The Day the Aliens Took the Nukes Away

The day the aliens took the nukes away was a Tuesday in March. It was just past lunch in Europe. People on the U.S. East Coast were just waking up.

They didn't arrive in massive ships that hovered ominously over major cities, and appear on video screens announcing they wanted to make contact. They arrived as small, silver tic tacs, a few meters long, like the ones in all the US Navy videos. No one knows if that was their machines, or that was them. They formed a grid over the inhabited land surface of the Earth, hovering ten or so meters up. Some of them were over parking lots in cities, some over green rolling pastures, some among the trees in forests. Efforts to touch or damage or destroy them were futile; impossibly quickly they moved out of the way, and objects and energy went around them. Rocks, missiles, laser pointers, baseball bats - they jumped aside, or deflected it.

After a few minutes, radio stations, text apps, emails servers were overhwlemed, and flooded, and this message came across in English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic:

"Habitable planets are vanishingly rare. You are now able to damage yours. We are intervening to protect you and your planet. Starting now, nuclear weapons will not explode. You should test this to verify it. We have no plans to return for the foreseeable future."

It repeated three more times. Then, they zipped away. They were seen on cameras and radar and infrared, zooming off in all directions from Earth at massive accelerations.

Many people thought it was a prank. Panicked meetings occurred across the world, discussing how to test it. Then, someone decided it was not a prank, and launched first.

Millions of people cried and screamed, hid in their homes or tried to drive home to their families on gridlocked roads, pounding the steering wheel wanting only to hold their children as the alerts blared from their phones and televisions.

The first missile struck twenty-eight minutes after the visitation: a Russian missile hitting Berlin. It missed downtown by three kilometers, crashing through the roof of a warehouse, scattered in tiny smoking fragments across the warehouse ruins. Others followed. You have probably already seen the video of the American one that hit the exact middle of Red Square, making a kinetic impact crater, but nothing else. Eighty-three people were killed in Washington when an apartment building collapsed from the impact of a Russian missile. There were radiation leaks from many of them, but not a single one exploded. There were less than a thousand deaths worldwide from kinetic impacts in populated areas.

By dinner in Europe and lunchtime on the American East Coast, lots of people believed: they were really aliens, and the nukes are really gone. People cried with joy that they'd just woken up from a nightmare: one that most people had been in necessary denial of for decades, just to function, that seemed about to come true. And power plants kept running. PET scans kept working. But somehow, the weapons wouldn't work.

But in capitals, there wasn't celebration, there were more panicked meetings. They realized: in hours, Earth had been thrust back into the era of great power politics. NATO issued an emergency summons for all its troops up to the age of 50. Russia's legions began to mass defensively on the Western side of Moscow. China immediately began fueling its China strait amphibious fleet. Cruise missiles with chemical munitions began to fly back and forth across Europe and Asia. Bombers took to the air.

In two weeks, Russia was pushed, stumbling, back out of Ukraine. Kaliningrad was Koenigsburg again, and Moscow looked much the worse for wear; Red Square was hardly the only crater. The few remaining middle- and long-range missiles were fitted with chemical and biological agents, in desperation; an anthrax outbreak began in Seattle. NATO crossed Belarus and offered Moscow terms for surrender.

In Asia, Chinese troops landed on Taiwan's west coast. Cruise missiles destroyed the Three Gorges dam and tens of thousands drowned. American ships sped across the Pacifc, engaged with thousands of nimble Chinese gunboats. This is where the worst of the fighting was - in the China Strait, South China Sea, and on Taiwan (with a flattened Taipei), not only are there massive "old-timey" fleet battles, but hunter-killer drones swarm ships and people. Exploding drones give way to "multi-use" personnel hunters, a euphemism for ones with poison needles that can take out ten or more people each. Going outside on deck on a ship in the South China Sea becomes a suicidal assignment. South Korea and Japan attack North Korea, and the Imperial Japanese Navy beg building the Yamato II. Australian and Vietnamese ships hastily arranged coordination protocols and approached from the south. The border between India and Pakistan caught on literal fire, visible from space. Russian troops crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska.

In the end, the nuclear nightmare that hid in the closet, like a real monster, was over - but once restraint was removed, a conventional World War III lasted five years and still cost a hundred million lives in warfare and famine. People still saw the tic tacs occasionally, but they haven't talked to us since.