Ripheus23

A Labyrinth of Crystallized Light

The scientist did not remember the Low Yield Exchange (also known as the Low Yield Exchange Incident) because she had not been born yet, then. Later, as an adult, she'd come to think about how the philosophy of chaos told her that she would not have been born at all, but for the meeting of the exact same parents as she had, at the exact same time, anyway. Evolution had been kidnapped by extinction, was being dragged towards the monster's layer; this scientist owed the darkness her very life nevertheless.

... [As it turned out, the use of the "mutually-assured-destruction doctrine" to hold back the end of days worked due to the absolute-proof theorem. However, the spider between the lines spun a web of lies that inspired the nuclear militaries of the Earth to develop an enormous number of "low-yield explosives," meaning in the 0.1KT to 10KT equivalence range. Yet so many were manufactured and used that the death toll during the LYEI still amounted to an unprecedented statistic of democide. Here are hypothetical examples of the unconventionally large number of fatalities (from single/limited-number bombing runs in an urban area) during the LYEI:

Seattle: 29,000

Omaha: 35,000

Washington, D.C.: 112,000

Tel Aviv: 123,000* [ironically, Jerusalem is not bombed because it is not recognized by Iran as the capital of Israel]

Tehran: 442,000

Beijing: 1,094,000

Tokyo [don't ask me why/how]: 3,000,000 [assumed]

Delhi: 75,000

Islamabad: 157,000

London: 76,000

Paris: 43,000

Norfolk: 44,000

Pyongyang: 655,000

TOTAL: 5,885,000

The LeMay limit: "theoretical" psychological limit on ordnance expenditure by a given world superpower, over a certain interval. The number is assumed to be around 2 to 3 million (depending on the government in question) and is named in "honor" of Curtis LeMay, the butcher of Japan and Korea. The idea is that the US, for instance, will not use much more energy during a LYE as was used by all factions together during the Second World War. Nevertheless, this "allowed" the US to fire off nearly 3,000,000 tons' worth of low-yield explosives, during the LYEI. (Indeed, it was later discovered that during Operation "Watchmen" a number of political elites had agreed to "grant permission" to each other to use certain quantities of low-yield devices, to kill select numbers of foreign civilians, in order to "demonstrate" the threat of nuclear holocaust sufficiently intensely so that the next generation of political elites would guard against the full-scale form of this threat, i.e. by reaffirming the doctrine of MAD. Unfortunately, the propensity of such a demonstration, to achieve its purpose, was tempered by the widespread apathy expressed about the number of civilians killed during the LYEI, i.e. since it was "too low" ("lower than World War 2," one commentator notes), especially in relation to the global population (7ish billion), it didn't instill enough new dread in enough people, to hold back the future danger of the LYL theory [low-yield lattice theory]...)