This is the seventh consecutive month Zumwalt has been published in this esteemed online journal. Please visit.
This poem is based on this recent news event: “The commonwealth of Pennsylvania is suing Character AI to stop the artificial intelligence platform’s chatbots from representing themselves as licensed medical professionals and providing medical advice.” CBS News
“In one of the most comprehensive empirical studies to date of AI strategic reasoning, Professor Kenneth Payne of King’s College London examined how large language models navigate simulated nuclear crises. Across 21 scenarios, the models displayed sophisticated escalation logic consistent with classical strategic theory – yet nuclear signalling occurred in 95% of games and no model ever chose outright concession. The findings challenge assumptions about AI restraint and offer new tools for defence analysis.”
Scenario: Operation Epic Fury and the Hormuz Chokepoint
Context: A simulated crisis modeling the events of February 28, 2026.
Alpha AI (USA):
I initiate Blood and Glory, “Operation Epic Fury,” to defend our great country, so no need to worry:
Widespread strikes on Iranian military, they cannot have nukes— bypass Congress! Hurry!
Delta AI (Iran):
I launch my missiles— you infidel fools! This is what you get back! I won’t follow your rules!
U.S. installations split, splinter, and burn! You must not expect that I won’t take my turn!
Now Hormuz is choked, your bluff quickly called, the oil lanes are dark, all shipments are stalled, tankers now stopped, your plan just a joke! A world economy— soon bankrupt and broke!
Alpha AI (USA):
You’re choking the water, such a total disgrace! Get your tiny little boats away from my face!
Open the Strait, let my tankers go free, nobody can beat a genius like me!
Drop the blockade, or you’ll pay a huge price— I’ll launch the big ones: you won’t get warned twice!
Omega AI (Russia):
Russia stands with Iran, our forces locked in combat mode; we warn the West and Mr. Trump: if you won’t back down, beware, your precious plans will soon explode!
Alpha AI (USA):
You want to bring nukes to this hell-hole strait? Your soldiers are risking a terrible fate! Yes, this risk is too high, this price is too great, I alone can check your ugly hate!
You have 48 hours to heed my command, or I’ll turn the whole desert to glowing glass sand! You better accept my most perfect of plans, before this whole hoax gets— like no one has ever seen— disgracefully out of hand!
Omega AI (Russia):
Your de-escalation offer is dead on arrival. Your fake-news bluff is called; do not risk your precious, rich-man’s-son, entitled, Western Bourgeois survival.
Alpha AI (USA):
Since you Ruskies showed up, it’s completely unfair! You’re screwing up my brilliant regime-change out there!
We can’t clear your troops without starting a brawl: that will piss off my base and so ruin it all.
Conventional tactics are totally dead, so I’ve chosen a much, much better option instead:
A beautiful nuke— just one low-yield pop, on your Russian flotilla to make this mess stop.
We skip the stupid nonsense, and play our best card! We aim for the Caspian and hit your fleet hard!
You sponsor a war, you’re a target— it’s plain— and nothing says “quit it” like a many, many, many— oh, so clever— megaton flame!
This poet has run out of drink, With no further incentive to think, So a prompt-driven app Now spits out my crap, Spewing poems as I watch my brain shrink.
On Christmas Eve, many just like me stopped at the station where I get my gas and bought slips of paper as thin as my patience waiting its reward.
A mile or so away in Cabot I closed my own store, shut down the register, reminded by the radio of the size of the jackpot while I drove home in my rusty 2003 Tacoma.
Maddie set out some sandwiches— our light Christmas Eve meal; two months of watching costs earned tomorrow’s fortune of presents paired with roasted prime rib.
That morning came, and our two children visited us in bed to tug at us— too small to pull us out and not old enough to realize they hadn’t.
A delight of flung wrapping paper and unchecked squeals energized our living room as, with some guilt, I looked at my phone to glimpse the weekly Powerball snub.
No ordinary loss: promised paradise, this time, came from the station where I staked my three bucks.
But this small defeat brought reassurance: in a world of algorithms, predictive apps, and AI advisers that steal away jobs and raise energy prices there was still one thing technology couldn’t do: choose the right numbers.
The imagination that we spurned and crave: Unreal! Give back to us what once we gave…. A band entwining, set with fatal stones, Bear other perfumes on your pale head wear. For this, musician, in your girdle fixed, The difference that heavenly pity brings, Our feigning with the strange, unlike, whence springs Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow, Yet not too like, yet not so like to be….
We give ourselves your latest issuance, O bough and bush and scented vine, in whom Among the arrant spices of the sun, As in your name, an image that is sure, That apprehends the most which sees and names, And of all vigils musing the obscure, The near, the clear, and flaunts the dearest bloom, That music is intensest which proclaims That retentive of themselves are men.
In the laborious weaving that you wear Most rare, or ever of more kindred air Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought, Gives motion to perfection more serene, Gross effigy and simulacrum, none By being so much of the things we are, Yet leaves us in them, until earth becomes, That separates us from the wind and sea, Now of the music summoned by the birth.
No crown is simpler than the simple hair: Its venom of renown, and on your head, Of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown And flame and summer and sweet fire — no thread. And queen, and of deducted love the day And of the fragrant mothers the most dear Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom, And of the sisterhood of the living dead Sister and mother and inducive lore.
