Chapter 383 Everyone With Their Own Agendas
While the coalition fleet was headed toward their launch coordinates, a secret meeting of eight global leaders was taking place via conference call. They were discussing a crucial matter that would change the global landscape, both literally and figuratively.
“So you want to send everyone’s entire nuclear arsenal to deal with Eden? You know you’re risking nuclear winter by doing that. Plus, my science advisor says it’ll affect the tides and weather forever if we wipe out an island chain the total size of Australia. Besides, did you forget that just Russia and the US alone have more than enough nukes to use on them?” Putin asked, adjusting the reading glasses he had added to his wardrobe a few weeks earlier.
“That won’t be a problem,” Trump replied. “We think they’ll take out more than 70% of anything we send them, if not more. And even if a third of our nukes get through, we can always activate the kill switch on some of them. Besides, even if we don’t kill most of what slips through, the worst that’ll happen is a few tsunamis wiping out countries none of us give a shit about. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it. Trading a few countries nobody cares about for Eden is a good deal, I’m telling you.”
Once Trump’s translator finished translating, Putin replied, “But we don’t really want them completely destroyed, though, no?” A mischievous smile flashed across his face as he spoke.
“No, no, no, we don’t want that. We need their tech to be recoverable, after all,” Emanuel Macron said in heavily accented English. Though he was the only one that said it out loud, everyone on the conference call was absolutely thinking the same thing.
“Look... I know some of you are afraid of using nukes because you think your citizens will react poorly, but do you think those same people would care about nukes when Eden’s soldiers are slaughtering them? Of course they won’t! And either way, they won’t vote for your reelection whether you use them or not. If you use them, they won’t vote for you because you used them. If you don’t use them, they won’t vote for you because they’ll be dead. Your only hope of keeping your political careers now is if you bring Mr. Michael’s advanced technology back to your countries,” Benjamin Netanyahu said. He planned to use Israel’s entire nuclear arsenal without holding back in order to increase his pull in the political world. After all, nobody would find out if he used everything he had, and they’d assume he kept a decent number in reserve. That way, the belief that he still had nukes would deter other countries from nuking him. It would be a risk, but he was practically salivating at the possibility of being able to do anything he wanted to do without risking retaliation, not to mention being among the first to choose from the spoils of war.
Ram Nath Kovind, the newly elected president of India, chimed in, “We need time to prepare. And at the same time, we need to sign an agreement to prevent any of us from leaving behind stockpiles of nuclear weapons or using this opportunity to attack each other. If anyone violates the agreement, they will become the common enemy of the entire coalition, not just the countries whose leaders are on this conference call.”
Mamnoon Hussain, the president of Pakistan, merely verbally scoffed at the suggestion. “Fine, fine, whatever you say. Not like a piece of flimsy paper ever stopped you in the past, so Pakistan will sign the agreement but I’ll personally ensure that there’s someone keeping an eye on you all.”
“Of course China absolutely agrees,” Zi Jinping said. “We will be the first to sign this agreement and the first to enforce it if enforcement becomes necessary.” When it came to politics and power games, he would never trust anyone, so he would be the first to hold back a stockpile of nuclear weapons. After all, everyone was going to anyway, and the agreement he had just proposed would be nothing more than a polite fiction that would only fool the gullible.
He came from a country where political power came not from the support of citizens, but by being ruthless and savvy enough to win the constant internal struggles in the ruling party of the country, so his thought processes were slightly different from the rest of those on the conference call. They were, at least on the surface, democracies. And democracies had to care about the opinions of the proletariat voters who, Zi Jinping believed, should not hold any power or authority at all. The reason his country was so strong was because they kept people aligned to a strict hierarchy where everyone was content to remain in the places the government had determined were the best for them. Even the capitalists in China were the same; if any one of them were to get any funny ideas, they would be ruthlessly slapped back down among the masses and suppressed.
Eden, in fact, was like that. If the entire world was to be compared to a communist state, Eden would be the upstart capitalist attempting to make waves. It was up to the world to slap them back down into the mud where they belonged, then strip them of their assets and redistribute them for the good of the ruling party. That thought process was exactly why China was so willing to be the first country to betray the fledgling republic of Eden in the beginning, and so far, their schemes had been wildly successful beyond their most optimistic estimates.
None of them knew, after all, that they were all simply monkeys dancing in Aron’s palm, or that he had predicted every single move the entire world was now making with almost perfect accuracy. Had they known that, things might have proceeded along a completely different track, because what mortal would dare to spit in the face of a walking god?
But unfortunately for them, they had been kept in the dark.
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