“Wrong!” Bang the wrench hits the underside of the hood as Dennis swings it up, points it at Jim. Behind the wrench Dennis’s face is red with anger, he’s leaning over the motor compartment, staring at Jim, his face an inch from the hood; and the wrench is shaking. “You listen to what I do, boy. I help to make systems for use in precision electronic warfare. And don’t you look at me like they’re all the same! If you can’t tell the difference between electronic war and the mass nuclear destruction of the world, then you’re too stupid to talk to!” Bang he hits the underside of the hood with the wrench. There’s a hoarse edge in his voice that Jim has never heard before, and it cuts into Jim so sharply that he takes a step back.

“I can’t do a thing about nuclear war, it’s out of my hands. Hopefully one will never be fought. But conventional wars will be. And some of those wars could kick off a nuclear one. Easily! So it comes to this—if you can make conventional wars too difficult to fight, just on technical grounds alone, then by God you put an end to them! And that lessens the nuclear threat, the main way that we might fall into a nuclear war, in a really significant way!”

“But that’s what they’ve always said, Dad!” Appalled by this argument, Jim’s face twists: “Generation after generation—machine guns, tanks, planes, atomic bombs, now this—they were all supposed to make war impossible, but they don’t! They just keep the cycle going!”

“Not impossible. You can’t make war impossible, I didn’t say that. Nothing can do that. But you can make it damned impractical. We’re getting to the point where any invasion force can be electronically detected and electronically opposed, so quickly and accurately that the chances of a successful invasion are nil. Nil! So why ever try? Can’t you see? It could come to a point where no one would try!”

“Maybe they’ll just try with nuclear weapons, then! Be sure of it!”

Dennis waves the wrench dismissively, looks at it as if surprised at its presence, puts it down carefully on the top of the sidewall. “That would be crazy. It may happen, sure, but it would be crazy. Nuclear weapons are crazy, I don’t have anything to do with them. The only work I do in that regard is to try and stop them. I wish they were gone, and maybe someday they will be, who knows. But to get rid of them we’re going to have to have some other sort of deterrent, a less dangerous one. And that’s what I work at—making the precise electronic weapons that are the only replacement for the nuclear deterrent. They’re our only way out of that.”