Henry said, “I get the military thing. But there is a bigger picture impact here. All those GPS satellites help us synchronize our global clocks. Timing between everything from traffic lights to water treatment to railroad schedules would start getting clogged up. Web searches would be affected and the Internet could drastically slow down. Think about the financial markets. All of those hyper-traders moving shares in the blink of an eye? Now people around the world aren’t on the same clock anymore. The information isn’t getting spread around evenly. In this day in age, that’s a HUGE deal. Now, how many of you are on your mobile phones all day long? If they hit the data farms, those phones are going to be much less useful. If the Chinese can really do this, that weapon is designed to start the apocalypse. If someone crashed all of our satellites and cloud storage, there would be a complete network collapse. There would be a huge stock market crash, followed by a huge food shortage, followed by rampant riots in the street and a total breakdown in society. I swear to god, I am not exaggerating here. How many of you have kids? What would you do for the last loaf of bread if your kid was starving and you didn’t think there was another bread truck coming? Take this weapon seriously. And consider stocking up on bread, water, and Seinfeld DVD’s.”

Well, that worked. David thought Henry summed that up pretty nicely. Nods of agreement from around the room. Looks of terror. Nice.

Bill said, “But hold on here. First, that still doesn’t solve the nuclear deterrence factor.”

“It will make the navigation for the missiles much less accurate,” said one of the Air Force officers.

David said, “Actually...to be honest, especially if they disrupted communication enough, I just don’t think we would go through with it.”

“Go through with what?”

David said, “Sorry. I mean, I just don’t think that we would really retaliate with nukes. Think about it. If they shut down all of our satellites like that, our government decision makers would be deaf, dumb, and blind. If they started a military attack and let’s say they jammed long-range radio communication...I’m not saying that we wouldn’t nuke China if we had a clear picture of what was going on, but it takes a very long time for the U.S. government to gather enough political support to attack a foreign country when we do have clear evidence. If all of a sudden, we just didn’t have any communications with our armed forces. If no one had electricity or phone lines. Do you see our politicians having the confidence in the information they were getting to launch a World War Three-style nuclear retaliation on China? I mean, until 24 hours ago, I would have told you that you were crazy to suggest any of this. I would have said, ‘Hell no, China won’t attack us.’ Think of all the trade they’d be giving up. It would be economic suicide. No one would believe it. Our technology has enabled hyper-war. But the decision making process hasn’t gotten any faster. And this isn’t 1983. Our leaders haven’t been conditioned to expect a nuclear war the way they were back in the eighties. If an attack happened then, we all knew who it was. The Soviets. The Evil Empire. But China isn’t really seen as an enemy today. Their cyber war against us is mostly covert. Their military buildup is second-page news. People get cheap iPhones and low prices at Walmart, and trade with China is at an all-time high. I just don’t see a nuclear response as viable if the picture isn’t clear.”