The Enterprise, with special Ambassador Robert Fox, played by Gene Lyons, aboard, is en route to the NGC 321 star cluster to try to establish diplomatic relations with Eminiar VII, the most technologically advanced planet in the area. More than fifty years earlier, the Federation starship U.S.S. Valiant was listed as missing in space after it transmitted a report from Eminiar and then vanished. The information from the Valiant‘s transmission was that the Eminian Union was at war with its smaller neighboring planet Vendikar.
As the Enterprise moves closer to the destination solar system, Lt. Uhura receives a looping Code 710 message from Eminiar’s High Council, instructing the starship to “under no circumstances” approach their planet. Captain James T. Kirk is more than willing to heed the dissuasive communication. But Ambassador Fox, who has the authority to give Kirk orders, insists on proceeding. He points out the urgency for the Federation of negotiating the right to set up a treaty port in that sector of space. A landing party of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Yeoman Tamula, played by Miko Mayama, and two male Lieutenants beams down to a courtyard adjacent to the building complex of the Eminian Planetary Division of Control. The government official Mea-Three, played by Barbara Babcock, greets the Starfleet officers. She leads them to the chamber of the five-member High Council, which is chaired by Anan-Seven, played by David Opatoshu. Anan expresses to Kirk his regret that the Federation ship disregarded the Code 710 warning. He explains that his home planet is still engaged in belligerent conflict with Vendikar, the third planet in their star system which was originally settled by Eminian colonists. The war between Eminiar and Vendikar has been going on for five hundred years. Casualties from direct enemy assaults total between one and three million civilian dead per year. “As long as your ship is orbiting our planet,” Anan says to Kirk, “it is in severe danger.”
Anan’s explanation is interrupted by a loud air raid siren. “Vendikar is attacking,” he tells Captain Kirk. One of the Council chamber walls slides open to reveal a War Room, filled with mainframe computers, illuminated graphs, and a sizeable marble map screen. Flashes of light burst on the map. “A hit! Right here in the city,” Mea-Three exclaims to Kirk. She further clarifies that the Vendikans are attacking with fusion bombs, “materialized by the enemy over their targets.” Anan sorrowfully adds that his wife died in the previous round of hostilities. He tells Kirk that a vicious and extremely destructive onslaught has just been carried out by the ruthless adversary. A half-million people were killed. Eminiar will immediately launch a counter-offensive against its bitter enemy.
In spite of all the talk of annihilation, wide-area scans by Yeoman Tamula’s tricorder indicate no bomb blasts or radiation disturbances of any kind anywhere on the planet. The war of the worlds is waged entirely by computer simulation. In other languages, the episode is called Computer War (Krieg der Computer in German and Kompyuta Sensou in Japanese). After a cyberwar computer program determines precisely which citizens have been terminated in a given virtual explosion, “deaths are registered.” The designated victims have twenty-four hours to report to a disintegration machine.
First Councilman Anan-Seven ruefully informs Captain Kirk that the starshipEnterprise, currently in orbit around Eminiar, has just been struck by a tri-cobalt satellite weapon. All of the ship’s personnel and passengers must dutifully present themselves for extermination by noon tomorrow. This is the same fate that befell the crew of the U.S.S. Valiant fifty years ago.
The standard Eminian assisted-suicide station is an enclosed walk-in recess with an orange retractable door and flashing overhead light. A dematerialization specialist operates the cylindrical control panel while an armed security person stands guard. A married couple embraces for eternity. Stepping into the booth one at a time, the deaths of loved ones are separated by mere moments.
A war is going on in virtual cities. It is a devastating, bloodletting video game in all of its graphic and lifelike splendor. Houses are ablaze. The sky is red glare above the digital cityscape. A fire team leader is shouting out commands. Hungry refugees are hurling rocks at riot police. Here a strobe-lit missile meets its hospital target at pure speed. There shrapnel erupts in a child’s face. A quick-response unit is gathering thrashed and mutilated bodies for mass burial.
In A Taste of Armageddon, The Original Series is so close to storytelling with words that it is not necessary for us to see the electronic killing game with our android eyes. We can imagine it. In 1967, the war video game was still unrepresentable. What we see instead in the episode is the scatological detritus ejected by the game, the bombed-out desert of the real, the Data Trash. The humanoids we observe in the corridors of power, Mea-Three, Anan-Seven and the others, are living shadows of their own forthcoming deaths. They are mere specters of the primary reality of the online game. They are the mirror-people.
