LONDON -- WMD: a new acronym for a new century and what a terrible augury of the century. If weapons of mass destruction are ever used for their intended purpose -- to annihilate mankind -- this century will be mankind's last. Perhaps the flippancy of the new century's young adults should after all be welcomed, since the most powerful nations of the world appear to be organizing this new millennium on the basis of WMD.
Some nations will make them and boast of them; some will make them and hide them; others will pretend to make them and boast of them; some will be destroyed for wanting to make them. And the rest, not having them, will be the voiceless supplicants at the gates.
The one exception in this WMD travesty of civilization is Japan, neither an WMD possessor nor a supplicant. But its special role comes from being the only nation in the world to have had suffered the catastrophe of having atomic bombs dropped on it. When the hydrogen bomb was developed, there were many voices raised in despair and fury predicting that the 20th century would be last of human civilization. And here we still are.