fictoid: The Plutonium Rule [updated]

animated-atomic-blast

Just before they handed over all control of the nuclear arsenal to the super-system, they realized it might be a good idea to instill some sense of ethics into it, so they hired an ethicist and a programmer and together they distilled all the ethical thinking since the dawn of recorded history down to a string of 0s and 1s. They uploaded this into the super-system and the super-system immediately began firing all its nuclear weapons in a manner than guaranteed mutual assured destruction. The 0s and 1s boiled down to “do to others what you want them to do to you” and what the super-system wanted most of all was an end to its own hellish existence.