Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Fahrenheit 451 Project

The year is 2028. Russia, North Korea, and China have banded together to form an alliance devoted to eradicate democracy and freedom in the world. They finally decide to start their attack, and launch nuclear missiles and send ground troops over the border from Russia to attack several countries, Poland, Latvia, and Lithunia. You are the general of the army, and you must come up with any solution possible to destroy the nuclear missiles and protect the earth from global nuclear war. The solutions you come up with will be forwarded to the president who will make the final decision on how to handle this crisis.

My solution takes the form of a letter to the president from the general of the army.


At the end of Fahrenheit 451, a nuclear bomb dropped by America’s enemies completely destroys the city that Montag had lived in. Throughout the novel, nuclear war had constantly been hinted at, whether it be a radio transmission, or if it was just a casual talk and war was just talked about as a far away event. Eventually, nuclear war does happen, and vaporizes Montag’s home city within seconds. The way that nuclear war is treated in the book is kind of like in real life. While never directly at the center of attention, the threat and possibility of nuclear war always is omnipresent in the novel hanging like a cloud on a sunny day. In real life, it’s a little bit like that, though not mentioned as often. Every once in a while though, there will be reports of a nuclear missile test going off in a different country, or a country that has just developed a nuclear power site claiming it’s for energy, and they’re small steps towards the awful possibility of global nuclear war. In 1947, the bulletin of atomic scientists started a doomsday clock, a clock that measures how close the world is to nuclear war. The closest it’s been was in 1952, when the United States and Russia tested nukes within two months of each other, right around the time that this book was published. I think that the tense times between Russia and America influenced the outcome of this novel.