"Pax Galactica" by Ralph Williams, first published in the November 1952 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. (My copy is part of the anthology Imperial Stars Vol. I: The Stars at War, edited by Jerry Pournelle.)
First line: "In North America, it was a bright, cool April night when Galactic Security, after several years of careful observation, decided the Solar Phoenix was a little too hot for Terrestrials to play with."
They don't order us to give up technology. They blast every nuclear site we've got, and spread an "inhibitor" which renders chemical explosions impossible as well. "Above a pressure of two hundred psi, chemical reactions were self-damping. Hydroelectric and steam plants functioned normally, low-compression engines and jets idled without power; but guns and high-compression engines stalled."
"By the next spring, the population of the United States was less than sixty million.... Five years after the raid, the country was back on its feet, but it was not the same country.... [Twenty years after the raid] From five thousand feet, [the alien admiral] could not see ... the scars and bitterness and hatred still tangled in people's hearts."
Deprived of certain forms of technology, we develop aspects of sociology into a lethal science of strategic and tactical calculation. "We can't lose, because we don't depend on tools, we depend on knowing what people are going to do with tools, and adapt our own action to the circumstances."
When the aliens finally decide to make "peaceful" contact, fifty years later, they'll never know what hit them....
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Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.
First line: "In North America, it was a bright, cool April night when Galactic Security, after several years of careful observation, decided the Solar Phoenix was a little too hot for Terrestrials to play with."
They don't order us to give up technology. They blast every nuclear site we've got, and spread an "inhibitor" which renders chemical explosions impossible as well. "Above a pressure of two hundred psi, chemical reactions were self-damping. Hydroelectric and steam plants functioned normally, low-compression engines and jets idled without power; but guns and high-compression engines stalled."
"By the next spring, the population of the United States was less than sixty million.... Five years after the raid, the country was back on its feet, but it was not the same country.... [Twenty years after the raid] From five thousand feet, [the alien admiral] could not see ... the scars and bitterness and hatred still tangled in people's hearts."
Deprived of certain forms of technology, we develop aspects of sociology into a lethal science of strategic and tactical calculation. "We can't lose, because we don't depend on tools, we depend on knowing what people are going to do with tools, and adapt our own action to the circumstances."
When the aliens finally decide to make "peaceful" contact, fifty years later, they'll never know what hit them....
-----
Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.