Choice and Duty

Several days before the Wehrmacht invaded Poland Hermann Goebbels, Germany's minister of propaganda, made sure rumors of Polish military activity abounded, going so far as to stage a false flag assault of German soldiers dressed in Polish uniforms on a radio station near the border, thereby rendering the September 1 invasion a "retaliation" for the unprovoked Polish attack.

We've seen that kind of thing before (Quemoy, Matsu). It is a distinct mark of war's beginning that the aggressors claim a violation shortly before they open fire. In today's wars it may be even harder to determine just who shot first. If you're in a submarine, underwater, and totally dependent on coded official communiques you can't easily turn on Moscow TV and check if any story is true, or for that matter, Al Jazeera, Dutch cable news, or UK's BBC.

So you're sitting in front of your missile control screen checking to see that your Tootsie is armed, targeted, and cleared to launch, just waiting for your turn to Pass Go and collect $200, when a novel thought crackles through your cortex: "Is this real? Or just a pretext for us radically-conditioned, subconsciously loyal lackeys to take the bait and bring the world to an end?"

For a real first strike perhaps they'd say your country's been attacked. There's that. But if so, the deterrent has failed and the enemy has set off to kill as many of you as they can. You could attack them in turn, but why? Your missiles wouldn't be deterring anything. Plenty of people are already going to die.

Your missiles would only increase those numbers, possibly ending all life on earth. Now that's a sin of an entirely different sort than just choosing heinously and callously to vaporize, melt, blind, crush, separate into segments, blow away the parts, and irradiate what's left of millions to wither in nauseous agony in one fell swoop. Allowing the enemy to live to procreate and possibly evolve to a peaceful sort has lots of merit in the overall scheme--gentlemanly, if not positively Christian, or ethical if you're not into religion.

If, however, your action was a first strike, you'd also have to consider whether you'd risk your families' evisceration in the ensuing guaranteed counterattack or whether that was just so much malarkey and that the world would be much better off without those feather-brains constantly rattling their hydrogen-sabres.

On the other hand, if your firing was instead the real assurance that destruction would be mutual, review the guidance above about whether increasing the death tolls would be worth it, since you could stay underwater in that well-stocked submarine, travel the world in search of an unirradiated isle where you might thrive a while, and watch satellite TV as to whether the world was really going to make it.

Lastly, you may have to determine whether becoming a submarine missileer was what you really wanted to do with your life, because the MP with the 45 at your temple is likely not to wait very long for your answer to his, "What's the holdup, Mister/Ms?" Unless you and your colleagues are prepared at that point to tell Captain Bligh the ship is no longer his, you may have to conclude risking your death then and there is preferable to ensuring the deaths of hundreds of thousands elsewhere in ten to twenty minutes.

Now this would be a great time to kick back, grab a Bud, and make a lot of chin music about the complexities of conscience. True, it would have been better to think about these things before you ever swore to defend the constitution in uniform. But, alas and alack, whenever do these problems come up at the right time?