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By Root 1282 0

have not changed: terrorists with bombs, conventional or nuclear, do not care who they kill, since everyone in a targeted city, country, or civilization is deemed guilty of pursuing an unjust war against them. Their savage logic is that there are among their enemies no non-combatants. All Americans, Israelis, Britons, Shia or Sunni are guilty of transgression against them. Naturally, the intended targets of such attacks find such thinking barbaric, as indeed it is. But let us remember here twentieth-century attacks on non-combatants in ‘Mespot’ and India, at Guernica, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Warsaw, in Coventry and London, at Hamburg and Dresden, at Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. These attacks were undertaken in the name of ‘air policing’ (policing is part of security and less than war), unabashedly to terrorize a population and thus force a quicker end to war (a humane strategy, no?), or to ‘de-house’ war workers (their houses were to be destroyed, not them). Technological advances allowed, in Vietnam and Iraq, the use of ‘smart’ bombs, which found only military targets—unless they didn’t, in which case the result was ‘collateral damage,’ a term suggesting that civilian casualties were an unfortunate byproduct of an attack on a legitimate target. Alas: no type of bomb is smart all the time. One might argue that those who use technologically sophisticated weapons are at least trying to avoid killing civilians; that is not the case for a suicide bomber who blows himself up in a crowded marketplace. And yet, in both cases the result is the horrible and predictable death of innocent people.

It would be pleasant to think that governments and terrorist organizations acknowledge limits to the kinds of attacks they can make, the kinds of weapons they might use. Not since Nagasaki has anyone dropped an atomic bomb on a city, and the energy with which nations have condemned the use of biological or chemical weapons—by the Iraqi government against the Kurds in Halabja in 1988, by the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in the Tokyo subway in 1995—inspires hope that the world regards this sort of attack as unacceptable. That such weapons continue to exist, however, and are used at all, suggests a more sobering reality. Where enemies can be totalized and demonized as readily as they are in the contemporary world, restraint is a virtue out of season. What remains is a conviction that noncombatants can be targeted if the danger is great or the cause just, as so often seems to be the case, or that genuine non-combatants cannot exist in a world of polarized ideologies or opposed cultures.

The editors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists are not optimistic about the fate of the earth. In January 2007 the minute hand of the ‘Doomsday Clock’ moved ahead, from seven to five minutes before midnight. ‘Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,’ warned an editorial, ‘has the world faced such perilous choices.’ The piece cited as particular dangers a recent North Korean nuclear test, Iran’s interest in nuclear power, signs that the Bush administration would consider the use of nuclear strikes on unfriendly nations or terrorist groups holding weapons of mass destruction, and the ongoing insecurity caused by the presence of 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia alone. The Bulletin acknowledged that climate change also represented a serious threat to the welfare of the earth. But ‘nuclear weapons present the most grave challenge to humanity, enabling genocide with the press of a button’. The growing interest in nuclear power, in part as a remedy for global warming, risks spreading nuclear material across the globe; the editorial reminds us that spent fuel from ‘peaceful’ nuclear reactors can be processed into weapons-grade plutonium, only 1-3 kilograms of which are needed to make a bomb. ‘Our way of thinking about the uses and control of technologies must change to prevent unspeakable destruction and future human suffering,’ concludes the piece. ‘The Clock is ticking.’3

Equally important is a