Weapons of the Third World War
"We were working secretly/For the military
Our experiment in sound/Was nearly ready to begin
We only know in theory/What we are doing"
The United States' test-detonation of an implosion-type nuclear fission bomb of 11 kilotons of TNT yield at the Trinity test site outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico on the 16th of September, 1945 signalled the development of a new class of weapons, of explosive devices and chemical compounds capable of inflicting massive amounts of damage upon their targets at a minimal financial cost to the aggressor. Antecedents to this class of weapons had existed as early as the First World War, in the German attacks against the Western Allies with chemical weapons. It was only in the second half of the 20th century, however, that this class of weapons evolved into a broad range of weapons possessing almost unlimited destructive power.
Research into nuclear weapons had begun in France as early as 1941; in the aftermath of the Second World War, the governments of the surviving major military powers had become aware of the basic theories underlying nuclear weapons. By 1960, six countries other than the United States -- France in 1947, the Soviet Union in 1949, Argentina in 1951, the United Kingdom in 1954, Brazil in 1958, and Japan in 1959 -- had developed nuclear weapons. By the end of the 1950's, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union progressed beyond simple nuclear fission explosives to thermonuclear explosives. These thermonuclear explosives used fission explosives to trigger hydrogen fusion -- a reaction not dissimilar from that which drive the Sun's production of energy -- and an explosion far greater than anything produced by a fission explosion. First-generation fission explosives could replicate in a few moments the same geographic scope and intensity of damage inflicted on Berlin in the final month of the Second World War; first-generation thermonuclear weapons could reduce central Brandenburg to radioactive rubble. Until the mid-1950's, these nuclear explosives were quite heavy and could be carried only by the most powerful of bombers. By that time, however, the same rocket technologies that were being used for the first stages of space exploration were used to create powerful new rocket engines capable of hurling even thermonuclear explosives thousands of kilometers and accurately delivering the warheads to their targets.
By the beginning of the 1960's, the rapid development of powerful missile launchers and nuclear warheads created an entirely new strategic environment. The military doctrines of the major military powers reflected the realization that no more could conventional air, sea, or land forces be massed against a nuclear-armed power without risking a devastating nuclear strike. Moreover, civilian populations and economic centers were vulnerable as they never were before -- in a nuclear war, missiles armed with powerful weapons could be launched far above conventional battlefields and detonate above a city with appalling results. Worse, it was well within the organizational capacity of modern militaries to launch hundreds of nuclear weapons could be launched at hundreds of different cities. For the first time in world history, a territorially vast country with a population numbering in the hundreds of millions could be razed in the space of a day. Most military strategists quickly came to the conclusion that nuclear weapons were unusable in any conflict short of genocide.
Different nuclear-capable powers reacted to this new strategic environment in different ways. To the nuclear-capable member-states of the League of Nations -- including India after that country's 1971 nuclear test in the Rajasthani desert -- the nuclear threat could be best met by defensive measures. A series of international pacts committed those League member-states at least theoretically capable of manufacturing nuclear weapons to strict guidelines regarding the manufacture, deployment, and use of nuclear weapons. These restrictions included ceilings on the maximum number of warheads that could be possessed by a single power and the explosive force of each nuclear weapon, the limitation of the manufacture of long-range missiles capable of deploying nuclear weapons across "continental" distances, and an unconditional prohibition on the first use of nuclear weapons in war or upon their use in close proximity to large populations of non-combatants or historically significant sites, both categories being defined by the League and international law. Moreover, from the signing of the 1972 Líma Accords, the member-states of the League of Nations collaborated in the construction of anti-missile systems capable of intercepting missiles (armed with nuclear warheads or not) targeted against the territory or property of any League of Nations member-state. Though the financial and human costs were great, the sheer determination of the major League powers to develop some kind of usable defenses began to pay off by the mid-1970's, and the first prototype defenses were installed in western Europe in 1976, and soon deployed throughout the First and Second World member-states of the League. By limiting the proliferation of these weapons and creating limited defenses, then, the nuclear powers of the League hoped to either avoid or limit a nuclear war.
