The Weapons of World War IV

I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones!”
—Albert Einstein

Those goddamn aliens ruined everything. We had everything lined up, from artillery and nukes to a few experimental weapons that would’ve made one hell of a bang, if nothing else. Sure, the other guys had their own weapons and stratagems, but that’s what made war fun—a chance to prove your mettle, your glory, your ingenuity—casualties be damned.

And then, the moment the first nuke launched, those damn greys showed up and got their stubby little fingers into our business. Just like that, no war ever again.

“Violent self-destructive actions are hereby banned,” they said. “We assume conservatorship of your planet.” That’s all they told us. There were no gifts of alien technology or cold fusion, no fun or wacky or creative ways to blow up our enemies. Bunch of gray-skinned cowards…

It drove our scientists nuts: ever since that intervention, all our weapons stopped working. It makes no sense. Guns won’t fire at all—not even cannons—but you can still shoot fireworks. Except that any fireworks that happen to fly in the direction of someone’s face (or, say, a major city) freeze in mid-air and disappear. Even slingshots won’t work anymore! Hell, you can’t even have a good old-fashioned snowball fight because those damn interlopers view that as violence, too.

We’ve tried so many things—oh, how we’ve tried. Violent speech is allowed. Face-slapping isn’t. (The hand just freezes an inch away from the face.) Parents can’t spank their children. The S&M crowd got particularly depressed because even consensual violence is off-limits. Gently flicking someone on the forehead is allowed. Strong flicking gets you frozen in place. Bombs won’t detonate, regardless of how you build them; even poisons won’t work. And if you only knew what they did to all our beautiful, precious nuclear stockpiles… That, in particular, just breaks my heart.

Those damn aliens treat us as if we were children, and what’s worse, the civilians are loving it! “No more wars!” they chant. “Maybe we can all get along after all,” they sing at all their hippie get-togethers. Iran and Iraq are having peace and reconciliation meetings. Russians and Ukrainians are still scowling and shouting, but they can’t even so much as shove each other.

A bunch of women are suddenly running for office, now that they don’t have to worry about violence of any kind. And a whole lot of men are going back to school, studying physics, chemistry, and whatever else might help us find a loophole in these nanny-state rules that banned all violence.

But little do they know… It took a lot of research; it took a lot of funding; it took more embarrassing experiments than I care to admit, but we did it. By god, we finally did it. We found a loophole that those damn peaceniks from outer space did not think to cover, and tomorrow, at the break of dawn, our paratroopers will land in key enemy capitals, and we will win this new and final war, this long-awaited, glorious World War IV.

The generals and admirals of eons past would laugh at us if they could see our preparations, our extensive training, the new fighting style we had to develop, but that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is victory, and victory shall be ours. The final world war will be fought with pillows. Our good ol’ ingenuity, combined with the heaviest, fluffiest pillows ever made, will ensure victory. They’ll never see it coming, and when we pillow-fight them all into submission, we shall prevail at last.