AXES, SWORDS, GUNS, AND NUKES
By Steve Baldwin

If you’ve never been to West Point, it’s definitely worth the trip. Despite the heightened security concerns of the last 20 months, the facility remains open to the public, although you MUST bring photo ID and be prepared to have your vehicle searched (of course, you have to be prepared for this if you expect to make it across town in any major city in the USA these days). And if you have any serious interest in U.S. history, going “on-campus” will be an eye-opening experience, even if you don’t endorse every single move our political leadership has made in the last 50 years (and I don’t know a single American who has). Best of all, it’s free. You don’t have to pay a dime to get a first-hand look at stuff that you’ve been staring at for months on the History Channel. 

There’s a lot to see at the USMA Museum and unfortunately, the Web page maintained by the Academy for this purpose hardly does the Museum’s extraordinary collection of death-dealing weapons justice. (http://www.usma.edu/Museum/Galleries.htm) It just scratches the surface, which is better than nothing, but not by much. 

If you’ve never been to the Museum, here’s a quick summary: Once you clear security, you drive up, park, and head to the Visitors Center. Then, you walk over to the Museum. Oddly, you walk down a ramp to an underground level, which seems weird, except that this subterranean detour immediately deposits you in one of the most awe-inspiring rooms of Heavy Weaponry this side of the Imperial War Museum. In it, you’ll find a World War I tank, a classic Willy’s Jeep, a huge array of cannons and howitzers, the steel casing of “Fat Man,” the first atom bomb, and cases full of exotic heavy armaments, the most peculiar of which was the prototype for the first Bazooka. 

This crudely-made device looks — at least to my eyes — as if some guy simply welded a grip and a stock from a Thompson submachine gun to a 5-foot length of steel pipe that was lying in a yard somewhere, and figured out a way to fire it. Ugly, crude, weird — but it worked. Call it Yankee ingenuity. A very poor photo of this device is available at: http://www.nfatoys.com/tsmg/tcn/1997/mar/mar97p3.htm 

Not that the USMA Museum isn’t anything but ecumenical. In fact, weaponry ware from German, Japanese and Russian sources are well represented. One of the wildest weapons I’ve ever seen has to be the Mauser Model 1918 Anti-Tank Rifle (http://members.rogers.com/georgeparada/articles/pzb.htm). What were these designers thinking? Well, apparently the armor on early tanks was flimsy enough that one could disable the juggernaut with a well-aimed rifle shot. It was the biggest, most malevolent bolt-action rifle I’d ever seen, bar none. Nice to know that you can still buy one (if you have $15,000, see: http://www.midwestordnance.com/mauser1918.htm). I mean, what the heck is the 2nd Amendment for? 

By the time I had spent 15 minutes in the Heavy Weapons gallery, I was reeling. I didn’t know if I was a Republican, a Democrat, a peace-lover, a warmonger, or a kid in a candy store. 

So I drifted upstairs, past cases full of truly primitive weapons, including muskets, maces, clubs, polearms, blunderbusses, and God knows what. Before long, I was drifting past a long line of weapons I recognized from recent war movies and news footage: AK-47’s, Uzis, BARs, Tommy Guns, Colts, Peacemakers, and M-16’s. My eyes glazed over and things began to distort, because some of the weapons, especially the Italian and Japanese jobs, seemed too delicate to kill anybody but the poor guy who had to fire them. Others seemed so heavy that it would kill an average man to even lift them, much less aim them. 

Finally, my eyes came back into focus, and I found myself staring at The Liberator Pistol (http://home.pacbell.net/rlhag65/). Reputed to be “the only pistol that could be made faster than it was loaded”, this el-cheapo weapon was manufactured by General Motors and distributed widely in France, China, and the Phillipines, for less than $2 a pop (I guess that would be about $25 now). If you think that this .45 caliber pistol looks fragile on a Web page, well, it looks even flimsier in a glass case. 

I don’t know why I fixated on this weapon, except perhaps that I suspected that if anybody aimed one of these at me, I’d probably laugh so hard that it would cause my assailant to kill me immediately. But that’s what happens to you when, coming out of a perfectly peaceful, idyllic day in the Hudson Valley, you elect to wander among guns, clubs, blunderbusses, and atomic bombs.

I don’t know why I fixated on this weapon, except perhaps that I suspected that if anybody aimed one of these at me, I’d probably laugh so hard that it would cause my assailant to kill me immediately. But that’s what happens to you when, coming out of a perfectly peaceful, idyllic day in the Hudson Valley, you elect to wander among guns, clubs, blunderbusses, and atomic bombs. 

I checked my watch, and realized, much to my dismay, that I had to move on, without even reading 1/10th of the informative nameplates that accompanied the hundreds of weapons that the USMA has on display. Without even seeing what was on the upper two floors. 

I walked downstairs, but before the exit, I saw something that I hadn’t really noticed before, because it was so darned, um, small. So delicate and harmless looking. It was the Davy Crockett, a 25 kg. tactical nuke that was designed to be fired from a bazooka toward advancing Soviet troops from a range of a couple of thousand meters (http://www.infantry.army.mil/museum/inside_tour/photo_tour/18_davy_crockett.htm). Fielded around 1961, it was retired when its mission was evidently deemed suicidal. Again, Yankee ingenuity at work. Amazing proof that you don’t even need a suitcase to deliver a Hiroshima-sized blast to whomever your enemy is. A light weapon that’s really a heavy weapon. 

I left the Museum, proud to be an American, but aware, somewhat uncomfortably, that Americans aren’t the only people with an astounding genius for ingenuity these days — it has been globalized, along with everything else. And that somewhere out there are people who, with a length of pipe, a firing mechanism, and some bad, bad stuff, would like nothing more than to set off some shop-built version of the Davy Crockett in our general direction. 

I wish those people would go away. I wish they’d mind their gardens instead of taking aim at a nation that deep down, I still believe has peace in its heart. But I don’t think that anything we’re doing right now in the world is going to make us hate us much less. That there will be enough of them out there — the ones who could be coming up with a cure for cancer, or baldness, or an energy-efficient car, but who will take the easy way out, and reach for the gun, instead of the microscope. Which, in the peculiarly narrow syllogism that life in this dangerous world instills, means only one thing: we’ve got to find them and kill them first. 

“Now you’re thinking like Don Rumsfeld,” I said to myself inwardly, checking this uncomfortable flow of weapon-induced logic with the hope that somehow, sometime, we might do better. That we might find a language other than war to make our message clear. 

But then, after staring at all those weapons, I’m not all that sure that history, going back to axe and mace, through machine gun and tank, through Fat Man and Davy Crockett up to the present age of the networked battlefield, will prove my hopes right.

In fact, I’m almost sure it will prove them wrong.

Steve Baldwin is a technology writer involved in Message-Oriented Middleware, Business Process Management and Bayesian Virus Filters, amongst other topics. He also maintains www.disobey.com/ghostsites/, a documentation of roughly 400 extinct Web sites. You can write Steve at Steve_Baldwin@hotmail.com.