“But you’re not an astronaut, Mr. President!” Hastings shouted again. “You’re the president of the United States! You’re not paid to take risks like that! With all due respect, Mr. President . . . are you completely insane?”
“He’s not insane, Hastings,” Kai Raydon retorted, angered by her unprofessional outburst. “And now that he’s had the courage to fly into orbit, he most certainly is an astronaut—a pretty damn good one, it turns out. He proved that any healthy, teachable, level-headed individual can become an astronaut if he so chooses, without years of physical training or scientific or engineering education.”
The bedlam seemed to subside, as if Raydon was a middle-school teacher admonishing his class to settle down and get to work, but the president could see that group of reporters was getting pretty riled up, and he was ready to wrap this up. “Any more questions?” he asked.
Another well-known television anchor seated in the front row got to his feet. “Mr. President, these space industrial proposals sound interesting, but they also sound expensive, as I’m sure everything dealing with space can be. You have been campaigning for well over a year on fiscal responsibility and paying for every new government program. How do you propose to pay for all this? You said you were going to cancel, postpone, or downsize other programs. Which ones?”
“I’m planning on targeting programs that I feel are costly, unnecessary, bloated, outdated, and wasteful, Mr. Wells,” the president said. “I have a long list of proposals that I will present to the congressional leadership. The three categories that make up eighty percent of the national budget—entitlements, defense, and discretionary spending—all need to be addressed. Modernizing our nation’s defense and preparing for the challenges of the twenty-second century is my absolute priority.”
“So you’re going to build space weapons by cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act?” a reporter asked.
“I want to stop adding more government entitlement programs, and I want to see real reforms in all entitlement programs so they can survive the century,” the president responded. “I think we can find cost savings when we do real reforms, which we can use to modernize defense. The same can be said about the military itself. One example would be a significant reduction of nuclear weapons in the American arsenal.” He could see another flurry of tapping and scribbling, and digital recorders moved closer to the speakers set up in the press briefing room. “I am going to propose that we reduce the number of nuclear warheads on alert from the current level of approximately seven hundred down to about three hundred.”
The level of excitement in the press briefing room began to rise again. “But, Mr. President, don’t you think with what’s happened in the South China Sea and western Pacific—China setting off a nuclear depth charge, firing on ships, downing our aircraft, and attacking Guam, not to mention Russia’s military resurgence—that this is the absolute worst time to be reducing our nuclear deterrent?”
“You’ve answered your own question, Mr. Wells,” the president said. “We currently have about seven hundred nuclear warheads ready to strike within a few hours’ time, but exactly what have they deterred? Russia, China, and other nations in response have all grown stronger and bolder. And when we retaliated, what kind of weapons did we use to stop them? Precision-guided nonnuclear weapons launched from aircraft and spacecraft.
“I feel the nuclear deterrent is no longer relevant and should be drastically downsized,” the president repeated. “The Russians took care of a lot of the downsizing during the American Holocaust, of course, with a horrendous loss of American lives. But there has been a lot of talk about replacing the bomber and intercontinental-ballistic-missile fleet, and I’m not going to endorse that. I propose that the strategic nuclear submarine fleet be the only forces on day-to-day nuclear alert, and it will be reduced so that only four strategic nuclear ballistic-missile submarines will be on alert, two in the Pacific and two in the Atlantic, with four more ready to put to sea on short notice. A few tactical air forces stationed on land and sea will be poised to generate forces for nuclear alert within a few days, if needed.”