Copyright (c)1995 NUCLEAR CONUNDRUM by George Witter A warhead delivery "bus" floats through the silence of space. It looks down on a small blue-green planet from a thousand-mile- high orbit. It waits with cold, calculating patience as the world turns below. With a puff of compressed gas, a six-foot, cone-shaped projectile launches from the open front of the bus. Then another. And another. Reentry vehicles, each capable of delivering immense nuclear devastation, descend, propelled by momentum and gravity. At an altitude of 100 miles, the first RV touches the atmosphere. It begins to glow due to the friction of air passing at 6,000 feet per second. Below, people are relaxing with Leno or asleep. Those souls that happen to be out late might see a glowing ember in the sky, but the night is overcast. Above the clouds, the reentry vehicle is still descending toward its target. Earth's gravity becomes stronger as the RV cuts through the increasingly dense air. Its shell begins to glow white hot, converting the surrounding air into plasma. Someone looking into the overcast night might notice that the clouds seem unusually luminescent. Before he can contemplate the source, the deadly courier punches through the clouds. Mere feet off the ground, it is little more than a blur streaking toward the target. It strikes with a terrible thunderclap, and a dust cloud rises above the crater. Hundreds of pieces of reentry vehicle cool in and about the crater as the Earth leaches away the remaining heat. The payload of electronic tracking equipment has turned into so much scrap metal. Tonight, at least, it was only a test. The fear that consumes most people today is not about a test vehicle, but the threat of a reentry vehicle loaded with a 20-megaton warhead. The reentry vehicles are real, as is the threat. Should we maintain our threat deterrent? Should the United States disarm her nuclear arsenal? If so, what would we do with the nuclear stockpile? These are complex questions that may have an extraordinarily simple answer. The universe, as we know it today, is several billion years old. Humans developed in only the last 10 thousand years. Furthermore, our development of high technology has taken a mere 100 years. On this scale, our experience with nuclear technology is analogous to a child near a pot of boiling water or a baby with its finger on an exposed electrical outlet. Carl Sagan, scientist, educator, and motivating force in the exploration of other worlds has computed the chances of human survival in the future. Taking our past history and applying our current technology, he has calculated the possibility of humans surviving the next 100 years at less than 1%. Should we maintain the arsenal or disarm? Either choice has pros and cons. If we maintain our nuclear stockpile, we ensure the protection of our country and tempt the destruction of the world. If we disarm, we ensure the survival of the human species, but not the American way of life. Disarmament would almost certainly increase the probability of our survival, but what of the surplus? It is estimated that there are enough nuclear weapons to destroy the surface of the world several times. The sheer amount of potential devastation is unacceptable if it is in a lead storage bunker or a missile silo. The answer to the problem is in the very technology race that created it. Project Orion is a realistic proposal for a starship. A starship that could reach our nearest neighbor star in our lifetime. A starship propelled by nuclear warheads. If all the countries of the world were to pool their resources, the planet Earth could have a fleet of Orion starships exploring the stellar neighborhood by the end of the 21st century. The start of the 22nd century would have ships returning with accounts of things beyond our imaginations and just maybe the discovery of another race to share our galaxy. This would be the ultimate and final example of "swords-into-plowshares" for the human race. Humanity is on the brink of answering these questions. Do we stay where we are, continuing to play nuclear brinkmanship or do we take a chance on peace? Do we begin to trust our brothers over the horizon or shake hands under the shadow of a mushroom cloud? Will we be the ones to take our story to the planets? Will we tell other civilizations about humanity, which took itself to the edge of self-destruction but finally evolved beyond territoriality to become artists, philosophers, and explorers? If not, all we can hope is that a race from a distant world may visit our devastated planet and take a warning back to the cosmos. END