To keep the hyper-reality of cyberwar going, the ghost-people must continue to exercise a certain “minimal” function in the real. To lend the game its requisite weight or support, they must furnish a necessary dose of reality-effect through the chalking up of their disappearance. The battle-simulation computers of Eminiar and Vendikar are “tied in with a subspace transmission unit” that links them in real-time. When the game has tallied a hit in a section of the city, deaths are recorded and “obsolete” bodies perish in extermination booths. The spectral individuals “out here” must keep up the accuracy of input-output information that feeds and keeps in balance the legitimacy of the virtual reality game system “in there.” As in feedback or retroactivity, data about the “real world” comes to be generated in reverse direction by the virtual system or war video game itself.
Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and the rest of the landing party are taken hostage to put pressure on Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott, who is in temporary command of the Enterprise, to negotiate the surrender of more than four-hundred-and-thirty crew members who are “already dead.” The Eminians try to lure the starship’s personnel down to the planet with an oral transmission delivered in a counterfeit Kirk voice. Computer analysis reveals that the voice patterns are not those of the Captain. After the failure of this ruse, Anan-Seven orders his “planetary disruptor bank” combat operatives to fire on the Enterprise. Since Lt. Commander Scott has raised the ship’s shields, no damage is done. But the ultimatum regarding the killing of the hostages remains in force. Ambassador Robert Fox makes the mistake of beaming down to the planet’s surface to clear up what he thinks is a “misunderstanding.” He is added to the hostages.
Spock tricks a security guard with a telepathic suggestion, allowing he and Kirk to escape from their holding cell. They demolish one of the disintegration units (number 12) with a hand-held weapon taken from the civil authority guard. Kirk makes his way back to the High Council chamber. He confronts Anan-Seven, “holding him” with the “disruptor” gun.
Captain Kirk threatens to unleash a less sanitized form of devastation on Eminiar using the Enterprise‘s tactical systems. Anan protests that Kirk is already condemning his planet and Vendikar to horrific destruction of their civilizations by not complying with the time-honored regulations of the computer virtual war. If Kirk and his crew do not report immediately to disintegration chambers, a diplomatic agreement “dating back five hundred years” will be broken. Real war will break out. There will be “disease, starvation, horrible lingering death, pain and anguish.” The First Councilman of Eminiar pleads with the commander of the Enterprise to reconsider his decision.
More government functionaries enter the Council chamber, and Anan regains the physical advantage over Kirk. The Captain has been cut off from contact with the Federation starship for quite some time. When Anan-Seven calls up the Enterprise on a confiscated communicator to demand again that the crew transport down, Captain Kirk seizes the chance to speak with Lt. Commander Scott for a few seconds. He shouts to Scotty, within hearing range of Anan, that the Chief Engineer should execute General Order 24 in two hours. Anan asks what General Order 24 is. Kirk elucidates that the Enterprise will destroy the planet Eminiar unless the Captain issues a rescinding order within the specified time. Anan thinks Kirk is bluffing, but the latter makes plain that he is not: “I didn’t start it, Councilman, but I’m liable to finish it.”
Kirk overpowers another guard assigned to him. Moments later, Spock and the other landing party members enter the Council chamber armed with disruptors. Kirk explains to Anan-Seven exactly why he finds the kind of “war” practiced by the two planets so repugnant and unacceptable. “Death, destruction, disease, horror. That’s what war is all about, Anan. That’s what makes it a thing to be avoided. You’ve made it neat and painless.”
Mr. Spock makes an assessment of how the networked computer system in the War Room works. There are processing units controlling the disintegration booths, the virtual attack weapons, defensive systems, and the computation of casualties. Spock proposes an action to bring down the dedicated data communications link between this installation and its counterpart computer system on Vendikar. The interruption of information exchange will be interpreted as an abrogation of the “agreement between the two warring parties.”
Captain Kirk fires his disruptor on the “key” computer, setting off a chain reaction series of explosions that destroys all of them.
Anan-Seven is shocked. He is greatly distressed over the expectation of real war that will follow Kirk’s consequential deed. Kirk suggests that Anan contemplate the antiwar option of giving real peace with Vendikar a chance. “You can either wage [real war] with real weapons, or consider an alternative: make peace.” “Contact Vendikar,” Kirk continues. “I think you’ll find that they’re just as terrified and appalled as you are.” Ambassador Robert Fox steps forward to offer his assistance as United Federation of Planets diplomatic mediator. Anan sees a glimmer of hope. There is a direct channel to the Vendikar High Council that has not been used in centuries. Anan and Ambassador Fox start to discuss how they will proceed, as Kirk revokes General Order 24.
Captain Kirk elaborates further his interesting and minority antiwar position. “We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands. But we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers, but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes. Knowing that we’re not going to kill today.”
A Taste of Armageddon is a perfect parallel to Jean Baudrillard’s thesis in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991) that “we are no longer in an Aristotelean logic of passage from the virtual to the actual, but in a hyperreal logic of deterrence of the real by the virtual.”
