Peace on Earth Read Online Free PDF

because the arms race wasn’t so much a matter of production as of research, innovation, which in those days depended entirely on people. But these new machines worked on a different principle, one borrowed from the natural evolution of plants and animals. These were systems capable of auto-optimization, speciation, and ramification, which means they could change themselves and multiply. I was pleased with myself that I had been able to remember that. Was the right hemisphere of my brain, interested mainly in women’s behinds and cake and hating green ties with brown dots, able to grasp such concepts? How could Its memory, then, be of value militarily? But if it wasn’t, I reflected, all the worse for me, because I could swear up and down that It knew nothing but no one would believe me. They’d grill It, that is grill me, and if they didn’t obtain what they wanted with the signs I taught It they’d use better teaching, better signs, and not let go for anything. The less It knew, the more trouble I was in. My life, even, might be at stake. This was not paranoia. I continued to dig into my memory.
    On the moon, the electronic evolution of new weapons was to begin. In this way, despite disarmament, no nation would be defenseless, because it would own a self-perfecting arsenal. And any surprise attack by an enemy, war without declaration, was impossible now, because to commence hostilities a government first had to ask the Lunar Agency for permission to use its sector on the moon. There was no way to hide this, and the side threatened would also apply for permission, and that would begin the return of the means of annihilation to Earth. The whole point was that the moon be inaccessible.
    Neither people nor probes could be sent to learn what military capability a given nation had at its disposal. A clever plan, but at first the project met with strong resistance from the generals and politicians. The moon was to be a testing ground and laboratory for military evolution within the sectors allotted to the various nations. The first order of business was to make sure there was no conflict between the sectors. If a weapon developed in one sector attacked and destroyed a neighbor’s weapon, that would upset the balance of power. The day such news came from the moon, there would be an immediate return to the previous situation and very likely war, a war conducted with modest means at first but in short order the nations would all rebuild their arms industries. The programs of the moon systems, written by the Lunar Agency in conjunction with multinational commissions, contained locks to keep the sectors from attacking each other, but that protection was considered insufficient. As before, nobody trusted anybody. The Geneva Agreement had not turned men into saints or international diplomacy into a convocation of angels. For that reason, after the transporting was completed, the moon was declared off-limits to everyone. The Lunar Agency itself could not enter there. If a defense program in any of the testing ranges was destroyed or breached, all Earth would know about it in an instant, for each sector bristled with sensors that worked automatically and around the clock. They would sound the alarm if any weapon, even a metal ant, crossed the boundary into the belt that was no man’s land. But even this wasn’t guarantee enough. The guarantee was the so-called doctrine of ignorance. Each government knew that better and better weapons were being created in its sector, but it did not know their value vis-à-vis the weapons being created in the other sectors. It couldn’t know, because the course of any evolutionary process is unforeseeable. This had been proven ages before, but the rigid politicians and generals were unreceptive to scientific argument. It wasn’t logic that convinced them; it was the increasing economic ruin caused by the traditional arms race. Even a fool could see that one didn’t need a war, nuclear or