<font color="yellow">"We're human beings, with the blood of a million savage years on our hands. But we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes, knowing that we're not going to kill, TODAY" </font><br /><br />But just let some Klingon trash materialize off our starboard bow -- and that son of a gun's dead meat! <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /><br /><br />But seriously... I do believe this was Kirk at his most eloquent -- and even his detractors concede he was a silver-tongued devil.<br /><br />And yes, this particular episode has Cold War angst written all over it. I've had to dig it from deep memory, but I believe I recall that the Enterprise encounters a solar system where folks on two of the planets are fighting a war of holocaust.<br /><br />But it's all computer-driven war games with no actual shooting. They worked it out as a way to not destroy infrastructure, while still carrying on their war. The downside: when the computers reported an individual as a casualty of war, that individual was expected to voluntarily report to an extermination center poste haste.<br /><br />Things get complicated for Kirk when one of the wargame computers reports that the Enterprise has been caught in the interplanetary crossfire (although it is, in fact, still happily orbiting) -- and that all the crew should accordingly report to be exterminated.<br /><br />Pretty much nobody who was alive and walking around in the 1960s went more than a day without considering the prospect of nuclear war in some context or other. Nobody who watched that Trek episode would have failed to reflect on the fact that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. regularly conducted similar computer simultions to gauge the effects of nuclear war.<br /><br />Also, I couldn't help remembering it later when President Cater considered developing the so-called "neutron bomb" -- designed to use penetrating radiation to inflict maximum casualties while preserving infrast <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font color="#0000ff"><strong>Just tell the truth and let the chips fall...</strong></font> </div>