"A Taste of Armageddon" (season one, episode twenty-three; production code: 023; 23 February 1967): Wikipedia-link.
Commentary: "A Taste of Armageddon" is one of the best titles of The Original Series.
The episode is pretty good, too. The planet Eminiar VII is at war with its neighbor, Vendikar (Eminiar III, colonized from Eminiar VII); the war has been raging for over five hundred years. We've all seen the photographs of the ruins of German cities after the Second World War; so, how could a war go on for so long without the civilizations collapsing? Eminiar VII & Vendikar have come to a coldly logical compromise: All the warfighting is done via computer simulation, both attack & defense. No actual missiles are fired, no actual cities are destroyed, but casualties are still inflicted: Citizens show up voluntarily to disintegration chambers.
The Enterprise, having been warned off by Eminiar VII & having ignored the warning (Starfleet's orders are to establish diplomatic relations at all costs), are duly declared casualties of a Vendikar attack, which brings our heroes into the conflict. Captain Kirk ultimately resolves the conflict by destroying Eminiar VII's war simulation computers. Eminiar & Vendikar face the prospect of resuming kinetic war, with all the accompanying horrors of destruction, disease, starvation, & cultural collape. In that light, Kirk invites the leaders of Eminiar VII to do what they haven't done in five hundred years, pick up the hotline to Vendikar & negotiate a peace.
One million to three million citizens of Eminiar VII were killed annually in Eminiar's own disintegration chambers (& were are led to believe the same conditions prevailed on Vendikar) because they had fooled themselves into believing the only two options were to keep killing themselves or to endure the material destruction of real war. Use your imagination! Look for solutions! Think outside the box! Refuse to accept the no-win scenario.
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