After World War I, Winston Churchill felt that the tank might have won the war in 1917, if only it had been kept secret properly, and deployed intelligently, instead of being thrown into battle piecemeal. Tanks combined with skilled generalship almost did win the war, in the battle of Cambrai, but the advantage was squandered. See: J. Laffin, "British Butchers and Bunglers of World War I," (Sutton, 1988). If, during the Battle of Gettysburg, a half-dozen of the 1865 model improved Gatling guns have been available to one side and not the other, I believe the war would ended with Pickett's charge. (If both sides had had them, it would have been a bloody trench war stalemate like World War I -- as indeed it became by the time Gatling guns were deployed in 1864 at Petersburg.)
It is not out of the question that someone might develop cold fusion enough to produce something like the dreadful remote control "mini weapons" and "crows" I described in the book, in Chapter 11. You would not have to perfect a megawatt-scale cold fusion reactors to produce them; they would require only 10 or 20 Watts mechanical. Something with the power of a remote-control model airplane or helicopter would do the job. They would be very cheap to manufacture. I did not go into detail, but consider an organization such as Al Qaeda decided to make some. Al Qaeda has tons of money. (The CIA says that 95% of men under 40 in Saudi Arabia approve of Al Qaeda and consider Bin Laden a national hero, so I am sure they have unlimited funds at their disposal.) If the technology were available, it could easily afford 50,000 remote-control robot "crows." They would be similar to model airplanes and would cost perhaps $300 each in quantity, or $15 million total. In the book I described how such devices might be used to attack a military base and go around assassinating people wearing uniforms. It does not take much imagination to think of what else they might do, in the hands of people who have no qualms about committing cold-blooded mass murder. Suppose, for example, you had 50,000 crows available, and a few hundred people hiding in the U.S. to control them. On day one you randomly select and kill a 16 people in cities and towns across the country. The next day you kill 32. Then 64, 128 . . . then you go on the radio and announced that the United States must immediately withdraw all troops from the Middle East and the price of oil will be $100 starting now, or the killing will escalate. Of course the US government would defiantly refuse at first. But imagine how things would be when the numbers reached 2,048 in a single day? This would be after 4,080 deaths, and you would still have a stock of 46,000 "robots" remaining. The country would be in an absolute uproar, with chaos everywhere. Europe and Japan would also be in hysterics. People everywhere would stay indoors all day long; food would rot in the stores; patients would die in hospitals, women in labor would be stranded, and people would soon starve. There would be riots, and the police and the military would be overwhelmed. Think of what happened in Washington, DC a few years ago when a pair of snipers began shooting people at random. Multiply that by 1024, then 2048 . . . I think a few days later the U.S. would -- in effect -- negotiate a surrender.
Of course you can go around killing 1,024 people a day with baseball bats or guns, and we kill roughly 70 people a day with automobiles by accident, and 30 others more-or-less intentionally by drinking and driving. But the "crows" would make it much easier to carry out this lunatic scheme, and they would be much harder to resist or defeat.
This is mere science fiction now, but I think it may be closer to actuality than people realize. If anything like this does happen, it will certainly be the fault of the US government and of institutions such as the APS. History will judge harshly, just as it would have judged Roosevelt if he had had ignored the letter from Einstein, and the Germans or the Japanese had moved ahead with the development of nuclear weapons. The Japanese probably could not have done it, but I think the Germans could have. They had all the labor and resources of Europe at their command. They spent vast sums on similar projects, such as building the Western Wall to resist the invasion of France.
Actually, history might not judge so harshly, because the history books are written by the winners. Your grandchildren may be taught that this was how enlightenment and Shariah Islamic law came to the benighted people of North America, how the despotic U.S. passed into history, and why our women must wear hijab, and so on. This may sound outlandish, but very often history has been changed radically by some humble new gadget that fits in the palm of your hand, such as movable type or 10 g of gunpowder tucked into a metal tube. Empires are overthrown and continents reshaped by a little knowledge and by some discovery that seems, when it is made, insignificant.
- Jed
