The Next Logical Step

What happens when war becomes a computer game, and the player never has to see the blood? Ben Bova's cold war nightmare follows a CIA agent introduced to a revolutionary war simulation machine so precise it can visualize the outcome of any conflict before a single soldier deploys. As he watches flawless predictions of nuclear apocalypse unfold on the screen, the horror isn't the destruction itself but how easily the architects of annihilation scroll through scenarios of global extinction without flinching. The physicist and general who built this monster believe they're serving peace through knowledge. But the agent begins to wonder: at what point does looking at death through a glass screen make you complicit in the killing? Written in 1962, this is the ancestor of every drone operator and AI warfare fantasy, a grim meditation on how technology promises to make war clean and somehow makes it even more monstrous.