The Baghdad Blackout
FROM the broad window of the PetroGen President’s Office, George contemplated the dark brown meander of Buffalo Bayou weaving along Allen Parkway to the distant green swath of Memorial Park. He turned back to Roger. “We’re running into some problems on the political front,” he said. “The DOE has been clever about making SSC contracts in 43 out of 50 states plus Puerto Rico, and that’s garnered them a lot of support in Congress. Construction has started on the accelerator buildings, and the Texas contractors and Texas State lobbyists are pushing very hard in support of the project. We’ve been stirring up the local residents with land near Waxahachie above the ring. They’ve formed a fairly vocal protest group and have given a lot of publicity to the fire ant problem, but the protests are not having as much effect as we’d projected.”
Roger shook his head. “It’s too bad we were couldn’t block Bromley’s appointment to Science Advisor,” he said. “What went wrong?”
“Nobody we recommended would take the damned job,” said George.
Roger looked surprised. “Don’t they have a sense of duty?” he asked.
“This isn’t the United Kingdom,” said George. “Public service is not held in such high regard here. We’d convinced President Bush that better connections between science and business were essential to long term economic growth. The top candidates for Science and Technology Advisor were all scientists or engineers with strong ties to the business world, mostly corporate executives. Bromley, as an academic, was down on Bush’s list. But then all of the corporate executive candidates declined to be considered because of the low salary and the new conflict-of-interest laws. The job only pays $72,000 per year. Any of them would have had to take a factor of three or more cut in pay and divest themselves of their stock holdings. I guess their sense of duty didn’t stretch that far.
“So Alan rose to the top of the list by process of elimination, and he was appointed. His Yale connection to Bush was too much for us. He’s already been very effective in presenting the case for the SSC to Congress.”
“Well,” said Roger, “at least we succeeded with Quayle and Watkins. Two out of three isn’t so bad in this business. It appears that the Admiral’s Tiger Teams are already helping to create some diversion of effort.”
“Ah yes,” said George. “How did you manage that one? It was brilliant.”
“It did work surprisingly well,” said Roger, “I used my BBC Reporter ‘Roger Dalton’ persona to get an interview with the Admiral. We’d already determined that he was a stickler for safety. When we shook hands, I Wrote him a hormonal boost in aggressiveness and caution, both useful attributes for a cabinet member. Then I asked him a long list of pointed questions about the rampant safety problems at the U. S. National Laboratories like Oak Ridge, Argonne, Los Alamos, Livermore, and so on. I implied that I was preparing a BBC exposé on the subject.
“The Admiral immediately saw the potential for embarrassment, and he also saw the opportunity to bend the DOE National Labs to his will. Within a week of my interview he’d recruited a few dozen of his old Navy mates, spit-and-polish retirees from his former nuclear Navy outfits. He formed them into what he called Tiger Teams. These Tigers descended on all the National Laboratories like hungry carnivores on flocks of lambs. They demanded endless safety meetings, giant mountains of paperwork, a vast review and overhaul of all the Lab safety procedures.”
“Yes, I heard about that,” said George. “Our contacts in the DOE Labs report an amazing diversion of effort and loss of morale. For example, some lab technicians are boosting their status by becoming ‘safety informers,’ turning in scientists to the Tigers. It’s like Stalin’s Russia.”
“Right,” said Roger. “The DOE Labs have essentially halted scientific research while everyone scrambles around attending safety seminars, writing detailed safety procedures for every conceivable scenario of possible disaster, and filling vast bookshelves with thousand-page documents that no one will ever read. Senior lab officials that have protested have been threatened with dismissal.”
“There are definite indications that the Tigers diverted effort away from the SSC redesign,” said George. “The design efforts at Fermilab, LBL, and Brookhaven are down, just when the old LBL dipole magnet design is being closely studied and re-evaluated. Everyone involved is overworked, and consequently they’re doing a very conservative redesign because they have no time for creative solutions.”
Roger shook his head and looked downward. “Actually,” he said, “I feel rather bad about what happened to Argonne. The lab was singled out by the Tigers and made an example for the rest. It was completely shut down; its science effort probably set back a year.
