SAMANTHA MEAD

100530643
Word Count: 1,394
CRN: 18340

SHORT HISTORY OF THE

WORLD: FINAL
ASSIGNMENT
Our Fate is In Our Hands

When we were first assigned the task of reflecting on our experience in the Short History
of the World course, I was initially finding it difficult to choose what I wanted to write about. I
found my choice in the second to last class of the semester when a quote was put up on the
screen and we were asked to consider its implications in the world of today. Martin Luther King
Jr. once said, We can live together as brothers, or perish together as fools.1 Humans, as a
species, are the most advanced creatures on Earth, creating societies and gaining the knowledge
through which to manipulate the planet for our own personal gain. The greatest problem that
humanity faces today, is how we use this knowledge. As the quote states, we can either use
knowledge together to save the already dying planet, and learn to live in a state of peace and
cooperation, or we can destroy ourselves by continuing to battle against each other for power.
Over the past few millennia, we humans have been steadily perfecting more and more violent
ways of hurting each other.2 More recently, since the twentieth century, technological
advancements have allowed mankind to not only create, but in many cases perfect some of the
deadliest weapons the world will ever know. Our success as a species is leading to many
unintended consequences, mainly those monsters that we have created with our own technology.3
There is probably no greater nightmare than the prospect of attacks through the use of chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons, which I believe to be three of the most deadly advancements in
science to have been made in the quest to find the ultimate advantage.4 With these weapons of
1 Lon Appleby, A Short History of the World: Prometheus Lecture, 2015.
2 Evan Ackerman, Electromagnetic Arc Generator Could Protect against
Shockwaves with Plasma, published by IEEE Spectrum, 2015.
3 Fred Guterl The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause its Own
Extinction and How We Can Stop It, Bloomsbury, 2012, 4.
4 Chris McNab and Hunter Keeter, Tools of Violence: Guns, Tanks and Dirty Bombs,
Osprey Publishing, 2008, 253.

mass destruction present in the world today, it has become a matter of the highest urgency to
preserve and strengthen international cooperation and international treaty arrangements.5
As quickly as chemical warfare was discovered, the civilized world has been trying to eliminate
its threat with limited success.6 Over the course of World War I, Germany had developed and
discovered ways of using chemical weapons in battle, but they would not be the last nation to do
so.7 Germanys affiliation with chemical weapons would become more devastating to the world
population during World War II, when Hitler commissioned scientists to explore more options
for chemical warfare.8 What they discovered would lead to the greatest genocide that the world
would ever know. Through the use of the pesticide Zyklon-B, gas chambers in concentration
camps would claim the lives of six million Jewish people, a number that was originally intended
to be as high as eleven million.9 This genocide shows how the knowledge of a chemical
compound originally intended for agricultural purposes was abused to kill millions of people.
Also during World War II, we would see the most destructive weapon every devised take shape
and be deployed, resulting in the instantaneous deaths of seventy thousand people in the
Japanese city of Hiroshima.10 This of course was the atomic bomb, and what would be the
beginning of the era of nuclear warfare. While what was considered the nuclear arms race once
5 Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr., Commonsense on Weapons of Mass Destruction,
University of Washington Press, 2004, 5.
6 McNab, n.3, 253.
7 McNab, n.3, 256.
8 Scott Christianson, the Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas
Chamber, University of California Press, 2010, 149.
9 Christianson, n.7, 154.
10 Don Nardo, World History Series: Weapons and Warfare, Lucent Books, 2004, 90.

only existed amongst around a half dozen of the Worlds most developed nations, several new
nations have recently joined the ranks of nations possessing the capability of at least limited
nuclear warfighting.11 One of the greatest fallouts of nuclear warfare cannot even be seen
immediately. Just as great as the threat of a bomb wiping out a massive amount of people as it
explodes, the side effects caused by the radiation can also have a lasting impression on the
population, and can lead to the deaths of those who may have survived the initial blast.12 The
term Nuclear Holocaust is a compression of the twentieth centurys two worst inventions,
leading to a fate in which the survivors would be envious of the dead.13 Realistically, we should
be grateful that the threat of nuclear war is just that, a threat and not yet a reality. It is believed
that had a thermonuclear war occurred between the United States and the Soviet Union during
the Cold War, the human civilization would have likely been destroyed.14 Even though there is an
effort being made in present day to remove the threat of nuclear warfare by destroying any
nuclear warheads that are in existence, it is probably too late to reduce the role that they play in
the future of civilization.15
The third technological advancement to have been made is in the field of Biological weapons,
which go further back in history than either chemical or nuclear weapons.16 Biological weapons

