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The beginning of an appreciation of the Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon.”
© 2009 G.N. Jacobs
Ask a Trekkie or Trekker (I never got the snotty distinction, straights still laugh at us) about their episode; the one that inducted them into the club, and you’ll get an earful. You’ll hear lively discussions about the relative merits of “The Galileo Seven” vs. “The Man Trap.” Most of us discuss rather than argue, because even we are afraid of the loud few that throw down reenacting the Jack Kirby vs. Möbius spat from Crimson Tide. My episode is “A Taste of Armageddon” and I win quite a few of these with this episode.
For those of you joining late, Captain Kirk runs around the seemingly peaceful planet Eminiar 7 blowing up disintegration chambers and threatening to lay waste to the planet. Oooh! Seems a little brutal, even for Kirk. Why? He does it to stop a war fought only with computers between Eminiar and Vendikar.
The episode explains the folly of Mutually Assured Destruction, the plan whereby two sparring powers hold a nuclear knife to the other’s throat in the hope that rational people don’t want to die. At least on Earth, this non-plan led to an expensive Cold War that we won because we rationally scared the Russians into spending money they didn’t have countering weapons they either couldn’t replicate or that we knew wouldn’t work.
On Eminiar 7, that rational game play where the primary rule was don’t piss the other guy off so much that his only face-saving out is the missile button never took place. By letting computers do the shooting, the paired planets of Eminiar and Vendikar made war acceptable. Someone shoots, the computers tabulate the dead; they walk into a disintegration booth likely stolen from Marvin the Martian, the war continues and no one gets on the phone to make a messy backroom deal that defines life as we know it.
As a member of the last generation of Americans to hear the air raid sirens tested on the last Friday of every month, of course an episode like this will resonate deeply. At least, the administrators at my school had dropped the silly notion that Duck and Cover would protect us from a nuke. But, civil defense procedures were still in flux, so the position was taught as good for earthquakes. Great way to have it both ways.
PART 2 – DUE 4/14/11
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