Salmon Sheets

Let's imagine that a war breaks out between two groups of people, X and Y. X type people are mostly concentrated in one part of the world, but are distributed everywhere to large extents. They are wealthy, powerful, advanced, and happy. Y type people are mostly concentrated in another part of the world but are also distributed everywhere. They are far less powerful, advanced, and happy. But a massive percentage of the population sees themselves as a merging of X and Y in varying amounts of each.

Let's imagine that a growing number of Y type people are deeply dogmatic and religious, believing that their Creator has endowed them with the right to kill X type people, not only without remorse, but with joy. Let's say a large percentage of Y type people bitterly want war against X regardless of the impact on themselves.

Let's also imagine that with each passing day, technology from X type people transfers to Y type people because the X type system doesn't have much discrimination against Y type people. Each day, everyone of both X and Y gains more access to more destructive capability.

What happens?

************************ Here's my guess *****************************

One ordinary day we will wake up and find that hundreds of thousands of people in a large city have died in some kind of gigantic blast. The news will be chaotic and no one will know what happened. Bits and pieces will stream into the news echo chambers with each passing minute. Radiation indicates a nuclear device, not just a "dirty bomb." The downtown area entirely destroyed. Southern areas also badly hit. Two experts say it was probably Iran? The triage will be a nightmare: anyone vomiting has fatal doses of radiation, don't bother trying to save them. People with their skin burned off get sent to Memorial Hospital. Now they're saying it's Korea. Broken bones and such go to Children's. Certain signatures indicate Iran. Someone you know will be frantically trying to find out what happened to someone they care about. The President goes on the air in half an hour.

No one really knows what's going on, no one is able to see the big picture, not even the people who committed the atrocity.

Lots of actions will be taken. But it will be chaotic. Things will slowly calm down and return back to normal. Lots of people will be in denial, thinking that it was a one-off event that doesn't deserve the massive response. People go back to what they were doing. Until the next one hits.

Eventually the chaos doesn't calm down and the animalistic parts of people's brains takes over the rational part and people start rationalizing actions that they would have never considered beforehand. These are the people who control huge numbers of nuclear weapons far more powerful than something cooked up in the Third World.

What probably frightens a lot of people is not that Y type people could be so blindly hateful, but that X type people are extremely powerful but act extremely weak. If you and your small children are locked in a room with an angry pit bull and you're holding a loaded gun, no matter how much you might like dogs, if the dog seriously attacks the children, the dog will die. What course of action will most likely save the dog's life: demonstrating the power of the gun somehow or acting weak and submissive?

Sufficiently threatened, America has demonstrated the capacity to invent terrible new weapons never before imagined. And a lot of angry people have never studied history.