Lieutenant Colonel Wang Wei began his shift at 20:00. The watch promised to be quiet. His mood was professional. Wang Wei glanced at the ventilation grate. It emitted dry, conditioned air—no scent of pines, no humidity, nothing to remind him of the season. Above, through three hundred meters of concrete, it was a typical September night. Here, the outside world existed only as digits on screens.
The facility appeared on no map. To the local peasants from the village of Jiajiatun, it was merely a military town with a restricted zone. To the Pentagon, it was a priority strike target.
Three weeks prior, in the East China Sea, the American destroyer USS Barack Obama breached the border in the Taiwan Strait. Chinese fighters buzzed its superstructure at full afterburner, just five meters away. In Washington, Congress approved yet another military aid package for Taiwan. In Beijing, the People's Daily ran a front-page editorial: "Imperialism continues its attempts to contain China’s rise."
In such an atmosphere, the early warning system had no room for error. It was built by the finest engineers from Tsinghua University and the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC) to eliminate human indecision. Algorithms calculated faster and more reliably than any officer.
At 00:15, the silence of the command post was shattered by an alarm. The main screen flashed red: LAUNCH DETECTED.
The "Jade Flame" system, the central brain of China's satellite constellation, fed the data: a Sentinel ICBM had been launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Confidence level—0.99 (Maximum). Seconds passed. The system detected a second launch. A third. A fourth. A fifth.
The display changed: MISSILE ATTACK DETECTED.
The communications operator, a young lieutenant, turned to Wang Wei. His voice wavered despite his efforts to remain calm:
— Comrade Lieutenant Colonel, confidence level is maximum. According to protocol, we must report immediately.
Wang Wei knew the protocol. He knew it by heart, just as every officer of the 810th Brigade knew their standing orders: report to Beijing, wait for command confirmation, launch a retaliatory strike. Twenty minutes—and the country you defend becomes nothing more than radioactive smudges on satellite imagery. Twenty minutes—less time than it takes for a courier to deliver a hot meal to your doorstep.
— What about the ground radars? — Wang Wei asked. His voice remained steady, though his insides felt like a tightening knot.
— Silence. Radars in Shandong and Fujian see no targets.
That was the key. The satellites saw launches. The long-range ground stations on the eastern coast did not. The data was fundamentally contradictory. Wang Wei looked at the board again. Five missiles. Why five?
He knew the tactics. He had studied at the PLA National Defense University in Beijing, where instructors from Russia spoke of the doctrine of "decapitation strikes and neutralization of decision-making centers." A first strike isn't launched with five missiles. A first strike involves hundreds of launches, a wave where space sensors go blind from the sheer number of warheads. Five was either a mistake or a provocation. Or the first echelon of a decapitation strike, with the rest following a minute later. But then ground stations should have already seen the trajectories. They were silent.
The system persisted. "Jade Flame" consisted of nine satellites in "Big Dipper" orbits—three always in the sky, others in drift. Their infrared telescopes watched the American prairies so intently they could spot a lighter flicked in the Nevada desert. Developers from the Beijing "Tianhe" Center swore: the algorithm does not err. The machine has no emotions, no fear, no fatigue. Only pure calculation.
But Wang Wei chose logic over protocol. He wasn't a career soldier; he had donned the uniform as a former programmer from Baidu. Wang Wei knew the "guts" of the algorithms and did not trust them blindly.
— Wait for radar confirmation, — he said.
The operator froze. It was a violation. Direct. Disciplinary. In the PLA, discipline is everything. If Wang Wei was wrong, Beijing could vanish in twenty minutes. If he was right, he had merely preserved this fragile peace for one more day.
The siren continued to shriek—a sharp, piercing sound that made ears ring. Seconds stretched like rubber.
At 00:35—twenty minutes after the first signal—the ground stations finally gave confirmation: no targets. The sky was clear. Not a single missile.
The alert MISSILE ATTACK DETECTED finally stopped flashing and went dark. The siren cut off. The ensuing silence was louder than any alarm.
Later, a commission would determine the cause of the false alarm. The "Jade Flame" satellites operated in highly elliptical orbits, monitoring U.S. territory. As it turned out, they had a software flaw – they were supposed to look at Earth "sideways" to see a missile’s plume against the black of space. That night, a rare combination occurred: solar glint, high-altitude clouds, ice crystals, and — as it would later be revealed — an experimental launch of an American "Darkstar" hypersonic glider (SR-72 prototype). Its ionized trails at the edge of the stratosphere were interpreted by the satellite as the plumes of launching ICBMs.
The neural network didn't lie. It honestly interpreted the data it received. To the machine, reflected light and an ionized trail from a hypersonic craft were equivalent to nuclear war. To Wang Wei—they were not.
He received no medal. A few months later, he received a reprimand—for failing to fill out the combat log on time that day. Later, he was quietly transferred to a training center in Heilongjiang Province.
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий
Ваше мнение по этому поводу?