Baudrillard is in no way saying that nothing real happened in 1991 in the Persian Gulf. Of course, the brutal regional tyrant Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Coalition bombs fell, and civilian casualties were high. Life-sustaining infrastructure was destroyed. There were catastrophic long-term health and environmental consequences for the Iraqi population. After Kuwait was “liberated,” tens of thousands of people were killed by Allied aerial forces in the infamous “turkey shoot” atrocity on the road to Basra, in complicity with a dictator willing to sacrifice his own people to keep his power. 145,000 Iraqis were killed, according to a demographic study by the U.S. Census Bureau. Baghdad’s slaughter of Kurds and Shiite Muslims followed, consented to by Western forces. Thousands of American soldiers have died or been disabled by “Gulf War Syndrome,” probably caused by the use of “depleted uranium” in U.S. weapons systems.
But what took place was not war, but something else. It was the simulation of war, or its substitution by deterrence. It was an exercise in (self-)domination of Western cultural citizens by their states and institutional elites. This political-rhetorical control takes place as the primary contemporary power system in the virtual, electronic, and informational spaces of the media. So much information is in circulation at such high speeds that “historical events” lose their sense. Events do not have the time or context necessary to take place. They are displaced by hyperreal “media events,” which are neither real nor imaginary. But the “consequences of what does not take place can be as heavy as those of an ‘historical event.’” (Jean Baudrillard)
In addition to careful management of images and information content, the true devastation of war is kept at bay from our perceptions by simulation technologies ranging from the televisual screen to the military “smart weapons” deployed from altitudes of tens of thousands of feet. During months of preparation for the “war,” viewers experience endless military experts paraded on the screen, endlessly analyzing scenarios before they happen. The pilot in his simulator cockpit, or gunner in his high-tech tank, is surrounded by a virtual environment and motion-dependent images which are the same whether he is in a war game training exercise or a “real engagement.”
The tens of thousands who actually die are secondary reality-effects of the primary virtuality system. These people’s deaths are of lesser importance because they are outside of what really counts. Their deaths are pre-calculated. They are “collateral damage.”
Real war is a dual relationship or antagonistic confrontation between adversaries. But in the Gulf “War,” the enemy was never truly engaged. What happened was the “non-engagement or avoidance of direct encounter between the parties involved.” (Paul Patton) For one side, it was a traditional war, and lost in advance. Saddam Hussein hid most of his airplanes in camouflaged concrete bunkers with fortified doors. U.S. aircraft bombed pieces of cardboard and fiberglass painted as decoys to look like missiles and missile launchers. Iraqi soldiers ran to surrender to Western television cameramen. For the other side, it was a virtual war, and won in advance. Not only were the levels of military technological capability totally disparate, but the two parties always talked on different levels. Hussein was willing to retreat from Kuwait in return for concessions, and waited for a phone call from President George Bush that never came. Bush refused negotiation at every turn, as “events” played out their preprogrammed logic of a test case demonstrating that no one is allowed to cross a certain “line in the sand.”
In A Taste of Armageddon, the two alleged opponents, Eminiar and Vendikar, never directly engage each other for five hundred years. The computer simulation of war is a method of domination by the sovereign state over its own population. It is the “victory of the model,” or the success and “implacable execution of the program.” (Jean Baudrillard) Eminiar is a simulacral power engaged in the simulacrum of war, using the foe Vendikar, or the Other, as a convenient alibi for its perfect crime.
September 11, 2001 was a “pure event” where “the new came into the world” and something truly took place, in blunt horrific reality. The terrorism of radical Islamic fundamentalists is a real danger to civilians in every part of the world. Yet in the post-September 11 era of the “war on terrorism,” governments are once again not able to straightforwardly enter into conflict with the adversary. President George W. Bush does not directly engage al-Qaida. On 9-11 itself, U.S. Air Force defense planes failed to follow automatic intercept procedures and never left the ground. Due to the superabundance of information, not its secrecy, so-called conspiracy theories are undecidable. This is precisely their importance. In Afghanistan, the Taliban were those who “harbored” the enemy and “would not hand over” the enemy. Al-Qaida eluded capture at Tora Bora and re-dispersed. The new “preventive” Iraq attack was planned and discussed in the virtual for years, against the evil head of a secular regime who could become a partner to al-Qaida in global terrorism.
The logic of the preemptive strike is virtual. Under the sign of prevention, deterrence, test, warning, or punishment, “tough guy” talk and action are a lesson in the conditional to “those who would.” By definition, the terrorist enemy comes into existence after the fact. Before the attack, as potential attacker and enemy, it exists as informational entity or statistical propensity, endlessly speculated on and reported in the virtual realm of the media.