The non-League nuclear powers chose a diametrically opposite strategy: Rather than limit the deployment of nuclear weapons and construct defenses against the likely means of delivery, the governments and military elites of China, Siberia, and the United States chose to engage in an arms buildup in the pursuit of deterrence. As enunciated by theorists, deterrence strategy required that each potential nuclear combatant develop an effective nuclear delivery force that can be protected from first-strike attack, thus ensuring that no combatant could feel free to launch a preemptive attack since massive retaliation would be inevitable. To this end, the number of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of these three countries increased an estimated threefold over the decade of the 1970's, while weapons of relatively small explosive force were retired in favour of new more powerful weapons and new missile systems were deployed. Worse, in 1979 United States President Nixon authorized the sale of a hundred intermediate-range missiles armed with fusion warheads to Indonesia; according to Nixon, the effective operation of deterrence between the Sino-Siberian alliance and the United States in Southeast Asia required that at least one Manila Pact ally be an autonomous nuclear power.
This rapid proliferation of nuclear weapons outside the League was bad enough, but worse still were the new innovations introduced by the scientists of the United States and the Siberian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, who fulfilled George Orwell's prediction in his dystopic fantasy 1984:
"The scientist of today is chemist, physicist, and biologist concerned with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life, such as how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In the vast laboratories of each side, and in the [hidden] experimental stations […], the teams of experts are indefatigably at work."
One worrying sign was the militarization of outer space by Siberia and the United States over the 1970's. Both countries had lost the race to land cosmonauts on the Moon, and despite the minimal scientific successes of each countries' programs of lunar exploration the vast infrastructure and numerous technologies developed at such cost for manned lunar voyages were left wanting for a purpose. Moreover, the Siberian and United States governments were aware that they they were becoming steadily weaker relative to the rest of the world, as the other major world powers increased their general economic and technological superiority to Siberia and the United States. The construction of each power's vast network of surveillance satellites, anti-satellite missile weapons, manned space stations, and even orbiting nuclear-armed missiles began in 1973 and continued over the decade. These military forces were technologically obsolete compared to the latest technologies of the League's member-states and were relatively minor threats to the League; the United States and Siberian space forces could realistically be used only against each other. Nonetheless, the vast resources poured into this spectacular network of space weapons -- extended by the end of the decade to the rival moonbases and possessing some components visible by the naked eye from the earth's surface -- signalled the emergence of a new and potentially vital field of military competition.
If less visually spectacular, the advances made in the development of gaseous chemical weapons were even more important. Since the 1950's, it was within the capacity of most First World countries to develop chemical compounds which, when inhaled by human beings, would cause immediate death. From the point of view of the United States and Siberian militaries, the main fault of these chemical compounds lay in their volatility: a strong wind could blow the compounds away from their target, while the most easily deployable would dissipate from a target area in the space of some few hours. The United States' superior scientific research facilities allowed far more rapid progress than in Siberia, but by the end of the decade Siberia and the United States (and theoretically the major powers in the League of Nations) possessed chemical compounds that could be deployed on long-range ballistic missiles, fired at a target, and released upon arrival to produce immediate death for most higher vertebrates by destroying nervous and respiratory systems. This, the fifth class of chemical weapons, also had the additional trait of persistence: sufficiently dense concentrations could persist for days in normal environmental conditions and remain lethal. These horrifying new chemical weapons were accurately called "chemical depopulants," capable of exterminating dense populations numbering even in the tens of millions in the space of an hour.
Thus, by the end of the 1970's humankind -- more specifically, the two most unstable and aggressive Great Powers in the world -- possessed technologies that could be used to kill immense numbers of people and raze vast territories home to ancient civilizations, all in the space of a day at the outside. Given the gradual deterioration of the world situation over that decade, these terrible technologies might have been inevitably used.