Deep Cover by Brian Garfield

it did not exist, and what did not exist could be disregarded.
    A correspondent stood against a background of palm trees and campus buildings and did forty seconds on the skull-smashing arrests of fourteen black students who had attempted to close down the administration building. Four commercials extolled forgettable products and Forrester’s eyes strayed toward the glass doors and the surly wintry evening beyond. An avuncular newsman recited a report of guerrilla strikes and government counterstrikes in the hills behind Djakarta. The anchorman uttered unemployment and inflation figures and summarized in brief sentences the daily serial catastrophes of a world in unchanging flux, talking through a capped-tooth smile of destruction and disaster. A slow day for news. That was good, he thought dispassionately, a big story would have crowded him off the air.
    He saw his face on the screen, squinting against the portable kliegs like a Hollywood horseman; his own appearance always startled him because he never felt subjectively as tall and rangy-rugged as the lean image on the screen. The voice sounded lower than his own, a silver rolling resonance that only just escaped being guttural.
    They had edited him down to essentials but the result did not displease him because they had kept the context intact, which indicated that the news-bureau chief was probably on his side, and for openers that was a good sign.
    â€œIt’s been brought to my attention that the Pentagon and its tame mouthpieces in both houses of Congress intend to sneak their new Phaeton Three program through passage in the form of riders casually attached to unimportant defense bills. I think the people of this country need to be warned of this attempt to stifle legitimate discussions and inquiries.… We’re talking about offensive weapons, not defensive systems. We’re talking about a terrifying new form of MIRV—multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle. We’re talking about deploying a system where each single missile can deliver more than sixty miniaturized nuclear warheads on more than sixty separate enemy targets—and each one of these mini-warheads will have twice the destructive power of the bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We’re talking about a defense establishment that’s so arrogant it expects to ram down our throats a quantum jump in the arms race—an apocalyptic program—that they want us to swallow without a murmur of dissent.”
    They cut the rest of it and jumped to the Q & A period. There was some narrative commentary by the reporter and they had edited it neatly up to the beginning of the interviewer’s question: “Senator, you’ve never associated yourself with the disarmament people before. Would you say this stand of yours is a new departure?”
    â€œI’m a firm supporter of national defense. The Pentagon wants us to believe that anybody who questions their hardware salesmen must be a coward who wants to appease the other side the way Chamberlain appeased Hitler. The fact is we have the military capacity to destroy the Soviet Union utterly—we can overkill them forty times over—and we simply don’t need another new weapons system that could prove more dangerous to us than to them.”
    â€œSenator, you’ve referred to that ‘danger to ourselves’ several times now. What danger do you mean?”
    â€œTwo things. First, what kind of weapons will the other side be forced to develop to counteract ours? And second, what about the risk of accidental detonation? The Phaeton system would deploy thousands of armed hydrogen warheads where we now have hundreds. Multiply the stockpile by a hundred and you multiply the risk of unintentional explosion by a thousand. A calculated risk is only justifiable when you’ve got something to gain from it, and we’ve got nothing to gain by this. The odds aren’t acceptable. I’m