No one knows who launched the first missile. That's a question for students of philosphy and "history". What passes for the facts are there, plain as a photorealistic day:

At some point in the late 20th century World War III wrought hell upon the living earth. It matters little who bears the guilt. We know that the cost was. There are some trigger, and you could almost see the finger pulling it. In all likelihood all three world superpowers did it; of course nothing is certain. Nothing can be certain now.

With the fall of the Soviet Union the final move in a game so elaborate as life itself was given. Although some "history" scholars presume without merit the true date of the disollution of reality was entirely earlier, even to the 19th century, and all evidence had been brushed under the rug of "history" over time. The game was set; both sides saw the end, and together ran into oblivion.

Whatever pulled the trigger set in motion the events that followed (supposedly): A message from a Lt. Baker c/o NORAD via superencrypted diamond filimant fiber optical line to the personal desk of President T., who was doing a publicity shoot for his save-the-mall campaign in the Oval Office, the aide who answered the call later describing the voice on the other line as "harrowed." Whether it was the Ruskis or the good old USA that pulled the trigger was of little importance. By then we had what we had been searching for, the Great American Dream, the technology that people had toiled for in storefronts and behind cacaphonous assembly lines and cublicles for generations and generations, each building upon the last, but aiming at what?

The only option was immediate retaliatory strike, the icy inevitability of game theory crunching through the various supercomputers that already at that time secretly ran the nation, according to certain scholars, or at least were integral to maintaining the various superstructures which held the world in precarious check. After all, history is fiction. So the story goes that with the whole N.H. off the map the rest, as you well know by now fell to rather terrible times indeed. But that's where the good old American ingenuity came in. You see, they had been planning it all along, at least since the 60s. JFK, Nixon. It was clear as day by the early 1970s what was in store for humanity, with Apple and H.P. building Silicon Valley, the name being not so metaphorical after all, as "history" would prove. It was inevitable before Woz and Jobs had shacked together or something in bell bottoms. Arthur C. Clarke wrote about it in Childhood's End.

The exact date doesn't really matter, when mankind drifted to the final medium. Some scholars maintain there is no real date, and mankind the product of a sublime and unknowable force. Some think it might be a benign force. But really none of that matters. Whoever flipped the switch on in the first palce had in mind what was best for us, right?

We don't believe in any of that nonsense, of course. There are a-priori limitations to go too far down that rabbit hole, no?

[Fades to black and then slowly gaining volume *Cheek to Cheek by Fred Astaire, and then opening to that scene of Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile]