Yes, I know, it’s been thirty years. But something just occurred to me. The whole justification for Veidt’s plan (in both the book and the movie) was that he was sacrificing a few million people in order to avert a nuclear war which would kill billions of people.
But was it really a sensible plan? I’m not talking about killing the millions; I’m talking about whether it would work. Sure, we saw that the immediate aftermath of the attack was nations banding together against a common threat.
But nations have banded together against common threats before. The United States and the Soviet Union got together during World War II to fight the Nazis. But it didn’t make us permanent best buddies. Once the threat was gone, the fundamental differences between us reasserted themselves. And now both sides were better armed.
Why did a smart guy like Veidt think things had changed? Sure, the United States and the Soviet Union would drop their differences and form an alliance against the aliens/Dr Manhattan (depending on which version you go with). But the threat was a fake. After a few years, people were going to notice there hadn’t been any follow-up attack and would begin to stop worrying so much about the external threat. And then all those Cold War issues would start coming up again.
Veidt hadn’t ended the threat of nuclear war. He had basically just postponed it for maybe ten years. At a cost of several million deaths. And the reaction to the alien/Dr Manhattan threat wouldn’t have been just a temporary peace and alliance. There would have also been a big military build-up. And with the threat not showing, all those troops and weapons would just be sitting around waiting to be used. This would increase the likelihood of a major war breaking out and make it much deadlier.
Can’t blame this on Snyder, Hayter, and Tse. This one falls on Moore.
By far the weakest part of Watchmen is the ending, though unlike a temporal common enemy like Nazi Germany, Veidt’s “alien squid” had a “psychic shock-wave” effect of some kind, so there would be no shortage of sensitive persons worldwide who would be utterly convinced the threat was real and ongoing.
Of course, once the squid’s tissue is examined and found to be genetically modified but still Earth-produced, the jig is up. Funny thing is, Moore doesn’t seem to have anticipated the development of a reflexive paranoia, where it wouldn’t matter what the evidence was - there would be people denouncing the event as “fake” within seconds of it occurring and for their entire lives. In this particular case, they’d be right.
Which well known super-genius hero with a well-documented aptitude for genetics (recall that interview where Bubastis is discussed) do you think the world is going to ask to examine the evidence?
A postponement of ten years seems pretty good when the alternative is nuclear holocaust within hours – a lot can be done in ten years.
If you like, you can imagine that Veidt had plans (of course he had plans). Perhaps he intended to use his vast international business empire to manipulate the world governments into a position where attacking each other would be unthinkable. Possibly tighter cultural and economic connections would foster an on-going alliance between the US and USSR (and who owned Burgers ‘n’ Borscht?).
No, everything isn’t settled for ever and ever, but there is, at least, hope that everyone isn’t going to die this week.
Surely that’s what The New Frontiersman is? But what difference are they really going to make? Imagine if there really was a huge, unanticipated disaster in Manhattan, killing thousands of people. Suppose some people didn’t buy the official narrative, and used every means at their disposal to their own conspiracy theories of what really happened. Would everyone immediately believe them, causing the collapse of the status quo? Or would they be mocked, and laughed off message boards?
I have to say that, personally, coming to the end of a story and having a strong sense that, in that fictional world, events would continue to happen and the characters would carry on living their lives, is more of a positive quality that a negative one.
One, mention is made in WATCHMEN of why Americans “continually push their unearned advantage until American influence comes uncomfortably close to key areas of Soviet interest”: because they think Russia will keep ceding territory rather than fire nukes, due to “a belief that American psychology and its Soviet counterpart are interchangeable.” But – as is noted in the same piece – Soviet decision-makers who remember the horror of a war being fought on their soil by Hitler’s troops “will never again permit their nation to be threatened in a similar manner, no matter what the cost.” (“If threatened with eventual domination, would the Soviets pursue this unquestionably suicidal course? Yes.”)
Two, the other reason why the Americans continually push that unearned advantage until American influence comes uncomfortably close to key areas of Soviet interest is because – well, because there is an unearned advantage to be pushed, is the thing. “It is as if – with a real live Deity on their side – our leaders have become intoxicated with a heady draught of Omnipotence-by-Association”.
So, taken together, the alliance doesn’t need to be permanent; it just needs to last long enough that we get Russian decision-makers who do think like Americans instead of choosing suicide, if Americans keep pressing their unearned advantage; except it doesn’t even need to last that long, once Doc has been taken off the board and America no longer had the option of ‘unchecked adventurism unless you suicidally launch nukes, which we would not do and we assume you would not do.’
Also, consider what the President says after Doc’s exit: “I don’t know. I’d always kind of hoped that the big decision would rest with somebody else. This is going to take some thinking about.” Mull that for a while. Mull that for a looooong while. It’s going to take some thinking about, and he’s never really bothered before?
Well, he’s thinking now. And he doesn’t want to pursue a suicidal course of action. Given a pretext to back away from the brink, what does he do?
It’s not like they’ve got samples of Actually-From-Another-Timeline tissue in a fridge somewhere, such that they can compare the squid to those, and also compare it to some of Veidt’s genetically-modified locals as MrDibble noted, and say huh, it looks more like the latter. Instead, they just – have no frame of reference at all, right? They can note that the squid is somewhat similar to life on Earth, and can but shrug if someone says “well, maybe life there is somewhat similar to life here.”
Certainly Veidt had plans to manipulate public opinion; note for example the change in advertised perfume brands from the dark, backwards-looking “Nostalgia” to the forward-looking, positive “Millennium”. Control the messages, change the zeitgeist, exert enough influence to get a more progressive administration in place (led by Robert Redford?), and you’re already well on your way to averting the longer-term disaster.
The fly in this particular ointment (apart from Rorschach’s diary) is flagged by Dr M just before leaving: nothing ever ends, and there is no once-and-for-all solution to the problems of mankind. Veidt has averted today’s holocaust and will avert tomorrow’s. But next year’s, or next century’s? Maybe, maybe not…
It doesn’t make sense for the Soviets to have any nuclear capability in a world where the US has the cooperation of Dr Manhattan. The real concern should be how likely it is for another Dr Manhattan to be created.
The ending used for Watchmen isn’t original with Moore. It was used for the Outer Limits episode “The Architects of Fear” back in 1963 (with Robert Culp as the Ozymandias, and as sorta the role Dr. Manhattan would play in the movie version). In that, the threat of extraterrestrial invasion was used to unite humanity, again using genetically-modified earth tissue. Moore was reportedly unaware that he’d been scooped, but he paid tribute to the OL episode in the comic, and they have the Outer Limits opening playing on the elder Ms. Jupiter’s TV at the end.
But the Meyer dolinsky-written TV episode was by no means the first use of the idea. The oldest I know of is William Tenn’s (Phillip Klass’s) story “Alexander the Bait” , first published in 1946 in astounding and later included in his anthology the Square Root of Man. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone else had beaten Tenn to the punch.
The idea of Mankind uniting against a common threat is a pretty decent one for a story, and you have to admit that the threat of super-scientific extraterrestrial invasion, especially if backed up by tangible planted and faked evidence (as in these three stories) is a pretty convincing one. It would, I think, last a lot longer than Cold War-era alliances based upon lesser threats with less evidence and lower consequences. Certainly the idea of technologically superior invading aliens is one of the oldest science fiction tropes around. It was conceived as an analogy to the decimation of less technological native societies by the European colonizers not only by H.G. Wells, in his magnificent War of the Worlds (1897-8), but much earlier by Washington Irving in The History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809 as by Diedrich Knickerbocker).
Nobody wants to be taken down a peg by anyone else, so I suspect the deception would hold for a long time. And even when it eventually broke down, it would have served its purpose of delaying any war for a number of years. It’s been a while since I read Watchmen, but I think Adrian Veidt makes exactly that argument.
All life on Earth shares the same genetic code, and even assuming that other life uses the same biochemistry as Earthly life, there’s a combinatorically-large (that’s much larger than astronomically-large) number of other possible genetic codes that would work just as well. Even if every star in the observable Universe has a planet with life, we would expect that none of them would share the same code as Earth. If we find a purported alien which uses the exact same genetic code as Earthly life, then we will know that it is not actually an alien.
Now, Veight’s bioengineering might be good enough to create life with a different genetic code, but that’d be an awfully tough row to how.
Fritz Lieber published “Wanted: An Enemy” in 1945, and it shares the same basic plot.
As for Watchmen, it seems clear to me that Oz was wrong about the risk of war- the parallel plot of the Black Freighter absolutely spells it out- and accomplished nothing with his gambit but killing innocents, damning himself, and forcing the world to waste zillions on research on interdimentional travel, which may not even be possible.
According to one of the in-universe text items, Dr Manhattan has stated that he could only stop about half of the Soviet nukes in an all-out attack – he’s powerful, but not omnipotent. That implies that destroying all their nukes before they can launch the remaining ones isn’t a viable option. If anything, they’d build more nukes to make sure enough got through.
The world hadn’t been on the brink of nuclear war within hours. Part of Veidt’s plan was pushing it to that point before making his attack.
The normal course of events was the status quo, where the United States was the world’s strongest power due to Dr Manhattan and the Soviet Union couldn’t confront the United States directly. Veidt altered this status quo by convincing Manhattan to leave Earth. With Manhattan gone, the Soviets were looking to take advantage of America’s relative weakness and shift the balance of power. This brought the world to the brink of war and had everyone on both sides scared. Veidt then launched the second part of his plan - the attack - and redirected their fears.
But once things calmed down, the fundamental strategic situation would still exist. America would have a favorable position in the world which it had achieved through Dr Manhattan. But it would no longer have Dr Manhattan to sustain that favorable position. The Soviets would at some point want to address that imbalance.
It’s a good thing I wasn’t Night Owl - I would have killed Veidt just out of principle for what he did (he’s not going to catch every bullet I send his way!). But the situation he created might have needed his guiding hand to stabilize. I might have accidentally cause WWIII! oopsies.
When you think about it, the Soviets must have been spending a ton on intrinsic field removal experiments. Probably disintegrating a dozen people a day, waiting for one to learn how to put himself back together.
Wasn’t part of Adrian’s explanation that Jon was withdrawing more and more from humanity, and was probably going to stop defending America in the near future anyway? Once Jon left, war was inevitable, regardless of why he did.
Nite Owl did try to kill Adrian. With a freakin laser, not a gun. While Adrian was also fighting Rorschach. Adrian didn’t even break his monologue. What chance was Nite Owl going to have afterwards?
IIRC, all that’s mentioned is that whatever happened to Jon was certainly unplanned and just as certainly unrepeatable, with no mention of failed attempts. (That said, my head canon is that it was repeatable – and that the only guy who’s shown to own his own personal Intrinsic Field subtractor used it on himself following a conversation about how Nothing Ever Ends – but that’s just speculation on my part.)
Unless I’m remembering wrong (my book is at home - unless you’re talking about the movie?), Night Owl shot him, and the only thing that saved Veidt was that he caught the bullet. A fine trick, and one that can probably only be used once.