Level 7

JUNE 10

So the war is over. It started yesterday at 09.12 hours, as far as our offensive action was concerned, and it ended when our last missiles exploded in enemy territory at 12.10 hours.

The whole war lasted two hours and fifty-eight minutes—the shortest war in history. And the most devastating one. For both these reasons it is very easy to write its history: no complicated and lengthy campaigns, no battlefields to remember—the globe was one battlefield.

I could summarise this war, the greatest in human history, in a few words: “Yesterday, in a little under three hours, life on vast patches of the earth was annihilated.” But I had better be more historically minded and write down a few details about how it happened. These details were announced on the general loudspeaker system first thing this morning, and have been repeated several times since. Everybody knows them now almost by heart. I shall reproduce them true to their spirit, even if the wording differs a little from the original.

Yesterday, at 09.07 hours, twelve H-bombs fell in a remote part of our country. Ten of them exploded in sparsely inhabited areas, but two hit big centres of population. The attack came suddenly, and by the time PBY Command detected the missiles they were already striking their targets. No interception of these rockets was possible, but their arrival served as the best possible warning and PBY Command’s later achievements were spectacular.

The PBX Command too was alive to what was going on. The treacherous attack had to be met with a counter-attack, and so the command “Push Button A1” was given. The command was limited, quite conscientiously, to just the one button. We did not want to start a total war as long as we were not sure that the enemy intended to annihilate us completely. Button A1 released only two thousand rockets, with warheads of one to five megatons. They were directed solely at military and industrial installations in the nearest enemy zone.

At the same time, in case the enemy should retaliate, the alarm was sounded throughout the country and people hurried underground. This was done in a fairly orderly manner, except for some trouble over the Level 1 shelters. Many people without the proper identification tried to get into them, and this led to rioting. It is likely that many people who should not have gone below did so, while some who were entitled to a place were left outside. The shelters became overcrowded, and in the struggle for space many women, children and old people were crushed to death. These scenes went on for as long as the areas concerned were not hit; and the longer they were spared the bombs, the worse the fighting became. In some places it was over in forty minutes or so, but here and there it lasted up to two hours, with bloody battles which became even more ferocious as distant explosions were heard. Entrances to shelters were blocked by people fighting in the most primitive and cruel way with the nearest weapons that came to hand—kitchen knives, clubs made from broken-up furniture, and bare fists if they could not find anything better. All this was reported over the radio by self-sacrificing commentators, who even in this emergency did not forget their duty to report the news. They died microphones in hand.

At 09.15 hours, three minutes after our first operational move, our leaders received a radio message from the enemy which announced that twelve intercontinental missiles with H-bomb warheads had escaped their electronic controls and might explode in our country. The message asked us not to retaliate, as this was not an intentional act of hostility but only a technical accident.

We replied that we should have been warned earlier so that we could intercept the missiles as successfully as possible.

The enemy answered that it had taken them some time to realise what had happened, and even longer to get in touch with us.

This sounded very suspicious. We had to be on guard, of course, against a treacherous attempt by the enemy to test our vulnerability by sending a sample of twelve rockets with the excuse that they had ‘escaped’ their controls. So we did not give any details about the explosions in our country (though the enemy must have got the general picture on whatever corresponds over there to our PBX viewing screen); nor did we tell the enemy about the two thousand rockets which were already on their way and would shortly be touching ground and exploding in his Zone A. We just went on arguing about the enemy’s twelve bombs until 09.32 hours, when our rockets started arriving. As results have shown, the enemy was taken quite as much by surprise as we had been. The difference was that he had surprised us with twelve bombs; we surprised him with two thousand.

Then we waited. We hoped the enemy would interpret this limited counter-attack on a limited area as a warning—a warning in action, to be sure, not in words.

Unfortunately his viciousness was beyond reasoning with. For, on being hit by our rockets, he immediately released a huge quantity of his own, thousands of multi-megaton missiles, against our country and our allies. These started exploding at 09.50 in the areas nearest to his rocket bases, and gradually reached deeper and deeper into our territory.

Meanwhile we did not sit doing nothing, of course. PBY Command was ready for the attack this time, and automatically controlled interceptors destroyed hundreds of enemy missiles even before they reached this country, mostly over allied territories. But many more hundreds—thousands, to be exact—exploded at their predestined targets.

Naturally, as the enemy’s attack spread, our offensive branch retaliated powerfully. Thousands of missiles were fired into the remotest corners of the enemy’s country and those of his satellites, spreading death and annihilation.

One other critical moment occurred when, at 11.15 hours, our gadgets discovered that the enemy had started using rigged bombs—the highly radioactive ones. This was the most barbaric thing to do, but we had long ago realised to what atrocious extremes the enemy was likely to go. We were ready for this too, and we hit back.

We hit hard. Thousands of our missiles fitted with H-bombs in highly radioactive shells were sent to hit the enemy and his satellites wherever they might have survived. This happened at 11.20 and was our last act of war.

The last of our bombs exploded at 12.10 hours. The enemy’s last bomb had hit us at 11.45. Presumably he had run out of missiles, or had all his launching sites destroyed, even before our rigged bombs arrived to have the last word in the argument.

Needless to say, we are the victors.