“And no one at any of the Labs has yet figured out what hit them. I’d really feel bad about having instigated all of that, if it wasn’t in the interest of saving the universe.”
“It’s interesting that all the activity surrounding Watkins’ Tigers made no impression on the news media,” said George. “I haven’t seen a thing about it. Any idea why?”
Roger grinned. “A CBS reporter explained to me that safety is an intrinsically boring subject,” he said. “According to him, safety has absolutely no news value unless there’s a disaster, and even then it’s only good for 30 seconds of pious moralizing.”
“Well,” said George, “the net effect on the SSC redesign is becoming apparent. The DOE just made an announcement about the revised project. The machine now uses 8,800 of the new 5 centimeter aperture dipoles and needs an extra mile of tunnel. The new official DOE cost of the redesigned SSC has risen to $8.2 billion from US federal funds, with an extra $1.6 billion expected from foreign contributions.”
Roger whistled. “Total $9.8 billion ... That’s more than double the first DOE cost estimate.”
“And more, in our universe, than the machine actually cost to build,” said George. “The new congressional emphasis on foreign contributions is very good for us. My contacts have been promoting the idea of the need for strong international financial participation in the SSC. It isn’t too easy, because there is strong feeling in Congress that all of the high technology items, which represent most of the cost, must be built here in this country. But the most recent SSC Appropriations Bill contains the requirement that the SSC project must have about a billion dollars in contributions from other countries. That means Japan. Have you been able get a reading on the SSC at the Japanese end?”
“Yes, but it’s rather confusing” said Roger. “The leaders of the Japanese high energy physics community support participation in the SSC, but the younger people are not so enthusiastic. They’re afraid that projects in their own laboratories will be sacrificed, and there is a developing opposition to SSC participation. And the Japanese science funding agencies have all made it clear that they have no money for SSC support.”
“No yen for the SSC?” George said. “That sounds hopeful.”
“Unfortunately, it’s irrelevant,” said Roger. “In Japan the big decisions are always handled personally at the topmost level. If there’s to be Japanese funding for the SSC, it will be decided by the Prime Minister himself. My contacts in Japan say that the Japanese Prime Minister, whoever that may be by the time Bush gets around to visiting Japan, might be willing to contribute a hundred-billion yen or so to the SSC, but only if he is asked directly and personally by President Bush.”
“That’s exactly what happened in our universe,” said George. “There Bush would go to Japan next November, would ask Prime Minister Miyazawa directly for Japanese collaboration and support for the SSC project, and Miyazawa would agree and shake hands on it. The SSC project would get a billion dollars from that hand shake.”
“We must do our best to prevent that handshake,” said Roger. “Bush must now have other things on his mind, what with the Gulf War.”
George smiled, then pointed to the newspapers spread on the broad rosewood conference table. “Yes, the Gulf War started last month, right on schedule,” he said. “In our world, that gave a big boost to the Administration, with Bush distinguishing himself as a tough international leader. It proved to be a key element in getting him re-elected in 1992, so that Dole, Deutsch, and Bromley could work on Congress during the closest SSC votes in 1993 and 1994.”
“I know,” said Roger. “I recently used the holo-ROM history encyclopedia on my lapstation to analyze the history of the Gulf War. While it was in progress, there was a major internal debate over just when the Allied Forces should declare a victory and go home. In our universe the Allies wiped out the Republican Guard in the desert, rolled into Baghdad, smoked Saddam out of his bunker, and hauled him and his top officers to Den Haag for the 1992 War Crimes Trials. The Den Haag Trials were carefully timed to be held while the US Presidential race was in progress, and the Bush/Dole campaign made good use of that.
“But apparently my own UK Government’s Foreign Office at the time was advocating a more devious course, that of halting the Gulf War in the desert and leaving a weakened Saddam in place in Baghdad as a foil against Muslim-fundamentalist Iran to the East and the Kurdish communist rebels in the North. Their argument almost carried the day. If it had, President Bush would have looked much less like a conquering hero to the voters. I suspect the ‘wimp’ factor might have reappeared and influenced the election.”
“I see,” said George. “That makes it clear, then. I must arrange a meeting with our esteemed President next week, so that I can reason with him in order to advocate a course of measured response and moderation.” He grinned.