A hypersonic missile is reported to travel at nine times the velocity of sound, cutting through air defenses with the ease a knife cuts through wet paper. That is not a tool intended to subdue. That is intended to annihilate. Man has crossed the line, from building tools of victory to crafting instruments of extinction.
Guns used to be crude but controllable. A sword, spear, or musket took guts and close-up work. Even the early tanks and planes, as deadly as they were, still demanded strategy and boots on the ground. Things are not the same anymore. A missile fired from mid-continent can burn cities to the ground before the enemy even hears the sirens wailing. Drones can kill with clinical detachment from the comfort of an air-conditioned office. Nuclear submarines can lie under the water for months with sufficient firepower to annihilate the human species. The very reality of war has been stripped of its face—it has been rendered too easy, too distant, and too final.
These doomsday weapons are not even aimed at capturing territories anymore. They are designed to flatten, burn, or level everything to the ground. It’s no longer about taking over ground or claiming power. It’s about claiming the authority to destroy all forms of life in a matter of seconds. The world’s most powerful states allocate billions of dollars annually on arms nobody ever wishes to employ but everybody still yearns for. It’s a global addiction to worldwide destruction in the name of national security.
Strangely, we human beings have become tech-savvy, but are moving in reverse morally. We’ve decoded the human genome, landed rovers on Mars, constructed machines that can comprehend language—but we still have the medieval ambition to conquer. But now we’ve traded horses for hydrogen bombs. That is not forward. That is madness in high definition. We’re at the edge of a cliff, looking to see who has the devastating explosives.
Worst of all is that war isn’t even between countries anymore. Terrorists, rogue nations, and even AI platforms now play with military technology. When those weapons fall into the hands of the wrong people—and they will—it won’t be geopolitics; it’ll be existentially catastrophic. We’re one loose missile from mass graves being the standard, and the Earth a barren rock floating peacefully in space.
And as we come up with methods of vaporizing one another, the actual enemies—poverty, disease, hunger, ignorance—keep on thriving. Bombs won’t feed the hungry. Missiles won’t teach children. A bulletproof vest won’t keep an afflicted child from leukemia. And yet here we are, laying out more funds for death machines than for life-sustaining solutions. We’ve put preservation in second place to annihilation. That’s the peak of human foolishness.
Surely, we would shake our heads over a child playing with fire in a grass field that had not seen rain in months. We can’t help but be amazed at our intellect and appalled by our stupidity. We are so smart, creating the technologies that will destroy us and rationalizing them in the name of peace. It is the ultimate irony of our epoch: peace by threat, security by intimidation, survival by fear.
We are not yet damned—but we are most surely dancing with damnation. It’s time leaders sit not in war rooms but classrooms, hospitals, forests, and slums—to look at the true war zones that count. Because the bottom line is, the only war worth winning is the one against our suicidal tendencies. Everything else is suicide in slow motion.
