It was a Tuesday afternoon when they sealed the borders of the campus.
Confusion spread around the place as students and faculty found they could not leave. Shortly after the police and paramilitary trucks rolled into place to block access, the president of the university administration was heard on all the loudspeakers on campus, calling for all students to go to their dorms and all faculty to their offices; if they live off-campus, then they should stay in their classrooms, he clarified.
Twenty minutes later, as the sound of helicopters whisked the air with a steady chopping beat, uniformed teams of administration lackeys strode into the gathering rooms of the old campus. They carried with them large black bags and cases. They all wore hard plastic face masks and body armor, giving them the appearance of riot police. Each team carried a portable radio, which they turned on loudly while they called for the increasingly nervous population to sit down and shut up. The voice of the president quacked to life:
“You are now a part of a vital experiment, in which you must participate at pain of legal action or bodily harm against your person. These people in black are referees. You must obey them and you may not harm them. They are carrying your equipment for the experiment. The campus has been cordoned off into two base halves, and you are now on a team by virtue of which building you happen to be in right now. The referees will give you armor with pressure sensation and GPS tracking, and everyone will receive a paintball gun. West campus is the Red Team, East campus is the Blue Team. After everyone is issued equipment, the doors will open. Your team must capture the other team’s beacon and bring it safely back to your citadel, a location which the referees will reveal when they produce each team’s flag. When you are shot, depending on where you are hit, you will either have to receive in-simulation medical care or you will be out of the simulation and your gun will stop working. If you are out of the simulation due to your wounds, there will be a nightly airlift to take the disabled to a holding facility where you will stay until the simulation ends. The campus will only be unsealed when one team has captured the other’s beacon and returned it to their own citadel, and I personally verify that they have won. Each side of the campus has one dining hall currently in their possession, which is stocked with enough food to support the needs of half the campus population for seven days. Enjoy the paintball war.”
His voice did not rise or fall, nor were there any hesitations or errant utterances, while he delivered this most unexpected address.
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It’s no secret that U.S. President Barack Obama wants a nuclear-free world. Who doesn’t other than the military-industrial complex?
However, destroying the most powerful weapon in human history altogether may be too much. There are plenty of legends and fantasy stories in which a great weapon thousands of years past has either been lost or destroyed and must be reforged or rediscovered in order to meet a threat the likes of which the world has never seen.
I believe very strongly that weapons generally exist to kill people, not to defend people. But there are at least two global threats that would warrant an atomic sword like the one we wield now: killer asteroid and hostile extraterrestrial attack.
There are several ways to deflect an asteroid and using a nuclear weapon is not necessarily the most effective one, but it is a useful one. And as I have mentioned before, I believe that it is more than likely that extraterrestrial life will come in peace, but if for some reason they do not or if they look upon our greedy ecophagic ways with scorn and fear, we may need to do an evil deed to keep ourselves some semblance of alive.
But the people of the world will not be able to live in mutually-agreed peace if one or a few sovereign countries hold their swords high above the heads of those who cannot have it. Furthermore, those scenarios are ones which go far beyond the problem of national or regional stability – they threaten the existence of all things on Earth, including humans, all of which were around long before the State. Albert Einstein provides a solution in his letter “Atomic War or Peace” that the wielders of the atomic bomb should give up their use to the United Nations. In this way, the UN could act as a defender not on earth, but of earth. The UN would not need to have the thousands of nuclear weapons that currently exist; rather after a satisfactory period of disarmament by the nuclear powers some 10% could be handed over to UN stewardship.
Let us hope though that upon completion of this great beating of swords into plowshares that the great and terrible power of nuclear weapons becomes a hallowed legend in the human chronicle and not a day-to-day living reality. Otherwise we could inadvertently come to know what it is like to live as they do in the chilling 1984 BBC television play Threads.
