Able One

"No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance."
-Confucius

Hello people, I have good news and bad news. Good news, you will still be able to read my posts and stuff until I finish my class on FLVS. Bad news, I'm reading a new book. I just couldn't get into the other one and gave up when it was overdue, so now onto another book, Able One by the sci-fi writer who has won the Hugo award six times, Ben Bova. So what I'm going to do is read a few chapters at a time, not doing the detailed thing I was doing before, and give a basic summary according to what I remember and write my reaction to it.

So without further delay, here is the first part of Ben Bova's Able One.

The book starts off with a truck driver trying to find a diner in the middle of a town, but he can't because his GPS wouldn't work. He pulls into a truck stop and he finds out that nobody's GPS or cell phones are working. All across the country, anything that requires a satellite to work is shut down, non-functioning paperweights. The Stock Exchange is down, people die on operating room tables because of communication failures with the doctors operating remotely, and the government is wondering what the hell just happened.

You find out that a satellite was launched from North Korea hours before, and only three hours before the satellite outages, the satellite was actually a nuke and was detonated in the orbit of earth, taking out our unhardened satellites. The country is placed in DEFCON 1 (which is the highest level of readiness and war in imminent, also called the "cocked pistol" stage.) and there are talks of evacuating Honolulu, Anchorage, and Juneau. The President is due to give a speech in San Francisco later that day.

In the Pentagon, inside the Situation Room there is an emergency meeting taking place with top military officials and civilian experts about what could happen and what the U.S.'s best course of action is. The talk for a while about evacuating the aforementioned cities, then when a man named Jamil enters, he brings an interesting point. If the payload of the warhead was light enough, the missile could hit San Francisco. This doesn't bring an overly fearful or surprised response from anyone, simply a 'well crap...' (EXTREME PARAPHRASING) from the emotions of the people in the room.

When asked why someone would attack San Francisco, Jamil brings up the Sarajevo scenario. When WWI started, Archduke Franz Ferdinand I was assassinated in Saravejo, Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. Russia had a  treaty with Serbia, so they declare war on Austria-Hungary. Germany had an alliance with Austrio-Hungray, so they declare war on Russia. England and France had an alliance with Russia, so they declare war on Germany, and thus began WWI. He explains that this is applicable to us if the Koreans attack the United States. North Korea hits us, we hit them. The Chinese doesn't like that so they attack us. We counterattack China, Russia gets involved, then NATO, then full-scale nuclear war. As you might be able to guess, that's not very good for us.

That is where I stopped reading for today, but I'm foreseeing an amazing book. While I was reading this my mind was constantly asking 'what if this really happened?' and soaking up the information like a sponge. What I'm really liking about this book so far, is that it's realistic, and the actual military terms are broken down for you to be able to understand. For example, when the president is speaking with some others about missile defense, at the end of the chapter, before the next, he breaks down the different stages of missile defense from Boost Phase Defense to Terminal Phase Defense. And later when they're talking about the warhead strength, someone says something about 250-kilotons, someone else says that this is half a Megaton, and yet another explains that this is 25 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

I believe the authors intent was to evoke the response of 'poop is about to hit the fan!' and cause a tense atmosphere and feeling in the reader. Honestly, without their cell phones, many people would go insane, so imagine the whole country without a cell phone, GPS, country-wide broadcasting like the Weather Channel, and then imagine the countless nutcases out there now panicking and killing people.

There is definitely spatial organization in these chapters and probably the whole book seeing as it's split up by cities and locations instead of real chapters.