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A doomsday story
S. MUTHIAH
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Michael Day's "Slide" is a work that makes you wonder where fiction ends and fact begins
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THIS IS one of those believe it or not stories, when you're not sure where fiction ends and fact begins. I was going out of town for a few days and I rushed into the library to pick up my favourite reading material for when I'm on the road, a thriller. Pulling out books that seemed thick enough to last my four days away, I grabbed a book whose cover design featured a huge wave rearing over a city. Given that this was just after the tsunami that devastated much of the Bay of Bengal littoral, it was inevitable that I wouldn't give a second thought to selecting a book featuring a killer wave. The book was titled Slide, it was by Michael Day and was published by Pan Books in 2003. What follows is not about Madras or Tamil Nadu but, given the shock the tsunami of December 26 gave all of us, it is not without pertinence.
The book was a straightforward thriller, not the greatest of them but one that kept you interested till the end. What evoked a greater interest in me was the heart of its story. An Indonesian version of Saddam Hussain-as-seen-by-George Bush Jr. has had his scientists working on a secret Weapon of Mass Destruction. When a George Bush Jr.-type American President receives information that the Indonesian President is days away from launching his weapon against America, he orders the launch of America's own secret WMD. The American WMD involves seeding a hurricane, cyclone or typhoon, call it what you will depending on where you are, and thereby increasing its power several fold so that it will flatten whatever land it strikes. Unfortunately, the typhoon heading for the secret Indonesian base veers when something goes wrong during the seeding operation and destroys much of the Muslim areas of the Philippines. The Indonesian President, assessing correctly what had happened, decides to launch his own strike. A nuclear device code-named Krakatau is launched against Hawaii to topple half the island of Molokai into the sea. The landslide triggers ripples "travelling at the speed of a jet airliner... (which) become raging beasts of waves" five hours later when they strike the San Francisco-Los Angeles area. "They were tsunami... the nemesis that Rahman had bequeathed the world."
Michael Day's concluding note after all this is frightening. "In a world dominated by growing population pressures and environmental decline, a situation will arise one day when a nation will wage a secret war against its neighbours in order to try to gain control of an essential and valuable resource — water, perhaps, or oil, or may be some important mineral. For the aggressor nation, the environment would make a useful weapon. The strike could go on for years, frequent attacks doing great and indiscriminate damage, but the truth remaining hidden amongst the normal random violence of nature. Neighbours would not even know that they had been deliberately attacked. Perhaps they already have."
A frightening thought. But even more frightening is Day's introduction titled `Fact'. Towards the end of World War II, the New Zealand army, he states, experimented secretly with setting off underwater explosions near Auckland to create tsunami waves. The war however ended soon after, and so did the experiments. Then, between 1962 and 1974, the Americans experimented with seeding the eye of several hurricanes in the Atlantic and trying to control them.
When they tried to do the same with the Pacific typhoons, the Chinese protested and the tests ended, but not before monsoon rain clouds were seeded several times in Vietnam to affect Viet Cong supply lines, writes Day. He concludes `Fact' stating that it was the growing danger posed by geophysical weapons that led to the United Nations signing the Environmental Modification Treaty in 1977, prohibiting any modification of the environment as a weapon of war.
What Day makes clear is that environmental weapons have been created in the past and could be again in the future. Not a comforting thought, is it?
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