"Jerry Pournelle - Falkenberg 3 - Go Tell the Spartans" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pournelle Jerry)

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...lle%20-%20%20Falkenberg%203%20-%20Go%20Tell%20the%20Spartans.txt




Go Tell the Spartans
FOR THE THREE HUNDRED
Go tell the Spartans, passerby,
That here obedient to their laws we lie.
PROLOGUE
The history of the 21st century was dominated by two developments, one technical and one social.

The technical development was, of course, the discovery of the Alderson Drive a decade after the
century began. Faster-than-light travel released mankind from the prison of Earth, and the subsequent
discovery of inhabitable planets made interstellar colonization well nigh inevitable; but the development
of interstellar colonies threatened great social and political instability at a time when the international
political system was peculiarly vulnerable. Whether through some hidden mechanism or a cruel
coincidence, mankind's greatest technical achievements came at a time when the educational system of
the United States was in collapse; at a time when scientists at Johns Hopkins and the California Institute
of Technology were discovering the fundamental secrets of the universe, scarcely a mile from these
institutions over a third of the population was unable to read and write, and another third was most
charitably described as under-educated.

The key social development was the rise and fall of the U.S./U.S.S.R. CoDominium. Begun before the
turn of the Millennium, the CoDominium was a natural outgrowth of the Cold War between the
Superpowers. When the Cold War ended, the European nations once known in International Law as
"Great Powers" retained some of the trappings of international sovereignty, but had become client states
of the U.S.; while the Soviet Union, shorn of its external empire, retained both its internal empire and
great military power, including the world's largest land army, fleet, and inventory of nuclear warheads
and delivery systems.

In the last decade of the 20th century both the United States and the Soviet Union experimented with
foreign policies that left the rest of the world free to compete with the former Superpowers. It soon
became clear, if not to the world's peoples, at least to political leaders of the U.S. and U.S.S.R., that the
resulting disorder was worse than the Cold War had ever been. It was certainly more unpredictable, and
thus more dangerous for the politicians, who had, under the Cold War, evolved systems to ensure their
tenure of power and office. The political masters of the two nations did not at first openly state that it
would be far better to divide the world into spheres of influence than to allow smaller powers to rise to
prominence; but the former United Nations Security Council easily evolved into a structure which could
not only keep the peace, but prevent any third party from challenging the principle of superpower
supremacy. . . .
***
The 20th century social analyst and philosopher Herman Kahn would hardly have been surprised by this
evolution. One of Kahn's speculations had been that the natural form of human government was empire,
and the natural tendency of an empire was to expand, there being no natural limit to that expansion save
running up against another empire of equal or greater strength.


file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruisw...0Falkenberg%203%20-%20Go%20Tell%20the%20Spartans.txt (1 of 159)20-2-2006 23:17:51
 file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...lle%20-%20%20Falkenberg%203%20-%20Go%20Tell%20the%20Spartans.txt