Paint(ear) Wars

What if we replaced all nuclear weapon stockpiles with Airsoft or Spyder Classic guns? What if we replaced all nuclear ammunition with paintballs? Imagine having prison hospitals full of people suffering from nothing worse than deep tissue bruises rather than missing limbs. Imagine an international web-based scorekeeping system so at any point in time anyone from any country could check on "who was in the lead" (since that seems to be so important to all of us). Imagine giant versions of these guns from fighter jets where hitting a target would simply mean you might wake up with a red house or a green Safeway store or a blue Pentagon.

Or, does war as we know it today have a higher purpose? Is it intended to be part of man's means of shrinking the population? It certainly is effective in reducing the male:female ratios in the world. If we didn't have war, would the human inhabitation of our limited resource, "earth" already be over capacity

(for that matter it already is in some parts of India, Hong Kong, areas of Africa, etc.)?

Or, has war caused us to keep our existence off balance? In other words, what if all the men (it has been mostly men after all) who were killed in the countless, senseless wars caused by greediness, religious intolerance or pure, unadulterated hatred over the last 5 or 6 milleniums had instead survived to their natural deaths? Wouldn't that truly have changed the world? Would we have had a depressed international economy much sooner because there would have been a true glut of people competing for the same jobs or would there have been so many more companies and more jobs because there were so many more people? Would we have been even further advanced technologically?

Hasn't it also wreaked havoc with the environment, I can't think of anything much more destructive in a sudden and complete way than an atomic bomb? And how many unexploded bombs are still all over the world, both on land and underwater? Or, how about a little napalm hit for destroying the surrounding environment (although there are some weeds around here I'd like to hit with that)?

Just saying, having to do a little more laundry because of paintball hits sounds much more palatable than worrying about surviving into the next week. Instead of losing your head you would possibly lose your favorite white shirt. I could live with that.