Editing Journal of an Alien Diplomat (section)

===Entry Twenty five===
The ambassador worsens now, his health deteriorating. Our meetings last only a few hours, with the rest of our time spent pouring over the larger and larger amounts of information his staff have been releasing to us. Information about their militaries, mostly, knowledge regarding their capability to adapt to warfare in space. Our talk of extra-galactic threats, it seems, has startled several of the species’ military leaders, and they wanted to know how much they would have to change if they agreed to be part of our confederation. We took one look at their military history and realized that they would have to retool their entire military from the ground up. Over nine tenths of the armed forces they had available to them were tied to the ground, with most if the remainder comprising obsolete oceanic navies and aerospace forces that couldn’t seriously threaten our escape pods, much less our juggernaut-tier defender ships. One thing that was actually somewhat surprising to me was the data regarding their nuclear weapons. One file stated that at one point, one of the now-dissolved nations of their people had possessed a nuclear weapon, called Bomb of Kings, that could have produced a yield over two hundred times that of the bomb that diverted that asteroid. A blast like that could have reduced our diplomatic cruiser to a fine, radioactive powder. Yet, it seemed that all such weapons were decommissioned and turned into power plant fuel decades before our first contact. What was surprising to me was that these very warlike people could have displayed the restraint needed to make weapons such as that and not use them. There were well in excess of twenty four thousand nuclear weapons in humanity’s history, detailed in two global arms races in two centuries. Yet only two had been used?