Explore "The Nameless Something" by Murray Leinster on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Like everybody else in the United States, Dr. David Murfree of the Bureau of Standards, in Washington, felt rather sick at the prospect of war under any circumstances, and especially under the conditions obtaining. The point was that the United States literally could not make a sneak atomic attack on anybody. Its prospective enemy could. Nobody in America had authority to issue an order for the beginning of war.
In the European Power's government there was one man who could simply nod his head and have guided missiles go keening up into the stratosphere to fall thousands of miles away upon the cities of the United States.