They didn’t matter, either. Russian top brass, too, knew that Silent Thunder was no threat—that is, to them.
When its pilot and navigator agreed they had reached their aiming point, Silent Thunder slowed to just enough velocity to keep it in the air and began to deploy its armaments. Those armaments—a modest-yield nuclear bomb and a hollow copper tube no wider than a man’s body—would have baffled the weapons specialists of even a decade earlier, but they were all Silent Thunder needed to do its job.
Inside the weapon’s guidance system, a map of the Adorable Leader’s North Korea appeared, overlaid by the long, narrow oval that was the footprint of the weapon.
No human being in Silent Thunder looked at that map, because no human being was there. Its captain—all of its crew—was back in Washington state, observing the map on a TV screen. “It looks all right to me,” the pilot, an American, said to the bombardier, who happened to be Russian. “Deploy the masks.”
“Right,” said the bombardier, fingers on his keypad. Black shapes formed around the edges of the oval, tracing the course of the Yalu River on its north and west, the Demarcation Line that was the border with South Korea, and then the Pacific coast to the south and east. Those shapes were nothing tangible, of course. Nothing made of matter could have survived what they needed to mask off, and devising the electronic fields that could do the masks’ job had been one of the trickiest parts of building Silent Thunder. “All set,” the bombardier reported to the pilot.
“Position still okay?” the pilot asked the Chinese navigator, and when the navigator reported that it was, the pilot crossed himself. (He thought of himself as a lapsed Catholic, but there were times when he didn’t feel lapsed at all.) “Fire the weapon,” he ordered the bombardier, and for the first time in the history of the world, a nation lost a war—totally, irrevocably lost it—without anyone getting hurt.
Actually, that wasn’t quite true.
A few heart patients in the Adorable Leader’s domain did die. They were the ones who were unlucky enough to be wearing pacemakers when the electromagnetic blast struck, carrying more energy than a stroke of lightning. (But about the only North Koreans with access to any technology that expensive—that Western—were high-ranking officials. They weren’t missed.) Oh, and there were a handful of unfortunates flying in light planes who did not survive the consequent crashes. (As high-ranking as the others, and no more mourned.) In all, the latest regime change in North Korea came about with far fewer casualties than an average holiday weekend on the Western world’s highways.
In a fraction of a second all the Adorable Leader’s telephone systems were disabled. Most of his power lines were short-circuited. Every weapon his nation owned that was any more complex than a shotgun would fire no more—and the Adorable Leader’s North Korean nation had owned a vast number of weapons of all kinds. Without telephones or radios no one knew what was happening any farther away than a shout could be heard. The nation was no longer a threat to anyone, because no real nation existed anymore on that plot of ground.
There was, it is true, one small actual battle in this nonwar.
That was because of one obdurate colonel stationed outside of Kaesong. He could not, of course, understand what had happened, but at least he recognized that his army was at risk. He did what many colonels would have done. He fell out his command, issued them whatever rifles