Specs for the Ultimate Weapon

    Nuclear weapons are not the "ultimate weapon." Their uses are limited in ways we don't always see clearly, but that are real. As an exercise and in order to  set a mental benchmark against which to measure nuclear weapons, let us imagine a truly ultimate weapon. -A weapon that allowed its possessor to win any war and therefore rule the world. What would one be like? Would it be a bomb that created some huge explosion? A bomb so big it could destroy the world in one blast?

    Or would it be, perhaps, more selective, more precise? What about a death ray that you could use against any one person, no matter where they were, and no matter how well they hid? Set in orbit around the earth, it could fire down and kill any individual. It would have to be directed by an incredibly sensitive monitoring system that could correctly distinguish different individuals even from that height. A weapon like this would have been able to take care of Saddam Hussein without a war.

    This is an ideal weapon for a dictator. Instead of having to rely on secret police to spread fear and compliance, he could command a nation with just this one weapon. Although it might be that if enough people rushed the palace at once, the dictator could be overwhelmed before he could kill every person.

    A less bloodthirsty version of this same idea might be the power to transport anyone from any part of the world to your headquarters instantaneously. There you could hold them until they agreed to cooperate. Perhaps the transporter chamber could be equipped with knockout gas so that anyone beamed there could be disarmed once they arrived.

    Or perhaps the ultimate weapon would be defensive. Perhaps it would be a shield that would make you invulnerable to all weapons. With such a shield you could go anywhere and fight anyone. With a handgun you could conquer the world. Of course, your enemies would try to get at you by threatening the people close to you. Perhaps the weapon's protection could be extended to protect your friends and allies. A weapon like this would have made NATO unnecessary.

    Or perhaps, subtlest of all, the ultimate weapon would not be even a weapon. Perhaps it would be a special mind-control device that let you persuade people. Power, after all, is getting people to do what you want. Violence, including violence with weapons, only occurs after you fail to persuade them. Its point is to coerce them. Mind control would allow you to skip the violent phase of coercion altogether.

    These ultimate weapons are all fanciful imaginings. (Although with the rapid pace of technological change nothing is ruled out.) But they illustrate what a truly ultimate weapon would be: the power to enforce one's will on the world. The record of nuclear weapons, by comparison, is unimpressive. They could not prevent the stalemate of the Korean War, they could not prevent the US loss in Vietnam, they did not prevent the ignominious Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, they played no part in either war with Iraq. It could be argued that they add to the prestige of the nation that possesses them, and some might argue that the US was able to contain the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, but they hardly allow their possessors to enforce their will on the world.

    We cannot dismiss nuclear weapons. They are the most destructive weapons we have created. But why is the image in our minds so peculiarly over-inflated? Why do we talk about them in ways that we cannot possibly mean and that cannot possibly be true?