Contact across the Solar System

Peace and War

Kalna and Ilmuth returned to their homeworlds for a rest, then got back into piloting. They decided on some inner-planet-outer-planet runs for variety, and on Titan, they met an old friend, Ramu. He introduced the two to Zuhl, another pilot who had known George. Zuhl hadn't followed the Earth that much, but he was interested in what the two described of the Earth and Earther society. Like big universities in out-of-the-way locations.

It seemed that humanity was continuing to move toward more and more peace, even before the two's recent visit to the Earth. The Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia both peacefully broke up. Yugoslavia broke up in a civil war, but that was winding down also. Saddam Hussein conquered Kuwait, but his armies were successfully driven out of that nation. He claimed that he was recovering his nation's 19th province, but it was very evidently a war about oil.

The Cold War almost turned into World War III several times, but fortunately, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union nor China thought that World War III was worth starting. However, several other nations got them or tried to get nuclear bombs, with varying success. India and Pakistan both got bombs, and Israel, Iran, and North Korea seemed interested in getting them.

Humanity seemed to be gradually moving toward peace. But something happened.

September 11, 2001.

A ghastly terrorist atrocity became news across the Solar System. Four groups of terrorists had taken over four airliners, and three of them had crashed their airliners into buildings. The fourth one crashed into some countryside instead, its terrorists thwarted by the airliner's passengers. The attacks on the World Trade Center hit home for some SSC people, since many SSC people live in high-rise buildings in their cities.

The attacks reminded Ilmuth of a bizarre military strategy that she learned of during her WWII observation days. The Japanese "kamikaze" or "divine wind" suicide attacks, which were flying airplanes full of explosives into American warships. That name was from their hoped-for effect, of being like a hurricane that devastated an invasion fleet some centuries earlier. A hurricane that they decided was a "divine wind". She recalled that while this strategy was not very successful in slowing down the American invasion fleet, it did succeed in freaking out the Americans.

Some years later, a resident sent her a scan of a very touching letter from a kamikaze pilot to his baby daughter. So instead of being with his daughter as she grew up, that poor guy felt that he had to crash himself into an American warship because those oncoming vehicles were so hard to stop. Why couldn't the Japanese have accepted that they were losing? Why attack Pearl Harbor in the first place? The Pacific Ocean was surely big enough for both nations, she thought, and the two nations' war sometimes seemed to her like two little children fighting over a toy.

She told Kalna about it, and Kalna responded that those kamikaze pilots had something to fear. Late in the war, Americans were bombing Japanese cities like crazy, killing large numbers of civilians, and likely reminding them of what their armed forces do to those that they had conquered. Then the Americans dropped those two nuclear bombs on some Japanese cities, with each one doing the work of thousands. Fortunately, the Japanese soon surrendered, and also fortunately, the Americans turned super merciful.

Kalna was mainly observing Europe at the time, doing such things as trying to interpret Adolf Hitler's radio speeches. To her, he seemed obsessed with vengeance and destroying his enemies -- he seemed very fierce. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and others didn't seem so fierce, even when they seemed very firm and determined.

Back to those attacks. It turned out to be militant Islamists who did the 9-11 attacks, Islamists who talked about how their god will reward them by creating for them some very nice women to be their wives. This oddity provoked comments from SSC people like "Weren't they able to meet any real women?" and "Isn't one enough?"

Despite a similar strategy, they had a rather mystifying difference from the kamikaze suicide pilots. The kamikaze ones saw that they were losing very badly, and they wanted to make the most of their coming deaths in battle. The 9/11 hijackers didn't seem anywhere close to cornered.

But the US leaders responded with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the latter war was evidently about oil. Then the "Arab Spring" happened, followed by the "Islamic State". More and more wars in the Middle East and nearby, even as the rest of the world was generally getting more peaceful.