Free The Worlds of Farscape by Sherry Ginn Page A

widespread domestic and international pressure, President Jimmy Carter secretly gave the go-ahead for the production of components for “enhanced-radiation weapons”—neutron bombs—designed to kill people by massive radiation while leaving equipment and infrastructure largely undamaged (Barrass 216–17). In between and beyond these developments, bombs and bombers were supplemented by the advent of nuclear warheads small enough to be fired by standard artillery or even man-portable recoilless rifles. Warheads were adapted to short, medium, and finally intercontinental-range missiles, to submarine launched ballistic missiles, multiple independent re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), cruise missiles, bunker-busters, et cetera in a never-ending attempt to refine and improve nuclear weapons and their methods of delivery. Simultaneously, the superpowers were investing billions to research and develop various chemical and biological WMDs. 9
    The arms race never truly ends. Not with the power to wipe out human life on Earth, not with the ability to wipe out all life on Earth several times over, not even with the ability to destroy the Earth entirely. Humans, it seems, are always looking for a bigger stick to beat themselves with and have been probably since the first ancestors climbed out of the trees. Farscape takes this propensity for suicidal improvement to its ultimate degree: a weapon that will destroy the entire galaxy, and perhaps even more. Like humanity, the Peacekeepers and Scarrans appear too dedicated to their long-standing feud with each other, too focused on their own hatreds and ambitions, to recognize the insanity of such a progression. Though in the regions of the galaxy where Farscape takes place, nuclear weapons, although not quite beneath contempt, are far from the bleeding edge of munitions technology. Certainly the warheads used by the Scarrans against Arnessk are either nuclear weapons which are several orders of magnitude more powerful than any currently possessed on Earth, or an entirely different type of weapon that far overshadows their destructive power. In either case judging by the destruction wrought by the Scarran missile’s thirteen warheads, weapons capable of eradicating all life on a planet are likely part of both races’ arsenals.
    Again Crichton and Company stand in for those living under the threat of both the Peacekeepers and Scarrans and are the vicarious spokespeople for an audience which has itself spent many years sandwiched between two superpowers. Today no one on Earth can truly believe that a global nuclear war can actually be won or can result in anything better than a long and terrible dark age for humanity as a whole. President Truman himself realized this truth, and in 1953 took the opportunity to express it to the nation and the world in his farewell address, concluding that a nuclear war “is not a possible policy for rational men” (Rhodes 79). Yet the Cold War would continue for thirty-nine years more. Eventually, strategists in the United States would introduce a policy of “mutually assured destruction” of centers of civilian population, consciously give it the acronym of MAD and pronounce it good (Barrass 162–63). Knowing the capabilities of these weapons, they embraced their horror as the best defense. Moreover, they did so in policy sessions from which the vast majority of American citizens, and all of the rest of the world, were excluded. All in the service of what, as Crichton says, is truly “mankind’s greatest contribution to the absurd—the thermonuclear bomb” (“Hot to Katratzi” 4.20).
    Thus, despite Crichton’s protests and warnings, despite their own experiments with wormholes, which have given ample evidence of the phenomenon’s inherent danger and instability, the Scarrans and Peacekeepers refuse to accept that they might well be mucking about with powers which they do