11 McNab, n.3, 255.

12 Graham, n.5, 23.
13 Ron Rosenbaum, How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III,
Simon & Schuster, 2011, 28.
14 Graham, n.5, 27.
15 Rosenbaum, n.13, 259.
16 Graham, n.5, 120.

are defined as devices that spread pathogens to sicken, or even kill an enemy.17 They can be seen
as early in history as the fifteenth century when the Spanish presented the natives of Peru with
clothing contaminated by smallpox, which rapidly spread, decimating the population.18 As the
global population continues to grow, we are creating conditions that are ripe for a plague of
twenty-first century proportions.19 Viruses that exist on their own in the world are not the biggest
threat of this type. Emerging methods of biotechnology are beginning to open up ways of
modifying existing viruses so they would be more lethal, and could spread more quickly than
anything nature ever made.20 Many scientists believe that we are currently on the verge of a mass
extinction event, one that would make the Black Death look like a mild recession, and something
that Homo sapiens have never experienced, but will only ever experience once.21
It would seem, that the more advanced we become as a species, and the greater our quest for
knowledge, the more we are at risk of being the cause of our own devastation. If we ignore the
eminent threat that the weapons previously discussed pose on our extinction, we are probably
still going to the kill the planet for future generations. In 2012 alone, it was estimated that the
global military expenditure stands at over $1.7 trillion annually.22 Included in this budget is
explorations into advanced weapons to give each individual nation an edge over the next. If some
of this funding was removed and allocated to saving the planet by reducing the causes of global
17 Clay Farris Naff (ed.), Biological Weapons, Thomson Gale, 2006, 7.
18 Graham, n.5, 120.
19 Guterl, n.3, 3.
20 Guterl, n.3, 97.
21 Guterl, n.3, 27.
22 Anup Shah, World Military Spending, published by Global Issues, 2013.

warming, we would be in a much greater state. As it stands, this is not the case. Although the use
of chemical weapons is largely in the past, nuclear weapons and biological weapons still play an
imposing and ominous role on our future. The struggle for power in the world is ever growing,
and if the nations of the world continue to work against each other, and continue to seek out each
others destruction, we are going to find ourselves in an all-out state of war as early as during this
century. If we cannot learn to co-exist on this planet, and allocate our research and knowledge to
reversing the effects that we are having on the Earth, we as a species are not going to survive. In
the very long run, if humans dont wipe themselves out with a big war, we will live in an
engineered planet, in the sense that it isnt natural anymore.23

23 Guterl, n.3, 174.

References
Ackerman, Evan. "Electromagnetic Arc Generator Could Protect Against Shockwaves with
Plasma." - IEEE Spectrum. 25 Mar. 2015. Web. 17 Apr. 2015.
<http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/military/boeing-files-patent-forelectromagnetic-arc-generator-to-protect-against-explosive-shockwaves>.
Christianson, Scott. The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber. Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2010.
Graham, Ambassador Thomas Jr. Commonsense on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2004.
Guterl, Fred. The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and
How We Can Stop It. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012.
McNab, Chris and Hunter Keeter. Tools of Violence: Guns, Tanks and Dirty Bombs. Great
Britain: Osprey Publishing, 2008.
Naff, Chris Farris (ed.). Biological Weapons. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006.
Nardo, Don. World History Series: Weapons and Warfare. Detroit: Lucent Books, 2004.
Rosenbaum, Ron. How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2011.
Shah, Anup. "World Military Spending." - Global Issues. 30 June 2013. Web. 17 Apr. 2015.
<http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending>.