Astounding Science Fiction/Volume 44/Number 05/The Editor's Page
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THE REAL PUSHBUTTON WARFARE
The official announcement of the obviously inevitable having been made—some months back now; we are not a news magazine, of course—we are, in reality, operating in the world political situation that was clearly predictable. A divided world with atomic weapons. And the trouble is not with atoms, nor with the laws of the universe. Nature's not nationalistic; she'll answer any properly phrased question asked by any intelligent being anywhere in the universe. The trouble doesn't lie there.
The trouble is pushbutton warfare, and I do not mean the pushbuttons made of plastic and metal by which rockets are launched, or sub-critical masses combined to annihilation. I mean those far more deadly pushbuttons that already exist, all over the world—pushbuttons that have controlled the most deadly of all weapons for many, many years. They're man-made pushbuttons, too—but they're the pushbuttons that set off men's minds.
Oscar Hammerstein II has a fine, bitter verse in "South Pacific" in the song "Carefully Taught" that goes:
You've got to be taught
Before it's too late,
Before you are six, or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate;
You've got to be carefully taught.[1]
This is the way those man-made pushbuttons are made. The United States has the world's greatest industrial machine; we mass-produce automobiles for people to ride in, beds to sleep in, even houses to live in, and television sets to enjoy. More recently the United States has gone into mass-production, assembly-line techniques on atomic bombs. But the greatest mass-production machine for producing those deadly pushbuttons is, unfortunately, not under our control. We do have a few small-scale, handicraft type producers. Their pushbuttons are rather poorly made, and relatively weak, as a matter of fact. It takes the power of a great machine to turn out a really strong, efficient product. Some individuals accidentally acquire a pushbutton which has the label "I've got to kill him before he kills me!"; when that one is pushed properly, we have a homicidal maniac. Usually the unfortunate individual has no more powerful means at his disposal than clubs, knives for pistols. Occasionally he succeeds in setting up an efficient mass-production machine for turning out duplicates of his own pushbutton model; then we have a Hitler, and more powerful weapons are at his disposal. The mass-production pushbutton has now been harnessed to mass-production death.
There are many varieties of labels on those pushbuttons, but all of them are wired—quite invisibly, of course—to human brains. And when the pushbutton is pressed, man—or men—jump. The big mass-production factories turn out ganged buttons, so that millions of men can be made to jump to one single push. It takes a big, government-financed and government-controlled outfit to turn out that kind, though.
That's the trouble with democracy, I guess. We have only a few imported types of pushbuttons and a few made by small-scale local producers turning out an inferior product. The only well-organized pushbutton producers in this country are frittering away their time with such unimportant things as teaching people to laugh en masse. Some, even, are going to the outrageous extreme of teaching people how to disconnect pushbuttons that have been so carefully taught into them. But most of the really effective pushbuttons in the country are imported. Our local producers have the sad habit of going into strictly competitive production; their efforts are largely nullified by mutual competition.
These carefully taught pushbuttons are the only kind that are really dangerous to Man; the metal and plastic kind aren't any good at all, the great intercontinental bombardment rockets, the subcritical masses of uranium and plutonium are all useless—unless a man who has been carefully taught is there to push them. And the man won't be, unless a whole population has been carefully taught, with plenty of pushbuttons installed in that deadliest of all weapons—the human mind.
We have a tremendous lead in production of atomic weapons, and in the technology of machine production.
But our production of mind pushbuttons is a small and feeble, and un-co-ordinated, effort indeed.
The world does not need a defense against atomic bombs. We need a science that will turn off and rip out those pushbuttons.
- ↑ Copyright 1949 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Williamson Music, Inc., publisher and owner of publication and allied rights. Used by permission.